Chapter 4 — Being chosen to be his Luna was never my choice.

Lara's POV

By the time the nurse was satisfied that I was steady enough to be left alone, I had pulled myself together enough to look like a functioning person. Breathing was even and my hands had stopped shaking. The face in the small mirror above the sink looked tired but held together.

That was good enough.

I thanked her, waited until she had gone back to whatever round she had been doing before I derailed it, and then sat there for another minute in the quiet of that room.

You know, I only felt tense seeing that sight — Lucien crouched beside Raina in that corridor, smiling at her like I was something he had already mentally moved out of — and that was why I needed to leave the space at that moment. My body just reacted before my pride could object. But the tense had passed now, and with it the dizziness, and I was not going to let one moment in a corridor undo the one genuinely good thing that had happened to me today.

I had a baby. I had a whole life growing inside me.

Raina could have Lucien in the corridor. I had something she didn't.

So I decided to set aside what had just played out, at least for now, and focus on the two things that actually mattered — my unborn child and myself. Everything else could wait its turn.

I also needed to get back to Dr. Asher's office. In the chaos of bolting out the moment I felt like I just heard Lucien's voice and for some reason, the only thought that left me bothered was the fact that I had left the printed report sitting right there on the doctor's desk… The one thing I had come to the hospital for in the first place and of course, there was no way I was leaving without it.

I straightened up, picked up my bag, and walked back down the corridor.

The wheelchair was gone. Lucien and Raina were gone. The whole scene had cleared like it had never happened, the corridor going back to its ordinary hospital business of nurses moving and doors swinging.

I walked straight to Dr. Asher's office and reached for the handle.

But stopped abruptly.

There were voices from inside which muffled through the door, but close enough to make out. I recognised the lower one immediately…

That was Lucien's voice.

The urge to come back later was there, but then I was that curious to know.

They say curiosity kills the cat. But I'd rather die knowing than live quietly in the dark while things happen around me that I'm not supposed to find out about.

And so, I pressed myself close to the door instead and listened.

"Doctor Asher, I need to talk to you about Lara." Alpha Lucien's voice came through even and firm. The voice he used when he had already made up his mind about something and was simply putting the world in order around it. "Listen. If Lara were to ever get pregnant by chance…"

He paused.

My hand went flat against the door frame.

Had Dr. Asher told him? Had the man gone straight ahead and said something the moment I left the room, despite everything I had asked of him? I replayed the conversation in my head — the careful nod, the ‘of course, Luna Lara, whenever you are ready.’ It had all seemed genuine. But then again, Lucien was the Alpha of this clan, and Dr. Asher answered him before he answered to me.

But then on a second thought, listening to the way Lucien had phrased it — ‘if Lara were to ever get pregnant’— I let out a slow breath. He didn't know because that was not how a man spoke about something he had already been told. That was a man laying down a precaution. A man planning ahead for a possibility.

He must have seen me in the corridor after all. Just enough to remind him that I existed.

"...then I need you to terminate it immediately if she were to ever get pregnant."

The words went through me like cold water.

I stood there with my palm pressed to my mouth before I even knew I had moved it there, my left hand clamped over my lips so that whatever sound was trying to come out of me didn't make it through. My right hand dropped to my stomach on its own, which was the second or third time today it had gone there without intending to.

I stood in the corridor and pressed my hand over my child and listened to my husband tell the doctor to get rid of it.

"Lucien." The word came out as barely a whisper, so low that nobody standing a step away would have caught it. "How could you be so heartless? This child in my belly is yours, too."

Inside the office, Dr. Asher's voice came back, and I was almost surprised by the firmness in it. "But why, Alpha Lucien? You need an heir. Without one, your hold on the clan will weaken."

There was a short pause from Lucien's side before he answered. "She has never had a wolf. Childbirth could kill her. I won't risk my Luna's life for an heir."

I blinked and then something moved in my chest at those words… some small, stupid, treacherous part of me that wanted to pick them up and hold them like they were proof of something. He said ‘Luna.’ He said he won't risk my life.

But then I pressed my palm harder against my stomach and reminded myself exactly what the other sentence had been. ‘Terminate it immediately.' That was not a man protecting his wife. That was a man removing a problem before it became inconvenient. If he actually cared, if he actually meant it, the conversation would have seemed very different…It would have come to me first, directly, not through a doctor being given instructions behind a closed door like I was a matter to be managed.

I had been here before — finding a crumb and almost convincing myself it was a meal. I was not doing that today.

I was not doing it ever again.

I knew I needed to leave. Staying here a second longer served nothing. I had heard enough — more than enough — and knowing that Lucien had possibly spotted me made staying anywhere near this corridor a bad idea. I couldn't explain my presence without explaining why I was outside that door, and I was not ready to have that conversation in a hospital hallway.

So I left right away.

*****

I went to my lawyer's office on the way home.

I didn't call ahead. I just walked in as his office wasn't too far from the hospital. Then sat down across from him, and told him I needed divorce papers drawn up and ready as soon as possible. He looked at me for a moment with the careful expression lawyers use when they're deciding whether to ask questions, then thought better of it and said he would have everything prepared.

I thanked him and walked back out.

Back at home, the papers were on the table in front of me by late afternoon. Neatly printed… and waiting.

I sat across from them and didn't move for a while.

With all that I had heard today, I had finally stopped fighting the one thing I had been refusing to accept for longer than I wanted to admit — that Alpha Lucien did not love me. He never had. And not only did he not love me, he had just sat in a doctor's office and quietly arranged to erase the only piece of proof that we had ever been anything real at all. For him to think of such a thing, to say those words to Dr. Asher without a single crack in his voice — that made him worse than difficult. Worse than cold.

And I was not going to wait until I lost my life and risked that of my unborn child before I accepted what was in front of me.

I was done for real.

I could either call it a goodbye or keep pretending everything was fine in a marriage that had gone completely south a long time ago. And you know what?...I was too tired to keep pretending.

I pulled the papers closer and stared at them.

And then, without meaning to, my mind went somewhere else entirely.

*****

'Don't worry. You will be safe here. I will protect you.'

I was eleven years old the first time Lucien said those words to me. His parents had just brought me in from the orphanage — a quiet, wide-eyed child with a small bag and no idea what she was walking into — and I had been standing in the kitchen doorway trying to figure out where I was supposed to put myself when he appeared. Taller than me, and of course, a older than I was. Already carrying that easy confidence that Alpha-born males seemed to come with naturally.

He hadn't made a big deal of it. He had just looked at me and said it plainly, like it was simply a fact he was stating.

'Even without a wolf, you are still under my protection.'

I had believed him. That was the thing that stayed with me all these years — not even that he said it, but that I believed it so completely and so immediately. Like something in me had been waiting for exactly that sentence from exactly the right person.

And for a long time, he had kept it. Through the years of growing up in that clan, through the awkwardness of being the only maid at a table of wolves, through every moment where someone looked at me like I didn't belong — Lucien had been there quietly and consistently.

So what had changed? What had happened between that boy and the man who crouched in front of me this morning with his fingers around my jaw telling me we would never have children with me?

I had turned that question over so many times it had worn smooth. And I still didn't have a clean answer.

I think things started to shift the day the wolf shaman opened her mouth.

'Dominus Serenity. Dominus Serenity.'

I could still hear the incantation. The formal gathering, the whole clan assembled, Raina in the front with a coronation dress on because everyone — including her — already knew how this was going to end. It was supposed to be Raina that would be chosen as Luna. Everyone agreed on that because she was the Alpha's childhood sweetheart who was prepared for that event and nobody in that room had any reason to think otherwise.

I was only there to serve drinks.

'The moon goddess has spoken. And so, she has decreed that Alpha Lucien's chosen Luna is… her.'

The shaman's stick had turned and pointed directly at me. And the signal had transferred — this warm, buzzing current that moved through me from the tip of the stick and settled somewhere in my chest like it intended to stay.

I had almost dropped the tray in shock.

"What!" The word had come out of me before I could stop it. I was still holding the wine tray, with my knuckles white around the edge, looking at the shaman like she had just said something in a language I didn't speak.

The room had gone completely still. And then Raina's voice had cut through it.

"She can't form a bond without an inner wolf." She had said it loudly and clearly, looking around at the gathered clan like she was making a legal argument. Then she turned to Lucien. "Alpha Lucien, please. This thing is rigged."

The look on Lucien's face that day — I had read it as shock, as confusion and as a man processing something unexpected. But standing here now, years later, with divorce papers on the table in front of me and the conversation he had with Dr. Asher's office which still fresh in my ears — I wondered if what I had actually seen on his face that day was something closer to resentment.

He had never wanted me as his Luna and he had spent five years making sure I felt exactly that.

*****

I pulled myself back from the flashback slowly, still holding the photo album I had picked up without realising it…which had pictures which had memories from moments we spent together over the years. Which includes, clan events, formal photographs, and a handful of moments that if you didn't know better, might have looked like two people building something together.

I closed it and set it down.

One thing I had never done, through all of it, was blame myself. And I wasn't going to start now. Because being chosen as his Luna was never my choice in the first place. I had not asked for the shaman's stick to point at me. I had not campaigned for the position or staged the moment. I had been standing in the back of a room holding a tray of drinks, and the moon goddess made the decision to choose me.

But loving Alpha Lucien? That was the only choice my heart had ever truly made on its own. And that part was a part that I owned completely.

I looked at the divorce papers on the table.

Then my phone buzzed on the surface beside them. It was a notification and so I reached over and swiped the screen open.

It was an image message.

I stared at the preview for a second before opening it fully — and just when I thought I had managed to put a floor under myself today, the screen showed me something that took it right back out.

Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I had no idea it had already gotten to the point of rubbing it directly in my face.