The Luna He Threw Away Was His True Mate

The silence in the Ashford ancestral home felt heavier than a funeral shroud.

I pressed my back against the mahogany door of my childhood bedroom, my wolf still buried so deep within me that I wondered if she'd ever surface again. Three weeks since the miscarriage. Three weeks since my body had failed to protect the life growing inside me. Three weeks since Kade had looked at me with those cold amber eyes and said, "Maybe it's for the best, Wren. We weren't ready."

My hands trembled as I pushed away from the door. The east wing had always been my sanctuary—my grandmother's old quarters that she'd left to me before her death. I needed to feel close to her memory, to something that had once been purely mine in this house that increasingly felt foreign.

The brass handle of the east wing door was cold beneath my palm. I turned it slowly, expecting the familiar scent of lavender and old books that had always lingered in grandmother's space.

Instead, the smell of fresh paint hit me like a physical blow.

I stumbled backward, my breath catching in my throat. The room that had been draped in deep burgundy velvet and lined with antique furniture was gone. In its place stood a nursery so perfect it could have been torn from a magazine spread.

Pink walls the color of dawn stretched before me, adorned with hand-painted murals of woodland creatures. A white birch crib sat in the center, its mattress covered in the softest-looking bedding I'd ever seen. Shelves lined the walls, already stocked with tiny clothes, stuffed animals, and gleaming baby bottles.

My legs gave out. I gripped the doorframe, my knuckles white against the wood.

This wasn't possible. This couldn't be real.

I forced myself forward on unsteady feet, my eyes searching frantically for some explanation. Above the crib, where my grandmother's name had been engraved on a brass plaque for over sixty years, I found only scratched metal and gouges in the wood. Someone had taken a blade to it, scraping away every letter of "Eleanor Ashford" with deliberate violence.

In its place, a simple piece of paper had been taped to the wall. A single letter written in flowing script: "S."

My hands shook as I pulled out my phone, photographing everything. The crib, the clothes, the destroyed nameplate. I needed proof. I needed evidence that I wasn't losing my mind along with everything else.

A stack of receipts sat on the changing table, held down by a crystal paperweight I recognized from the main library. I grabbed them with trembling fingers, scanning the dates and amounts. Pottery Barn Kids. Buy Buy Baby. A custom furniture company in Vermont.

All charged to the Ashford family account. My money. My inheritance.

The first purchase had been made the day after I'd been admitted to the hospital. While I'd been bleeding out the remnants of my pregnancy, someone had been shopping for another woman's baby.

I sank into