The Barren Luna

10 - Ginny

I slowly lifted my heavy eyelids and, to my horror, found myself in the bedroom I used to share with Henry a lifetime ago. I looked down at my body and found it clean and dressed in clothes that didn't fit it right anymore. A female entered, an Omega I vaguely remembered, and she was startled to see me awake.

“Hello, Luna, how are you feeling?”

“Confused. What am I doing here? Who dressed me?”

“I did. The Alpha brought you in this morning and left you in my care. Doctor Warren also came by to check up on you. I brought you some food,” she nodded her head at the tray she was holding.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Alpha’s orders,” she looked away, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s mostly broth anyway. Please try to eat, Luna.”

I wondered whether she was as afraid of my mate as I was. I sat up and motioned for her to bring the broth over. I ate several spoons of the thick, rich broth before I had to stop. It was too much too soon.

“What’s your name?”

“Jessie, Luna.”

“Thank you for the broth, Jessie, it was delicious.”

“You should be thanking yourself, Luna,” she smiled. “I used the one I found in your freezer.”

I chuckled and was amazed at how I was still capable of the simple gesture. Somewhere in my freezer, there was a batch of broth that was made and frozen at a point in time when Dorothy was still alive. Would one be able to ingest a moment of that time while eating it or did it disappear in the process of thawing?

Lost in those thoughts, I didn’t even notice that Jessie had left. My body was weakened by the weeks (months?) of starvation and darkness. I made a mental note to ask Jessie what date it was. The door opened and I immediately wanted to know:

“Jessie -,” I looked up and saw the once-loved and familiar male standing in the door frame, his eyes trained on me. I whimpered as I frantically crawled backward on the bed until I reached the headboard, and then I started looking around the room for a weapon to defend myself.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Ginny,“ he said quietly and I almost believed him. The asshole had the audacity to look hurt at my reaction. I just shook my head.

“Don’t come closer.”

“I won’t,” he held his hands up in surrender. “I’ll stay right here. How are you feeling?”

“What am I doing here? Why did you bring me here?”

He seemed to consider his response carefully.

“This is your home, Ginny.”

My face must have clearly shown my confusion and disbelief because he added: “I know now that you were innocent, Ginny. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you before. I deserve your reaction to me, what I did was unforgivable, but I am your mate and we will work on this, we will get through this.”

Some sixth sense in the back of my mind prickled, and I took a good look at Henry. His eyes seemed wild, and his hair and clothes were unkempt. There was just something off about him. Why did he believe in my innocence all of a sudden? Where was his whore and their pup? Many questions needed answering and I got the sense that I had to ask them elsewhere.

When I remained silent, he said, “We'll eat dinner together downstairs. Wear the green dress you wore when we went to your sister’s mating ceremony,” and he left.

Ignoring the clearly insane request, I decided to search the room to see if I could find anything that could be used as a weapon, either on me or on him, but there was nothing. In one of the bedside tables, I found a braid of hair. A braid that looked like it was made from my hair, to be exact. It was washed and combed and braided nicely, and thinking about how he got it and why he kept it next to his bed just made me sick.

Oh, God. Was he going to sleep in this bed with me? Panic flooded my body and my flight response kicked in. I looked at the window and decided – I would jump. It wasn’t high up enough to die on impact, but in my weakened state, it could still do significant damage. Besides, I assumed I was still his prisoner, so maybe the guards would kill me during my escape attempt. Anything was better than staying here and wondering whether Dotty's murderer would come join me at bedtime.

I felt my ribs crack as I hit the ground. I struggled to breathe as I tried to summon the strength to get up. A very blurry pair of black boots appeared in my line of sight, and then another. Soon, someone was carrying me back to the house. I tried protesting but my body wouldn’t cooperate, and darkness pulled me under.

Jessie was doing something to my ribs and the pain woke me up.

“What the hell was that, Ginny? Were you trying to kill yourself?” Henry seethed but upon seeing my expression, he stilled. “Oh my God, you were. Ginny, what the fuck?!”

He paced around the room before fixing me with his gaze.

“ Don’t harm yourself ,” he commanded, and I felt something wet on my upper lip. Jessie gasped and quickly excused herself. While she fumbled with packing up the first aid kit, Henry sat down next to my bed, pale and lost in thought.

“I just remembered my command to you,” he said as the door was closing. “I only wish I’d remembered it sooner.”

I furrowed my brows, thinking back on all of Henry’s commands to me, and it dawned on me.

“Fuck, I messed up, Ginny. I wish I’d remembered it earlier, fuck! Why didn’t you remind me?”

I considered for a moment whether to respond or not, but when I realized he was truly clueless, I decided to help him one last time.

“One moment, I was in pain because you were fucking someone else,” I said and he grimaced. Red-hot rage was bubbling up inside me.

“Then I injected myself with poppy seed and fell asleep. Then someone knocked on the door and told me you were expecting me. Then your pregnant whore threw herself down the stairs. Then I was in the dungeon. Then you killed my favorite person in the world and made me watch. When, in between all of these shocking events, was I supposed to have sat down and taken a moment to rationally dissect everything and maybe even remember your command to me? And why was it my responsibility to keep track of the Alpha commands you made?” He didn’t respond.

“And since you’ve never been commanded, let me enlighten you – it’s not like you think about the command all the time, you may even forget it, but your body never does. So my body wouldn’t have let me harm her even if I had wanted to. That’s why I didn’t say anything, I had forgotten what you hissed at me the first time I sat next to her!” I could see spit flying from my mouth as I raged.

He just hung his head in shame, and I saw it as my opening. I couldn’t fully shift yet but I released my claws and swiped at his neck, hoping to nick his jugular. The movement jarred my broken ribs and hurt like hell. Hearing me move, he lifted his head and I only managed to slash his face before he caught my wrist and stared at me in shock.

“Guard!” he yelled, and a male I’d never seen before opened the door. “Tell Doctor Warren to send over some wolfsbane.”

The male nodded and left.

“I hate you, Henry,” I said weakly and he closed his eyes at the sound of his name and took a deep breath. “I will never forgive you, no matter what you do.“

“We’ll see about that,” he said softly and left the room. I didn’t hear the lock click but I now knew there were guards posted everywhere. I saw no way out but in.

???

Over the next few days, whenever Henry entered the room, I would pretend to be catatonic. I would just lie motionless in bed as he sat next to me, held me by the hand, stroked my hair, and spoke to me in a tone I vaguely remembered from the first years we spent together.

“I missed your scent so much, Ginny,” he said one day, inhaling deeply. “It’s faint because of the wolfsbane, but it’s still there, clementine. I remember the first time I felt it like it was yesterday. Happiest day of my life up till then. The only thing that trumped smelling you was seeing you,” he then touched my cheek, and I struggled not to recoil in disgust. Interestingly enough, I no longer felt tingles when he touched me. Maybe it was the wolfsbane? I wanted to hope that our bond was broken beyond repair at this point, but would he not be feeling that?

“I'm so sorry, Ginny; you're the only real thing in my life. Everything else is a big fat lie. We were happy, Ginny, weren’t we, before I went and messed up everything?”

The next day he said:

“I would give up my Alpha title right now in exchange for going back in time and coming back home to one of your delicious dinners that you’d made with love, and your eyes lighting up when I entered the house. I was enough for you, wasn’t I? I don’t know why I couldn’t see that. I was blind in more ways than one.”

Since he had commanded me and was now dosing me with wolfsbane, he moved the guards to the yard and informed me I was free to roam the house if I wanted to. I only did that when he went to the office. I soon found my drug stash in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, but since I wasn’t allowed to harm myself, I simply hid it under a loose floorboard, not wanting Jessie to stumble upon it. She still came over once a day to cook and clean for us.

“You know what else I miss,” Henry said one evening before bedtime, “holding your soft, warm body in my arms as we drift off to sleep together, and finding your long hairs on my pillow.”

He choked up for a moment, genuinely distressed at the memories. “I sinned against you, my mate, in more ways than one. I committed several ultimate betrayals. I’m sick over what I have done, but I need you, I can’t lose you. We’ll be happy again, you’ll see, everything will go back to how it used to be.”

He was saying these things in a pleading tone, as if he was trying to imprint their truth on me, trying to convince both of us that this was a possibility, yet I still couldn't believe that he was that delusional. As my ribs healed, I feared that he would want to sleep in the same bed as me.

We had started having dinners together as soon as I was well enough to walk, and he would carefully pick out my clothes and lay them out for me to wear; he would then compliment me on my appearance when I came downstairs. I felt like I was trapped in an insane asylum. I would sit there like a doll that was dressed according to his wishes, not speaking, swallowing bites occasionally because I was terrified of more commands, and he would talk and talk as if nothing was wrong in the world, as if we were a normal couple eating dinner after a long day.

“We had three realistically great years before I ruined everything, Ginny, wouldn’t you agree? I keep going over the past in my head and I’ve realized that there are things I never told you. Do you remember that Alpha summit I went to when Lucy was about to give birth to Nora and you stayed behind to help her?” The doll, of course, remained silent.

“Alpha Larson had just welcomed his second pup and we were all at dinner, just us males, congratulating him and celebrating. Then later in the evening, Larson yelled out from his side of the table, just let me know if you need help, Giles, I can put a pup or two in that hot little mate of yours ,” Henry clenched his fists angrily at the memory and I thought the cutlery would break from his grip.

He’d never told me this. I wished he had.

“Two Alphas had to pull me off of him. He just laughed like an insane wolf as I kept punching him. After I came back, I kept thinking about that incident and his taunt. I feel like that started it all. Even before, my mother would make comments here and there but I never cared. All of a sudden, it was all I could think about. Seeing Calum and Lucy with Nora at the hospital pretty much wrecked me. I hated them, I hated how happy they were.”

Henry and I had never talked like this about how he felt about our puplessness, not once. I found myself leaning forward, eager to hear more.

“My mother kept telling me how unhappy you must be without a pup, and how big of a toll it took on her, how she wished my father had taken a concubine instead of subjecting her to those months of feeling like a failure, but I wouldn’t do that to you, I wanted to try all the medical procedures available to us first,” he grabbed my limp hand and caressed it gently as if those medical procedures hadn’t also been a form of torture.

“I told myself I just wanted to give you a family, but if I’m being completely honest, I also wanted to feel more like a male, to prove to everyone that I wasn’t shooting blanks,” he admitted, perhaps emboldened by my silence and lack of judgment.

“I kept imagining everyone mocking me behind my back, laughing at me as Larson did, the pupless Alpha providing entertainment for even the lowliest pack members who had managed to father pups,” he concluded bitterly and I was fascinated by how much of himself he'd managed to keep hidden from me in those months of repeated fertility treatments.

Maybe I was too lost in my own worries and insecurities to look at how my mate was feeling and what he was struggling with. But he should have told me, and it made me so angry that he was telling me all of this now, when it was already too late for us.

The next night at dinner, I sat across from him, wearing a purple blouse with black pants, an outfit that I wore to a pack function in the early days of our mating, which I could remember being enthusiastically taken off of me when we snuck off for a quickie in his office, and he continued his monologue.

“I love that color on you, Ginny. You probably don’t even remember, but you wore that outfit at the party after we opened the pediatric wing of the hospital. You were the most beautiful female in that room and most rooms. All rooms as far as I’m concerned. I just couldn’t get it out of my head, the idea of you being unhappy, resenting me, thinking me less of a male,” he paused for a bit, almost as if waiting for reassurance or denial from me. He could keep waiting until the end of time as far as I was concerned.

“I had these paranoid intrusive thoughts about being the one who was infertile, and every new pup around us just made me feel worse. When your sister announced her pregnancy with their pack’s heir, and her mate wasn’t even the Alpha yet, that’s when I lost my shit. The next day I approached the council and set the wheels in motion, thereby sealing our fate,” he was looking at something behind me now, lost in God only knew what thoughts, whereas I was reeling from the knowledge that it was him who went to the council. This whole time I'd assumed that he had been pressured into it by them. How na?ve of me.

“Now I know that it was never about the pup for you, but I fear it is too late that I ruined us. Oh, God, Ginny, I ruined us! Please tell me it’s not too late,” he begged in vain. I remained silent.

That night, he came into the room to see me before bedtime, as always, only he was already in his sleepwear, and he sat down on the bed to take off his socks. I froze in fear. I was no longer stupid enough to put anything past him and I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Don’t worry, love, I’ll wait until your ribs are fully healed. I’m sorry it’s taking this long, it’s the wolfsbane. I can’t wait to feel you again, I missed you so bad,” he whispered as he threw his arm over me, kissed my temple, and fell asleep soon after. I was struggling to breathe. There had to be something I could do. I remembered my stash. Tomorrow night would be my last chance to escape whatever Henry’s insane mind had planned for me.

Dinner was steak and mashed potatoes. I was in the fight of my life, trying to swallow pieces of the meat like everything was fine, like I wasn’t planning to kill a male tonight. I was paranoid that he could hear my heart racing, that he could smell my anxiety coming off of me in aggressive waves, and that he would suspect something was wrong. But Henry just sat there like every night, behaving like this was a date I’d willingly agreed to, like I was still his loving mate and he was mine.

He talked again but I wasn’t able to focus on the words. All my energy went into reciting the steps of my plan and not throwing up. Violence wasn’t the problem, and neither was gore – we were wolves, we hunted all the meat we ate, we eviscerated enemies, we sparred during pack training and bruised and bloodied each other, but this was different – I was preparing to go against the two most sacred positions in a werewolf’s life – my mate and my Alpha.

If it wasn’t for the wolfsbane, I don’t think my wolf would let me do it, she still loved his wolf and accepted his authority as our Alpha. But I wasn’t going to resign myself to a life of sexual slavery because of that. I’d had all night last night and all day today to plan this out, to consider the consequences, and I was ready. Even if the guards killed me on sight after discovering the murder, I was fine with it – I’d given up on life long ago, when I was still in the dungeon. The only unacceptable outcome was both of us surviving.

After we were done eating, I got up to put the plates in the sink, and on my way back to the table, I took the syringe full of poppy seed tincture from my pocket and stabbed him in the neck with it, emptying the contents into his jugular. He promptly collapsed onto the table, face-down.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the wolf, not the man.

I then grabbed my trusty Kramer by Zwilling 10“ serrated bread knife from the set we got as a mating present from my old Alpha and Luna, and I first used all of my strength to press it down on the back of his neck to crack his vertebrae. Then I needed to find an opening between them to completely detach his head from his body. It was the best I could do without silver. I thought of all the sourdough breads I’d used this knife on at this very table, and how I would eagerly cut through the crust to see how well they had turned out on the inside. Now, I was sawing through the jugular of my mate, through his windpipe, and his flesh, while his blood oozed and pooled at my feet.

After I was done, I threw the head as far away from me as I could. I irrationally worried it would reattach itself somehow. My body refused to believe it was over. I dropped the knife and fell to my knees in the blood, my hands shaking, my yellow dress drenched in various bits and fluids.

I heard a commotion and someone breaking the door in, and then a huge mountain of a male appeared in front of me, looking crazed and worried. He grabbed me and I closed my eyes, ready to receive my punishment, but all I felt was his hands roaming my body, patting me down. I opened my eyes and saw him still looking me over, but not angrily. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he was worried I might be hurt.

“I killed him,” I said, my entire body shaking at this point. “I killed him,” I sobbed.

“I know, I know,” the stranger said, rubbing my upper arms with his hands. “It’s okay, you’re okay now.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and it all went dark.