I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 04

I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 04

The door closed. I stood in the quiet and looked at the long scar running down my right arm.

At the Choosing Ball, everyone in the room had already decided he’d pick Aelia. Childhood friends, matched bloodlines, matched fortunes. I was a nobody the Blaze family kept in a back room.

But a month before that ball, rogues ambushed him in the Greyfall range. He got clear of them and straight into a landslide, and by the time I found him he was hours from dying.

I was hiking those mountains alone. We spent a month in that forest together, and it was the most dangerous and most honest month of my life.

Protecting him woke my wolf fully for the first time. She drove off the rogues that tracked us. That same night his own wolf slipped his control, mate instinct taking the reins, and he marked me. My arm opened up on the rocks in the middle of it. That’s where the scar came from.

He told me that when we got out, I’d be his only Luna.

I told him Aelia and I carry the same scent, and maybe she was the one fate had picked.

He shook his head. “I grew up with her. My wolf has never once answered her. There’s only you.”

I believed him.

At the ball he did exactly what he’d said. He crossed the floor to me and named me Luna. Aelia walked out.

The Blaze family could not survive their own slave becoming Luna. They threatened to pull their council support, then went over Magnus’s head to his mother, Sunna, the former Luna, and demanded my identity stay buried.

Sunna has always looked at me and seen a deformed thing a laboratory made. She sealed the Luna records in the name of pack security and ordered Magnus and me never to speak the truth aloud.

I thought I could live with that. The former Luna would never accept me, fine. Magnus loved me and that would be enough to build a life on.

Then Aelia came back, and everything started coming apart.

One offhand sentence from her and he’d leave me mid-conversation. She framed me over and over and he kept calling it a little sister who didn’t know where the line was.

I let out a breath, gathered myself, and went upstairs to lie down.

I was halfway into sleep when the bedroom door slammed open.

I jerked upright into the sight of Magnus’s eyes, red with rage, his wolf so agitated I could feel it churning under his skin.

He grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the door.

“Come with me.”

I couldn’t get my feet under me. I stumbled after him to keep from going down.

“Magnus, what happened? Where are you taking me?”

“You’d know better than I would,” he said.

He put me in the SUV and drove, and the speedometer kept climbing.

My heart slammed against my ribs. One hand went over my belly and the other locked around the grab handle.

“Magnus, you’re insane. Stop the car. Let me out.”

He didn’t acknowledge that I’d spoken. He drove all the way to the Thorn pack house.

I’d been there exactly once since we married. Sunna spent the whole evening finding new ways to make me small, Magnus screamed at her about it afterward, and he promised me I’d never have to set foot there again.

He dragged me through the front doors.

Aelia was on the sofa, sobbing, angry red hives blooming across her face and throat. Sunna sat beside her, murmuring, stroking her hair.

Every head in the room turned to me. It felt like being pinned to a board.

Sunna came at me and slapped me across the face.

“You vicious, deformed animal. Magnus brings the girl home for one dinner and you bribe someone to poison her.”

The blow knocked me sideways. My cheek went numb and then it burned.

I looked for Magnus without meaning to. “It wasn’t me. I’ve been in this house one time. I don’t even know where the kitchen is. How would I arrange anything?”

He looked back at me and there was nothing in his face. Not one degree of doubt in my favor.

My wolf shrank back inside me. Cold crawled up my spine.

Sunna’s mouth twisted. “You’d do anything to sit in the Luna’s chair. Why would this be beneath you?”

Aelia cradled her swollen face and glared at me over her fingers.

“You’re still lying? The kitchen girl already confessed. You paid her a hundred thousand dollars to swap my cake for the mango filling. You know exactly how allergic I am.”

I bit down on the inside of my lip. “If I did it, show me the proof.”

She shoved her phone screen into my face.

“Transfer records. From the second card Magnus gave you. What’s your story, that Magnus paid the girl himself to frame you?”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“It wasn’t me. I’ve never used that card except for baby things.”

Sunna turned to her son. “I told you years ago. A creature with no traceable origin cannot be Luna. You didn’t listen. If we hadn’t kept an epi pen in this house, Aelia would be in an emergency room right now. If she’d died, how exactly do we explain that to the Blaze family?”

She let that sit.

“Well? What are you going to do about this?”

Magnus was silent for maybe two seconds.

“If she’s done wrong, she kneels outside the pack house. She gets up when Aelia’s reaction goes down. Not before.”