I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 07

I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 07

Something crossed his face then. A flicker of the man who’d stood outside my parents’ door all night. His wolf caught the scent of the pup and stopped him mid-step.

Then Aelia sobbed, “Magnus, it hurts so much. Am I dying?”

Whatever had surfaced in him went straight back under.

“No. I’m not letting anything happen to you.”

He shook my fingers loose with one small movement of his leg.

“Using the pup for sympathy won’t work. You brought all of this on yourself.”

He was already moving.

“If that child is your excuse to hurt whoever you like, then I’d rather not have him.”

He carried her out. He never looked down, so he never saw the blood spreading across the floor underneath me.

I curled around my stomach and begged the empty hallway.

“Magnus, I didn’t touch her. Don’t go. Please, save our baby. Magnus—”

The front door closed.

I screamed after him through the tears. “Magnus, I hate you.”

The contractions came faster and harder, and the smell of my own blood filled the room until my wolf was howling, a raw and ruined sound with nowhere to go.

I bit through my lip and started crawling. Living room, hallway, front door. A few feet at a time.

I got outside. A neighbor was walking past the gate, and I spent everything I had left on two words.

“Help me. My baby—”

She called 911.

The ambulance took me to Silverpine. I got a fist into the sleeve of the healer running beside the gurney, my face soaked with tears and cold sweat.

“Please save my baby. He was due in a month. One more month—”

They put an oxygen mask over my face and pushed me through the doors.

Under the surgical lights everything came to me through a long tunnel of static. Voices moving fast over my head, none of the words arriving.

The anesthetic went in. My whole lower body went distant and then gone. The last thing I heard, right at the edge of the dark, was one of them saying quietly, “She came in too late.”

My eyes opened a little wider.

Then nothing.

I woke up in a room.

I shifted and the incision caught, and the pain put me flat on my back again.

A voice came out of the corner, hoarse and used up.

“You threw him away. Are you satisfied now?”

I turned my head.

Magnus was in the chair by the window, unshaven, eyes bloodshot.

On his knees sat a small urn.

I stared at it. I tried to get across the room and went off the edge of the bed instead, hard, onto the floor.

I couldn’t get up. So I lay there and looked at it while the tears ran sideways across my face.

At a certain point the pain was so complete I couldn’t breathe around it. My mouth was open and nothing came out but broken air. Inside me my wolf had crawled into the hollow where the pup had been and would not answer me.

Magnus spoke again.

“The Blaze family has filed a police report. Assault with a weapon. Out of respect for the Thorn name, Aelia has agreed to settle. You apologize to her face and she signs the withdrawal.”

I looked at him and let him see all of it.

“You want me to apologize to her.”

His face didn’t move.

“If you refuse, the Thorn family can’t shield you. You go to prison and your life is finished.”

Something in me went cold, all the way through, and then even that burned out and left only exhaustion.

“If my son knew his death was going to be the thing that kept me tied to all of you,” I said, “I don’t think he’d want it either.”

Magnus paused at the door. Then he left anyway. One sentence over his shoulder.

“Think it through.”

I held the urn against my chest and took the night train to Pinebrook alone.

Outside the window the scrubland tore past in the dark, and I felt my mouth curve.

“We’re going home, baby. Mama’s taking you home.”

Everything brave I ever did bought me nothing but this.

Magnus. Not in this life. Not ever again.