I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 11

I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 11

He stood in the entryway a long time before he made himself walk into the black living room.

The yellow knit blanket she loved was gone from the sofa.

The little potted succulents she’d fussed over on the windowsill were gone.

Every dress he’d bought her, every bag, every piece of jewelry, all of it exactly where he’d left it. The handful of things she’d bought herself, gone.

There had been photographs of the two of them all over the house.

Every one of them was gone. Even the wedding portrait. In its place, four small nail holes in the

paint.

She’d been thorough. She hadn’t taken one thing he gave her.

He sat down on the sofa without meaning to. The house with her scent gone out of it was as cold as

an emptied nest, and his wolf kept casting around inside him for a way back to something that no longer existed.

“Why,” he said out loud, to nobody. “Why would you just stop wanting me.”

He knew he’d favored Aelia. He knew Estella had swallowed things she shouldn’t have had to.

Leaving had never been on the table.

She was the one who used to get jealous. She was the one who used to threaten the bond. Where did

she get the right to just go.

Sitting in all that grievance, he still had not seen his own hand in any of it. He took out his phone

and called his assistant.

“Find out where the Luna is. Tonight.”

He’d barely hung up when it rang again.

He answered fast, thinking it was her. It was Sunna.

“Magnus. Come back to the pack house.”

He was already at the bottom of his patience.

“I’m busy.”

Her voice went flat and cold. “I am your mother and I was Luna before you were born. I can’t call you home now?”

His grip tightened on the phone. He thought about how she’d spoken to Estella. About the slap.

About the stone steps.

He did need to go back. He needed to say it in that house, out loud, once.

He wasn’t having his mother humiliate her again when she came home.

“Fine,” he said.

At the Thorn pack house, Sunna was waiting in the front room. She took one look at his face and

frowned.

“What’s happened to you? You look terrible.”

He didn’t answer. “What do you want?”

She handed him a cup of herbal tea with honey in it and waited until he’d swallowed a mouthful

before she spoke.

“I hear you’re planning a mating ceremony for Estella.”

“Yes.”

Her mouth thinned. “Absolutely not. Have you forgotten what you agreed to? If she comes into this

family, the marriage stays private.”

She set her own cup down.

“The Blaze family is your strongest bloc on the council. Estella is a defective wolf out of a

laboratory. Look at what she’s done recently. Which part of it belongs anywhere near the title of

Luna?”

She kept going.

“Women who come from nothing know exactly how to trade on pity. What she wants is money and

,position, and you’re handing her both.”

He was thinking about a jewelry drawer left untouched.

He heard himself laugh, quietly, bitterly. “I wish she were that shallow. Then she’d have taken

something. Instead she took nothing at all, including me.”

He stood.

“Mother. This is the last time I say it. I’m not in love with Aelia. She has been my sister and nothing else, from the beginning to right now.”

Sunna’s face began to change.

“Estella is my wife, and she is the only woman I have ever loved. I spent years managing you and

e Blaze family and I let her pay for all of it. That’s finished.”

“What exactly are you telling me?”

He said it one word at a time. “If you can’t accept my Luna, then you and I don’t need to speak

again.”

He turned to go.

Three steps toward the door, heat came up through him out of nowhere, wrong and fast.

His wolf caught the herbs in the tea and roared.

Before he could turn, guards had him through a doorway and the lock went over behind him.

Aelia was sitting on the bed.

She was wearing a thin silk slip and her face was scarlet.

She caught her lip in her teeth, then crossed the room and pressed herself into his chest.

“Magnus, I’ve loved you since I was a child. I mean it. Give me one chance. That’s all. The Blaze

family keeps backing you, and I will be a better Luna than a blood bank ever could—”

He thought about everything the two of them had done, and about how it might have already cost

him Estella permanently, and he looked at her the way you look at an enemy.

He threw her off.

She hit the wall and pain went white across her back.

She was gathering herself to come at him again when she saw him go to the window.

“Magnus, this is the third floor. You’ll kill yourself-”

He gave her one cold glance and put his fist through the glass.

He picked a shard out of the frame and drove it into his own thigh, and used the pain to hold the

herbs down.

“Magnus.” Her eyes went wide and wild. “Do you hate me that much? You’d rather cut yourself

open than touch me?”

The smell of blood filled the room.

He kept his eyes on the door.

She cracked first, ran to it, and started pounding.

‘Sinna, open the door. He’s hurt. Open it.”

Sunna got the lock open and came in, and found her son on the floor in a spreading pool of his own

blood.

She went gray. “Have you lost your mind?”

He looked up at her and would not look away.

“There’s no one but Estella. There never was.”