I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 06

I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 06

It took a full week for my knees to heal.

I dragged my increasingly unwieldy body around the house and packed everything I owned into one suitcase, which didn’t take long. Then I waited out the cycle.

The morning of my prenatal appointment, I opened the front door and found Aelia and Magnus standing at the bottom of the steps.

My wolf came awake instantly.

“What are you doing here?”

There was something almost sulky in his voice. “Are you that unwilling to see me?”

Aelia nudged him with an elbow. He pressed his lips together and said, coolly, “It’s your appointment day. I’m the father. I’m coming with you.”

I tightened my grip on the folder of medical records and nearly laughed.

“Don’t bother. You’ve missed enough of them. One more won’t change the count.”

Aelia came up the steps smiling and hooked both hands around my arm.

“I let the whole allergy thing go, you know. And how many times has Magnus come here to smooth things over with you? Playing Luna is one thing, but there’s a limit.”

Her hands closed on me and it felt like a cold snake winding up my forearm.

I tried to pull free. “Let go of me.”

She didn’t. Her nails dug in until they broke skin.

She was still smiling. Her eyes were something else entirely. She leaned in close and dropped her voice so only I could hear.

“You’re a blood bank they grew in a lab. You don’t even have a bloodline of your own. What makes you think you deserve respect? Or the title? Or a man like him bowing his head to you over and over?”

Her nails went deeper.

“Every single person in the Thorn family has told him to break the bond. He won’t. He keeps hiding behind that baby.”

She smiled wider.

“Let’s find out how he protects you without it.”

Then she pressed something into my palm. A short-handled hunting knife.

She closed both her hands around mine, laughing, wild-eyed, and drove the blade into her own stomach.

Her scream tore across the yard, and in the same motion she shoved hard into my belly.

She had positioned herself so that her body blocked Magnus’s view.

He never saw the knife go in. What he saw was me losing my balance and going down the stairs from the second-floor landing, over and over, all the way to the bottom.

“Estella!”

His face emptied and he ran for me.

Above us, Aelia clutched her middle and cried out, white to the lips.

“Magnus, help me. She’s trying to kill me.”

That was when he saw the hunting knife standing out of her stomach and the red spreading fast through her dress.

The smell of her blood hit his wolf like a match to gasoline. He turned, went up the stairs three at a time, and caught her before she fell.

“Aelia—”

She sagged into him, face streaming.

“All I said was that I wouldn’t come between you anymore. I told her to stop punishing you. And she picked up a knife.” Her breath hitched perfectly. “She said it doesn’t matter what she does, because she has your heir and you’ll forgive her for anything.”

He pressed his hand over the wound. His fingers were shaking.

“Estella, have you lost your mind? This is attempted murder.”

My abdomen was seizing up in waves, one rolling into the next. I couldn’t get enough air to speak properly. All I could do was shake my head.

“She did it herself. I didn’t. Magnus, I didn’t—”

His eyes were red to the whites.

“Aelia has been terrified of pain since she was a child. She used to cry over training scrapes. You expect me to believe she put a knife in herself to frame you?”

He lifted her against his chest.

“When did you become this person? I have never been so disappointed in my life.”

He started down the stairs with her, fast.

As he passed me I got a hand around his pant leg and held on.

“Magnus, it hurts. Please take me to the hospital. Something’s wrong with the baby—”