I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 13

I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 13

I came up the path fast and frowned at him.

“What are you doing here?”

He looked at me like a man who hadn’t slept.

“I came to take you home.”

Mrs. Blackwood stepped straight around me and put herself between us. Her hair has been white for

years and her eyes were red.

“Alpha. We don’t know what happened between the two of you. We know our daughter was hurt.”

Her voice stayed steady, which was more than mine would have.

“Estella told us the mate bond is severed. She isn’t going with you and we’re not taking your gifts.

Please leave.”

A low murmur went through the yard behind him.

“They severed it?”

“Married how long? What happened?”

“She’s barely come outside since she got back. God knows what she’s been through.”

Magnus’s chest visibly tightened. “I never betrayed her. Estella is the only woman I love.”

I looked at Mrs. Blackwood’s face, at how much this was costing her, and gave in.

“Come inside. We’ll talk.”

The neighbors began drifting off.

He came through the door with all of it still in his hands.

Mrs. Blackwood understood I wanted to do this myself. She took her husband out to the back garden and left us the front room.

I noticed the blood coming through his right pant leg.

I didn’t want him collapsing in the Blackwoods‘ house, so I got the first aid kit out of the cabinet and

held it out.

“Your leg’s opened up. Deal with it.”

He rolled the fabric back. The travel had torn the wound open and the bandage underneath was soaked through.

glanced up at me without meaning to, looking for something in my face.

I’d already turned away.

He redressed it himself in silence. When he spoke there was something raw underneath it.

“A year ago you’d have been across the room before I finished sitting down. You’d have done this yourself and you’d have cried about it.”

I made a small sound.

“You’re right. A year ago. The bond’s gone, Magnus.”

Something went through him. He got both hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him.

“Estella, I never wanted to sever it. Not once.”

His grip tightened.

“The petition, saying I’d make Aelia Luna, all of it was temper. You’re my wife. There has never been anyone else I’d call that.”

And there it was in his eyes. The hurt. The genuine bafflement of a man who couldn’t understand how he’d ended up here.

Everything I’d been holding down came up through me at once.

I pushed him off.

“You didn’t want it. Am I not allowed to want it?”

My voice was rising and I let it.

“What made you so sure that all you had to do was lower your head, and I’d forgive you? Every time?”

I heard myself.

“What am I to you? A dog you trained? Something that comes back because it doesn’t know how to go anywhere else?”

He stared at me. “Estella, I have never thought of you that way.

“No,” I said. “You just did it that way.”

He saw the tears and came toward me, hands out to hold me.

I took two steps back, out of reach.

“Even standing here, you still don’t understand how we got to this. Go home. There’s nothing left.”

He didn’t move.

“So because I took her side, you throw away everything we had?”

His hands dropped.

“I’ve explained this. I looked after her because we grew up together, because the Blaze and Thorn

elders are tangled up in each other’s histories, because they’ve held my council seat steady for a

decade.”

He said it like a closing argument.

“If I loved her, why did I walk to you at the Choosing Ball?”

I looked back at him, calm, and let him see how little of it landed.

“You feel about Aelia the way a man feels about his sister.”

I let that sit.

“And how does she feel about you?”

His face didn’t change yet.

“Did you genuinely not know she wants to be your Luna? Or did you keep two families comfortable by pretending?”