I Was Pregnant When His Real Luna Returned

Sabrina left on a Tuesday night.

She didn't say goodbye. She didn't leave an explanation, not really — just a folded note on top of her packed suitcase that said she refused to be auctioned off like livestock. The handwriting was neat and unhurried, like she'd had time to think about it. Like she'd been planning it for a while.

I found out the same way I found out most things in our house. I was summoned.

"Kitchen. Now." My mother's voice through the door, flat and clipped.

I came downstairs in my socks to find both my parents standing at the kitchen island. My father had his arms crossed. My mother had Sabrina's coat draped over one arm and a folder of documents in her other hand. The suitcase — Sabrina's suitcase, the big one with the gold zipper — sat by the back door like it had already made up its mind.

Neither of them looked at me the way you look at a person you're about to ask something of. They looked at me the way you look at a problem you've already solved.

"You leave for Ironveil in the morning," my mother said. "The car comes at seven."

I stood there for a moment. "I'm not Sabrina."

"No." She set the folder on the counter and slid it toward me. "But you'll go as her."

My father said nothing. He never did, when my mother had already decided.

I looked at the documents. Sabrina's name. Sabrina's photo — close enough to mine that no one who hadn't grown up with us would catch the difference. The mating arrangement with the Ironveil Pack, signed by both families, with Alpha Enzo Mendoza's name at the bottom in dark, deliberate ink.

I should have said no. I know that now. I should have said a lot of things.

Instead I pressed my fingertips together under the counter where they couldn't see, and I said nothing at all.

My mother lifted Sabrina's coat and settled it onto my shoulders. She smoothed the collar once, efficiently, the way you straighten a picture frame.

"Don't embarrass us," she said.

That was it. That was the whole conversation.

---

The Ironveil pack house was nothing like I'd imagined.

I'd pictured something cold. Fortress-like. The kind of place that announces its power through stone and silence. And it was those things — the building was enormous, set back from a long private drive, with the kind of quiet that meant everyone inside it knew exactly where they stood in the order of things.

But it was also alive. There were wolves everywhere, moving through the halls with the easy confidence of people who belonged somewhere. Pack members who glanced at me as I was escorted through the main entrance and looked away again, unimpressed. Every single one of them radiated rank like heat off pavement, and my Omega instincts, the ones I'd spent years learning to ignore, started screaming at me to make myself