Chapter 42 #2
She lifted her head and looked at me. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair a disaster, her eyes soft. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She was lying on my chest, she was mine, and I still couldn’t believe any of it was real.
“I meant what I said at the hospital,” she said. “All of it. The forgiveness, the love.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not sitting on the sidelines with whatever’s coming. We’re in this together.”
“Together.” I pressed my mouth against her forehead. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Three days later I introduced her to the full pack.
I’d spent those three days preparing. Meeting with Luca about security, coordinating with Brennan on protocol, making sure the grounds were set up properly.
Andrea spent them in the reading nook with Buddy, pretending she wasn’t nervous, which I knew because she was reading faster than usual and stress-eating the chocolate Tara had sent in a care package.
The afternoon came. Hundreds of wolves and their families on the estate grounds in late sun. Andrea beside me in a yellow sundress, belly visible, chin up, her thumb pressing against her opposite palm.
She looked like sunlight. I had to stop looking at her so I could speak.
“This is Andrea Grey. My fated mate. The mother of my son. Your future Luna.”
The crowd was mixed. Curiosity, skepticism, warmth, hostility near the back. A human Luna had never happened. Precedent mattered to wolves.
Andrea didn’t flinch. She stood beside me, didn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t, and held her ground.
Brennan stepped forward first. He’d told me he would. We’d arranged it the day before because the first response shapes every response after it, and Brennan’s word carried more weight than anyone’s in this pack.
He looked at Andrea. She looked back at him. Two people who’d met at a council table where she’d shaken his colleague’s hand and earned a compliment about her spine.
“Welcome home, Luna,” Brennan said. Clear, carrying, deliberate.
Andrea’s eyes went wide. She looked at me. I mouthed told you. She pressed her lips together, fighting tears in front of hundreds of wolves.
Aldric followed. A nod, formal, but real. Then others. Not all, not most, but enough that the silence shifted to something warmer. I watched my pack begin to see what I’d seen since a woman in a pink blouse walked into an interview and smiled.
A woman brought her daughter forward. The girl reached up and touched Andrea’s belly.
“Is the baby a wolf?”
Andrea crouched carefully, one hand on her knee. “We don’t know yet.”
“I hope so.”
Andrea laughed, bright, real. I watched her talk to this child with afternoon light on her face and the ache in my chest was so sharp I had to look away.
That evening, sitting on the bedroom floor because Andrea said the bed was too soft and the floor was better for her back, she cried. The overwhelmed kind, too many emotions crashing at once.
“Brennan called me Luna,” she said into my chest.
“He did.”
“I’m a Luna.”
“You are.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing, Finneas.”
“Neither did my mother, and she lasted twenty years.”
She pulled back and looked at me with mascara-streaked cheeks. “Your mother is clinically insane. That’s the worst comparison you could have made.”
I laughed. She laughed through the tears, wet, messy, her face a wreck. Alex kicked between us.
“I’m going to be good at this,” she said. Not a question. A decision.
“You already are.”
She tucked back into my chest. I held her on the bedroom floor with her tears on my shirt and my hand on the belly where our son was doing somersaults and I thought: this. This is what I almost lost. This woman, this life, this floor. I will burn the world down before I let anyone take it.
The next morning I was making coffee. Andrea was still upstairs. The hum from yesterday was still in my chest, the gray wolf’s bow, the pack’s cautious acceptance, Andrea’s face when Brennan said Luna.
Luca came through the back door without knocking. His face killed every good feeling I had.
“What?”
“George Ashtor issued a formal challenge. This morning. Witnesses at the pack hall.”
I set the coffee pot down carefully because if I didn’t I was going to shatter it.
“Seventy-two hours,” Luca said. “Accept or forfeit.”
“Forfeit isn’t a goddamn option.”
“I know. Conrad worked the old families for weeks. George has the junior Alphas. Lorraine coordinated the timing.”
“Because I just introduced Andrea.”
“Because you were happy, Finn. She wanted to hit you at your highest.”
The rage was instant. White-hot, my wolf slamming against my ribs, wanting to shift, wanting to find George right now and end this before it started.
Lorraine watched me stand in the sun with Andrea yesterday.
Watched an elder bow to her. Calculated the exact moment it would hurt the most and sent her brother in.
I breathed through it. Rage was useless in strategy.
“How many behind him?”
“Fifteen junior Alphas. Handful of old families. Not enough to sway the pack but enough to legitimize it.”
“And when I win?”
Luca caught the when. “The Ashtors are done. Permanently.”
I gripped the counter. George was young, hungry, trained. Not my equal but unpredictable. Hungry wolves did stupid, dangerous things, and stupid dangerous things could kill you if you weren’t ready.
Upstairs, Andrea’s footsteps. Bedroom to bathroom. Water running. She was awake. She’d come down soon, see my face, read it instantly because she read me better than anyone alive.
I told her no more secrets. I meant it.
“I’ll tell Andrea,” I said. “Then we plan.”