After He Let Her Wear My Luna Gown, I Planned My Escape

Three weeks before the Harvest Moon Banquet, I walked past Cassian's study and heard her crying.

I knew that cry. Helena had been perfecting it for months. Soft, a little broken, the kind of sound that made strong men forget their own names. I stopped in the hallway, one hand on the wall. The door was open just a crack. I could see the edge of Dorian's framed photograph in her lap.

"She doesn't even look at me, Cass," Helena whispered. "At dinner last week, she walked past me like I was furniture. In front of Garret. In front of the council." A small hiccup. "I just... I have nothing left of him but this house. And she makes me feel like I shouldn't be in it."

I waited for Cassian to ask. To say, let me hear Mila's side. To say anything at all.

His voice came out tight. "I'll handle it."

That was when my wolf, Sable, made a sound inside me. Not a growl. Something quieter. Something tired.

I walked away before they heard me.

He summoned me that same night.

The office was lit by one lamp, the way he liked it when he was about to be unpleasant. Cassian stood behind his desk in a black shirt rolled to the elbows, jaw working. My fated mate. The Alpha of Ironveil. The man whose scent had once knocked me sideways when I was twenty-two and stupid and certain that the Moon Goddess didn't make mistakes.

He didn't ask me to sit.

"You will show more respect to Helena," he said. "In front of the pack. Starting tomorrow."

I stood very still. I had learned, by then, that stillness cost me less than anything else.

"What did I do?"

He blinked. Just once. "Excuse me?"

"What specific thing," I said, keeping my voice even, "did I do to her. Tell me, and I won't do it again."

His mouth opened. Closed. He couldn't name one. I watched him search for one and come up empty, and I watched him get angry that I had made him search.

He used his Alpha tone then. It hit my chest like a hand pressing down. "You will show. More. Respect."

I nodded. I did not speak. I left.

In the hallway, I waited for Sable to snarl, the way she always did after he used that tone on me. She didn't. She had curled up somewhere deep inside me and gone quiet, and for the first time in weeks I could not feel her breathing.

That was the night I started counting days.

Two weeks before the banquet, he called the council.

I sat at the long oak table I had picked out myself, three years ago, when this room was still ours. Garret on Cassian's right, the senior warriors down the sides, Rhea the healer at the far end with her hands folded. Helena seated to Cassian's left, in the chair that used to be mine. She wore gray.