Twelve years I'd loved him. It took him nine minutes to tell me our marriage was a transaction.
The kitchen smelled like warm milk and cedar.
I'd heated it the moment I heard his key in the lock—an old habit, the kind that lives in your hands before your brain catches up. Damon always ran cold after long flights. Three days in Seattle, and I'd counted every one of them. Not because I missed him, exactly. More like the way you count the seconds between lightning and thunder. Waiting to know how close the storm was.
He came in without saying my name.
That should have told me everything.
I set the mug on the marble island and watched him shrug off his jacket. He looked the same as always—broad shoulders, jaw tight with that particular brand of exhaustion that powerful men wear like a badge. But underneath the cedar and the travel and the faint ghost of airport coffee, there was something else.
Perfume. Floral. Wrong.
My stomach turned before my mind could name it. A slow, animal nausea that started somewhere below my ribs and climbed. I pressed my palm flat against the counter. Breathed through my nose. Said nothing.
Damon didn't look at me. He was already scrolling his phone, thumb moving in that bored, automatic way. With his other hand, he reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a manila envelope. Thick. Sealed with a metal clasp.
He slid it across the marble toward me like he was passing a report to an assistant.
"There's two hundred thousand in there," he said, eyes still on his screen. "Camille's scared you'll do something. Don't. Whatever she took from you, I'll pay double. Just don't touch her."
The mug of warm milk sat between us, steaming.
I looked at the envelope. Then at him.
He already knew. That was the thing that landed first—not the money, not the name, not the casual way he'd delivered it like a weather update. He already knew that I knew. And he hadn't come home to explain or apologize or even lie to me with any real effort. He'd come home to manage the situation.
I was the situation.
"Camille," I said. "That's her name."
My voice came out flat. Steady. I didn't recognize it.
Damon finally looked up. His eyes moved over my face the way you scan a spreadsheet—quickly, efficiently, looking for the number that's off.
"Selene." He set his phone down. "You're a Luna. Act like one."
Five words. That was all. No apology wrapped inside them, no softness, not even the decency of discomfort. Just a reminder of what I was supposed to be. What I was supposed to perform.
I picked up the envelope.
I walked to the bathroom and locked the door.
---
The tiles were cold through my socks.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub and held the envelope in both hands for a long moment before I opened it. Inside, the bills were stacked in neat, even rows—twenty bundles, banded and ordered with the kind of precision that meant someone had done this before. Or had plenty of time to prepare.
He'd had this ready. Maybe for days.
I didn't cry. I noticed that about myself the way you notice the weather—distantly, as a fact. My eyes were dry. My hands were steady. Only my knuckles gave me away, bone-white where I'd pinched the corner of a hundred-dollar bill between my fingers, pressing until the paper edge bit into my skin.
He didn't ask if I was okay. He asked me not to make a scene.
I stared at the money.
Twelve years. I'd given up a career in environmental law when the pack needed a full-time Luna. I'd stood beside him through three territorial wars, two alpha challenges, one brutal winter when we lost eleven pack members and I'd held grieving families together with my bare hands while Damon negotiated treaties. I'd carried a pregnancy for eleven weeks before my body quietly let go of it, and I'd told no one—not even my mother—because Damon said the pack didn't need to see weakness from their Luna right then.
All of it, apparently, had a price.
Two hundred thousand dollars, stacked in a manila envelope, slid across a kitchen counter at two in the morning.
I raised my eyes to the mirror.
The woman looking back at me had dark circles and a jaw set so hard it ached. She looked like someone bracing for impact. She looked like someone who had been bracing for a long time and had simply gotten very good at hiding it.
I thought about throwing the money in his face. I thought about walking out the front door right now, barefoot, into the dark.
Instead, I opened the cabinet beneath the sink and pushed the envelope to the very back, behind the spare towels and the box of things I never used. I closed the cabinet door.
And then I heard him.
Damon's voice, low and careful, drifting from the living room. On the phone. He thought I couldn't hear him—most people couldn't, at this distance, through a closed door. But I was a wolf. I had always been a wolf, even when he seemed to forget it.
"It's done. She took it." A pause. "No, she didn't cry. That's… that's just how she is."
Then he laughed.
Not a big laugh. Just a small, private, easy sound—the kind you make when something turns out to be less trouble than you expected.
I sat down on the bathroom floor. The tiles pressed cold through my jeans. I put my back against the cabinet and pulled my knees to my chest and stayed very still.
Somewhere in my chest, in the deep wordless place where a mate bond lives, I felt something shift. Not break—not yet. More like a bolt that had been holding something together for years, finally worked loose by too much weight and not enough care. A single slow turn. The faintest give.
He laughed because I didn't cry.
He laughed because I was predictable. Because I was manageable. Because after twelve years, the woman he'd bonded himself to had become, in his mind, a variable he already knew how to solve.
Fine.
I pressed my back harder against the cabinet door.
I won't cry. Ever again. Not for him.
