Elara POV:
The heavy front door of the manor slammed shut downstairs. Footsteps. His footsteps. The confident, unhurried tread of a dominant wolf ascending the main staircase, each step a silent declaration of territory.
My heart was a wild drum against my ribs, a trapped rabbit's frantic beat. There wasn't time.
I clutched the binder to my chest, spun around, and threw myself behind the heavy velvet curtains that covered the floor-to-ceiling window.
The study door swung open.
Caspian stepped inside. He didn't turn on the lights, leaving the room in shadows that his wolf eyes navigated with ease.His ice-blue eyes, the color of a frozen lake under moonlight, swept the room.
He paused, his head tilting slightly, nostrils flaring as if tasting a shift in the air.
My blood turned to ice, forcing my pulse to quiet, willing my scent to somehow blend into the shadows. A futile hope against a wolf who could scent a lie on the wind.
But he just walked to his desk, his movements economical and precise — the controlled grace of an apex predator. He pulled open a drawer, retrieved a different file, and turned to leave. He didn't even glance at the safe.
As he passed my hiding spot, his scent washed over me — that familiar, sharp cedarwood, the alpha's signature that once made me feel safe.
But tonight it was tainted with something else. A faint, floral perfume I didn't recognize, clinging to his clothes.
The scent of another she-wolf. It was a new kind of pain, driven deep under the gaping wound of the revenge memo.
The door clicked shut behind him.
I slid down the wall, my knees giving out, and landed in a heap on the floor behind the curtain. I stayed there for a long time, just breathing. In and out. A wounded animal licking its wounds in the dark.
Eventually, I forced myself up. I placed the binder back where I found it, took the marriage contract — the document that bound me to this pack — and closed the safe, spinning the dial to lock away his secrets. I crept out of his study like a thief, returned to the master suite, to my side of the vast, cold mating bed.
Since he got married, he seldom stayed at home for the night, so he just came back to get a document and left tonight, and I couldn't sleep all night.
I watched the moon trace its path across the sky, the sacred eye of the Moon Goddess who had clearly forsaken me. The words from the binder replayed in my head. The one least deserving.
As dawn broke, painting the sky in pale, indifferent shades of grey, a wave of nausea rolled through me. I bolted from the bed, making it to the en-suite bathroom just in time to retch into the toilet. Nothing came up but bitter bile.
And then, a thought, cold and unwelcome, surfaced like a fish in frozen water.
My cycle. It was late. Two weeks late. In a wolf pack, a late cycle was never just a late cycle.
In the sterile quiet of the bathroom, the idea seemed both ludicrous and terrifying. I rummaged through the back of a drawer, my hand closing around the box I'd bought months ago, just in case. A pregnancy test.
The five minutes I had to wait felt like an eternity. I sat on the cold tile floor, staring at the little plastic stick on the counter, not daring to hope, not daring to fear.
The silence was broken only by the distant howl of a wolf from the forest beyond the estate — a reminder of the world I'd married into.
When I finally looked, two stark pink lines stared back at me.
Positive.
No joy bloomed in my chest. Just a profound, hollowing cold. I was pregnant with the child of an alpha who saw me as a prop in his twisted play of revenge.
What was this child? A new link in my chains, binding me tighter to this hell, a pup that would tie my bloodline to his forever? Or... a chance? A reason for him to change, for his wolf to finally recognize what we could be?
The sliver of foolish hope was a testament to how broken I was, how desperately I still craved a bond that had never existed.
I needed to be sure. I made an appointment with a private clinic downtown, using my maiden name. No pack healers. No one who reported to the Montgomery family.
Dr. Sarah Davies was kind, she confirmed it. Six weeks pregnant. She handed me a small, black-and-white thermal photo.
A tiny, blurry sac. A wolf pup. It was mine.
A fierce, protective instinct I'd never felt before, primal and ancient as the moon itself. This wasn't about him anymore. This was about this tiny, innocent life. My child.
I had to try.
Even if the Moon Goddess had cursed me with a one-sided bond, I owed this pup a chance at a family.
Even if Caspian was pursuing me out of revenge for another woman back then, that was before we got married.
After we got married, he wasn't particularly kind to me, but he wasn't bad either. He paid for household expenses and gave me some pocket money on a regular basis every month, the way an alpha provides for his pack's basic needs.
He always gives me gifts on holidays and birthdays. A bouquet of flowers that causes me allergies. But I've never refused them. I'm willing to accept them willingly, poison and all.
He's not cheating on me. That perfume might mean nothing. It's just that he probably doesn't love me as much as I thought he did, and his wolf has never howled my name.
My mother used to tell me that marriages are usually arranged by circumstances, like pack alliances. If one can marry someone they truly love, they must cherish that marriage even more. A true mate bond is the rarest gift.
I really cherish my marriage. I've tried so hard to be a good Luna.
And now we also have a child, although this child isn't the fruit of our love. But it is the fruit of our union, a new branch on the Montgomery family tree.
For this innocent pup who didn't ask to be born into a den of cold silence and hidden revenge. I had to give him one last chance to be a father, to be a husband, to be the alpha my heart still foolishly believed he could be.
That evening, by some miracle, Caspian came home for dinner at a reasonable hour. He sat at the opposite end of the long dining table, the alpha's seat, his attention already on a tablet propped up beside his plate. Pack business. Territory disputes. Always more important than the woman who waited.
The silence between us was a physical weight, the bond that should have hummed with warmth instead a dead, cold thread.
My hands were clammy. I took the ultrasound photo from my purse, my fingers tracing its smooth surface, memorizing the shape of my secret hope.
"Caspian."
My voice was barely a whisper, a submissive wolf's tentative approach.
He didn't look up, his focus on the glowing screen.
"Caspian," I said again, louder this time, forcing a strength I didn't feel.
He finally lifted his gaze, his blue eyes impatient, the icy alpha stare that had once made my heart flutter and now only made it ache. "What is it, Elara?"
I slid the photo across the polished wood of the table. It stopped near his plate. "I'm pregnant."
The words hung in the air, fragile and heavy as the scent before a storm.
He picked up the photo，glanced at it for a moment.
Not a flicker of surprise, or joy, or even anger. His wolf didn't stir behind his eyes.
He then placed it face down on the table as if it were a coaster, a trivial scrap of paper.
"Hm," was all he said.
My heart, which had been beating so frantically, seemed to stop, as if his indifference had reached into my chest and stilled it with an alpha's command. "You're... not happy?"
He took a sip of water, then delicately wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. His movements were always so graceful, so controlled. So distant. A wolf who felt nothing for the mate who stood before him.
"An heir is a good thing for the Pack," he stated, his tone flat, as if discussing the acquisition of new hunting grounds. "The bloodline continues."
Not 'our baby'.
An heir. An asset. A future alpha or a bargaining chip for an alliance.
All of a sudden, he seems to have received a secret wolf message.
He pushed his chair back and stood up, the scrape of wood against stone a claw across my soul. "I have an important video conference regarding the Redwood Valley territory dispute. Rival packs are circling. You should get some rest."
He walked away without another glance at me, or at the photo of our child lying forgotten on the table. The pup meant nothing to his wolf.
I watched his back disappear into the hallway, the last, tiny ember of hope inside me flickered and died, leaving nothing but cold, black ash where a mate bond should have blazed.
Just as he had never cared about me. I was merely the vessel for his heir, the placeholder until his true mate returned, the least deserving recipient of a revenge that had nothing to do with me.
And now, I carried the next alpha of the Montgomery pack in my womb — a pack that would never truly be mine.
