He Thought I Became His Perfect Luna, I Had Only Stopped Loving Him Chapter 07

He Thought I Became His Perfect Luna, I Had Only Stopped Loving Him Chapter 07

A knock at the door.

One of the pack guards came in carrying a sealed letter.

“Alpha. This is from Elder Lioraen.”

Elder Lioraen. The oldest living member of the pack. Some said he’d watched the Greywick line rise from nothing. He was as close to pack history as you could get.

Stellan broke the seal.

Inside was a certificate. Formal and final.

The Luna bond belonging to Aelwen Bramlock has been officially dissolved. She belongs now to the

forest and the Moon Goddess alone.

He read it once.

Twice.

He stood there for a full minute.

Then he dropped the letter and screamed.

“This is fake.” His voice cracked. “This can’t be real. She can’t dissolve it without me,

ceremony, I never agreed-”

But this was Lioraen’s seal.

And Lioraen had the authority.

there’s no

Before Stellan could move, the study door opened again. Pack Council guards, not his own men,

lined up at the entrance.

“Alpha Greywick.”

The head guard’s voice was level.

“You have caused documented harm to the Luna appointed to you by the Moon Goddess. The

evidence has been reviewed.”

“The Pack Council is formally challenging your authority.”

“Pending investigation, your Alpha status is suspended.”

The room tipped.

Stellan drove home in a haze.

The living room was full.

Every elder in the Greywick family sat in a circle like a sentencing panel. His father Ethan was

gray-faced, shaking with suppressed fury. His mother Sophie had been crying long enough that her eyes had swollen shut.

“You’ve brought shame on this family.” Ethan’s voice was like something grinding underfoot. “Your future. Your marriage. Your name. You threw it all away for a rogue girl.”

Sophie pressed her hands together. “It was that Rhoslyn. All of it. She got her hooks into him, turned him against Aelwen, and now the Council is involved and Aelwen is gone and what are we supposed to do-”

Rhoslyn was dragged in by two of the family’s guards.

Stellan watched. Didn’t stop it.

He almost felt like he was watching someone else’s life fall apart in real time.

Five years ago, he’d thought he was being clever: marry Aelwen, the most eligible woman in the pack with no family connections to threaten his plans, keep the elders happy. Keep Rhoslyn close

and protected. Everything tidy.

Five years later, he’d hurt Aelwen over and over for Rhoslyn’s sake. And lost everything.

“Enough.” The word came out of him scraped and hollow.

The room went quiet.

“She’s done here.” He meant Rhoslyn. “As of today, she has no connection to this family. None.”

Rhoslyn was hauled out.

Her cries echoed down the hall and faded.

Stellan walked upstairs.

He went to the small room.

He sat on the edge of the bed where she’d slept and let himself just breathe in what was left of her.

A corner of paper caught his eye from under a book.

He picked it up.

A medical chart. In Iris’s handwriting.

Patient: Aelwen Bramlock. Silver bullet fragment, compressing central nerve pathways. Progressive memory loss confirmed and accelerating. Recommended course: surgical removal.

Risk level: extreme. Success rate: under 30%. Patient refused to notify family. Patient insists on facing the surgery alone.

Stellan’s hands started shaking.

She hadn’t been stalling.

She hadn’t been playing games or making a point.

She had left to fight for her life in an operating room somewhere, alone, without telling him.

Without giving him the chance to fail her one more time.

He sat there for a long time.

In the next three days, he called in every favor he had left.

He wanted the truth. All of it.

What came back destroyed him.

The rogue raid had been staged.

!

Rhoslyn had known those rogues. Most of the weapons they’d used that night were loaded with

blanks.

Only one bullet had been real.

The silver one.

The one that hit Aelwen.

His Beta’s voice was steady, because someone had to be:

“Rhoslyn told them that if Aelwen died, you’d be hers. She paid them five hundred dollars to fire

that shot.”

“The night Aelwen supposedly forced Rhoslyn to kneel in the snow and confess-“His Beta paused. “Rhoslyn staged that. She went out there herself and got on her knees in the cold so she’d have something to show you.”

Stellan sat in his chair and looked at the stack of reports in front of him.

He thought about every word he’d said to Aelwen in that moment.

The things he’d accused her of.

What he’d done after.

He started laughing, quiet and awful, like something inside him had just snapped clean.

He’d been played for five years.

One small, calculating woman had looked at what he loved and taken it apart piece by piece, and he had helped her do it.

“Bring Rhoslyn to me,” he said.

One hour later, two guards walked her into the house.

She had bruising still fading on her face. When she saw him, something lit up in her expression:

hope. The stubborn belief that this time, it would be different.

“Stellan. You finally—”

He dropped the photographs on the floor in front of her.

She looked down.

Her face went white.