Rossana
No one knew how hard being a demoted luna was, the entire world comes crashing down right on your face that was the case for me especially because I left the love of my life so I could become a luna.
I was nineteen years old and I had just told Edric Cole that the child I was carrying was his.
He believed me.
He had no reason not to. We had been together three months by then — long enough to be plausible, short enough that the timing required no explanation. He looked at me across the small table in his family's receiving room with those steady reliable eyes and he believed me completely.
Relief is the most accurate thing for what I felt.
Edric Cole was a good man. He was kind and steady and his ambitions were reasonable and his family had standing and he was going to be Alpha one day and all of those things together added up to a life that a nineteen year old girl from a family with more pride than security could build something real on.
Jason— the one whose child I was actually carrying — was none of those things.
He had a horse-sized cock and was the most handsome man I had ever seen, he swept me off my feet and we had a torrid affair, I loved him but he had no place in the framework I was using to plan my future. He had no standing and no family name worth mentioning and no ambitions that aligned with anything I needed and he was the most alive thing I had ever been near.
I chose Cole.
I chose the steady eyes and the reliable hands and the Alpha title that would make me Luna and I have never once told myself it was the wrong choice because it wasn't the wrong choice. It was the necessary one. There is a difference and I understood it at nineteen and I understand it now.
What I did not fully account for was the child.
Ava was born in the deep winter, three weeks early, in a rush that the midwife said was unusual and that I knew was not unusual at all but was simply Ava arriving in the way she would always arrive — before anyone was ready, in circumstances that required immediate management.
She was beautiful. That was the first thing. Whatever else I felt in those early hours I felt that clearly and without complication. She was beautiful and she was mine and I held her in the grey winter light and felt something so large and so specific that I didn't try to name it.
Then she opened her eyes.
And I saw him.
Not a resemblance exactly. Not the kind of thing anyone else would notice or that could be pointed to and explained. Something subtler and more total than that — a quality in the way she looked at the world from her first moments in it, that same reading-something-in-a-forgotten-language quality that I recognized from the only other face I had ever seen it in.
I closed my eyes.
I held her and I breathed and I told myself what I would tell myself for the next twenty years.
This is manageable. This is manageable. This is manageable.
It was manageable. For a long time it was manageable.
Edric loved her. He loved her with the uncomplicated wholehearted love of a man who had no reason to question what he was loving and I watched him with her and felt the specific mixture of gratitude and guilt that became as familiar to me over the years as breathing. He called her his eldest. He taught her things. He was proud of her in the specific way fathers were proud of daughters who were quiet and dignified and never caused trouble.
He never knew. In twenty years he never came close to knowing. That was partly careful management on my part and partly simply the fact that good men who trust completely are very easy to protect a secret from. Their trust is the protection. They don't look for what they don't believe is there.
Hazel came two years later — fully Edric's, completely his, with his jaw and his eyes and his steadiness already visible in the specific way she held herself as an infant. I loved Hazel with the uncomplicated ease of a woman loving a child that belonged entirely to the life she had chosen. Hazel was what I had built. Hazel was the proof that the choice had been right.
Ava was the evidence that the choice had a cost.
I tried to love her but something about her reminded me of a life I could have had but didn't have and it became more complicated when we found out she was wolfless, after that the only instinct I felt was panic because I knew something about that had to do with her father.
I knew why she couldn't shift.
Her wolf was there. I had never doubted that. But a wolf was tied to bloodline in ways that pack science had documented extensively and that I had read about with the focused attention of someone looking for a specific answer. A wolf whose paternal bloodline was unknown to it — severed, hidden, unreachable — could not fully surface. It existed in a kind of suspension. Waiting for something it didn't know it was waiting for.
Ava's wolf was waiting for a connection she didn't know she needed.
And I could not give it to her without destroying everything.
So I watched her carry the wolfless shame for three years and I managed my guilt the way I managed everything and I told myself it was the necessary thing.
It was becoming harder to believe that.
The demotion changed the calculation.
When Edric was stripped of his Alpha title three years ago and we were reduced to servants in the palace we had once moved through as equals I understood that the walls I had been maintaining were thinner than I had believed.
Something had shifted in the political architecture around us and I could feel it.