After His Pup Ended My Pregnancy, He Locked Me Away

My name is Ellie Watson. I am twenty-two years old. I am a wolfless Omega from the Greymist Pack, which means in my world I am almost nothing at all.

That night at the Shadowvale banquet, I was carrying a tray of champagne flutes and counting the steps from the kitchen to the long oak tables. Twelve steps. I'd counted them three times already. Counting kept my hands steady. I was the only Greymist Omega they sent to serve. The ranked wolves stood in another room, talking pack business. I belonged with the glasses.

I was wearing the plain black dress they gave me at the door. My hair was pinned up. I had been told not to speak unless a guest spoke first. That was fine. No one ever did.

Then the scent hit me.

It was dark cedar and woodsmoke and something deeper underneath, something warm. It rolled across the hall like heat from an open oven. I stopped walking. The tray shook in my hands and one of the glasses tipped and spilled onto the white linen and I did not move to fix it.

I had read about this. Every wolfless girl reads about this. The scent that finds you across a crowded room. The Moon Goddess, finally remembering your name.

I looked up.

He was already looking at me.

I knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. Alpha Alistair Vane of Shadowvale, tall, dark-haired, jaw cut sharp, the kind of man who walked into rooms and changed the temperature in them. He was on the far side of the hall, surrounded by other Alphas, mid-sentence with someone important. He stopped mid-sentence. He set down his glass.

He crossed the floor.

The whole hall noticed. People stepped aside without being asked. I could not move. I could not breathe. I pressed my thumbnail into my palm so hard I felt the skin split.

He stopped in front of me. He was so close I could feel the heat off his chest. He looked down at me like he was reading a sentence he had been waiting his whole life to read.

"Mate," he said.

The word landed in the hall like a struck bell.

I heard a glass shatter somewhere. Someone gasped. My Beta, Dara Whitfield, was suddenly at my elbow, her hand light on my back, her voice very low. "Ellie. Ellie, breathe."

I couldn't. The scent was filling my whole chest. I had spent twenty-two years being passed over by the goddess and now she was here, here, in dark cedar and smoke, in a man who was looking at me like I mattered.

Alistair held out his hand.

"Do you accept?" he asked. Quiet. Just for me.

I said yes.

I said yes before I had time to wonder why.

He marked me four days later. The bite was clean and quick and I cried into his shoulder afterward, not from pain, from gratitude. I moved into the Shadowvale Luna suite that same week. The suite was bigger than my whole bunkroom back at Greymist. There was a window that looked out over the woods. There was a bathtub deep enough to lie down in. There was a closet with empty hangers, waiting for me.

The pack received me politely. They bowed their heads when I passed. They called me Luna. The first time someone said it out loud, I had to turn my face away because my eyes filled and I did not want to be the Luna who cried in front of her own people.

Alistair was warm. That is the part I keep coming back to. He was warm. He brought me coffee in the morning. He asked about my day. He laughed when I said something funny and the laugh reached his eyes. I had spent my life invisible and now a man like him was looking at me and seeing me.

I stopped pressing my thumbnail into my palm. I was almost a different person.

He brought Anya to me on a Sunday.

She was tiny. That was the first thing I noticed. She came up to maybe my hip, slight and pale, with hair too long for her face. She was clinging to Alistair's sleeve with both hands. Her eyes were huge and wet and she looked at me like she expected me to hit her.

"This is Anya," Alistair said. His voice was gentle in a way I had not heard before. "I rescued her from a rogue camp last spring. She has no one. I told her she could stay."

My heart cracked open. I dropped to one knee so she would not have to look up at me.

"Hi, sweetheart," I said. "I'm Ellie."

She didn't speak. She just stared.

I brought her warm milk that night. I read to her the next evening, and the evening after that, sitting on the edge of her little bed while she watched me from under the covers with those flat unreadable eyes. I thought she was traumatized. I thought she was grieving. I thought if I was patient enough, if I was soft enough, she would let me in.

I was so stupid. You have no idea how stupid I was.

The Luna ceremony was held two weeks later, in front of the full pack. I wore a white gown with silver thread along the sleeves. I had never owned anything so beautiful. I stood at the altar with Alistair's hand on the small of my back and watched the pack assemble in their formal blacks, and I thought, this is the day I become someone.

Anya walked up the aisle in the middle of the vows.

She was so small no one stopped her. She came right up to the altar. She tilted her face up at me and smiled. It was not a child's smile.

Her fingers shifted into claws so fast I did not see it happen. One swipe. From my collarbone to my hip. The gown opened in long ribbons and fell off me in pieces and I stood there in my slip in front of three hundred people.

The hall went silent.

Alistair moved fast. He scooped Anya up into his arms like she was nothing, like a parent picking up a tantruming toddler. "She's frightened," he said over his shoulder, to the pack. "She doesn't understand. Forgive her."

Then he turned to me.

His voice changed.

It was not loud. Alpha tone is never loud. It is weight. It hit the center of my chest like a hand pressing down on my sternum, and the words came after. "Smile, Luna. Continue."

I smiled.

I continued.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm until I felt the skin split, and then deeper, until I felt warm wet on my fingers, and I said the rest of the vows with blood pooling in the cup of my hand.

Three days later, when I had stopped shaking enough to speak, I went to him in his study. I did not accuse. I had been an Omega too long to accuse. I asked, gently, if maybe Anya needed a healer. If maybe we could look at this together.

He did not look up from his papers.

"She is grieving, Ellie," he said. His voice was unhurried. The voice of a man who never needed to repeat himself. "Your discomfort is not a priority."

I stood there a long moment. Then I nodded and left the room.

I walked down the hall to the Luna suite, closed the door, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.

My role here had a ceiling.

I had just touched it.