Chapter 6 — He later signed it!

Lara's POV

"I want a divorce."

Just as the last word dropped off my lips, Alpha Lucien's hand was already around my throat.

Alpha Lucien's grip was so tight that at one point, I was already finding it difficult to breathe. My vision blurred at the edges. My airway narrowed down to almost nothing. And yet I still managed to hold onto those divorce papers — my right hand gripping them like they were the only solid thing left in the room. If this was where it ended, then fine. He could have everything else. But I was not letting go of those papers.

There was something strange about standing there, struggling to breathe, and feeling more certain than I had felt in years. Five years of that marriage had never given me clarity like this. Five years of hoping, waiting and swallowing everything down had never made anything feel this clean or this simple. And all it had taken was his hand around my throat for the last thing holding me here to finally, completely let go.

But then my unborn child crossed my mind.

Not a thought exactly — more like a pull. A quiet, firm reminder from somewhere deep that this body was not only mine to put at risk. The baby growing inside me hadn't asked for any of this. He or she didn't deserve this and didn't deserve a father who would do what Lucien was doing right now, and it certainly didn't deserve to lose their mother over a piece of paper in a living room.

That was enough reason to stay alive. That alone. Not Lucien and not this marriage either. Also, not any version of the future I had once been foolish enough to imagine with him. Just that child was that one reason which I needed.

If I could get through this moment, then I would demand for the expulsion ritual. I would cut every tie, sever every bond, and walk out of this clan in a way that left nothing for him to pull me back with. But first, I had to survive it.

"Lara." He said my name like having it in his mouth irritated him. "First, you conspired with that witch to sabotage my succession ceremony five years ago and made yourself my Luna. And now you want a divorce?" His grip pressed in tighter for one hard second, and then he snatched the divorce papers clean out of my hand, though his other hand stayed locked around my throat. "What games are you playing this time?"

I could feel my pulse hammering against his fingers. Every word I pushed out cost something, squeezed thin and rough by the pressure, but they came out anyway.

"I didn't marry you to become your Luna." I held his eyes while I said it even in that position. Not to prove something. Just because I needed him to hear this, at least once before I walked out of his life. "I loved you." The words came out plain and without anything attached to it. It was just the truth finally said to his face. "I wanted to have your children." My teeth were pressed together. "Now I know you don't feel the same way. So I am leaving you. No matter what it costs."

Something moved across his face. But then, I didn't have enough breath left to work out what it was.

He threw me off without wasting a second.

I landed on the couch hard, and the coughing started the moment his hand left my throat — deep and uncontrollable, the kind that shakes your whole chest and brings water to your eyes. I pressed one hand flat to my throat and let it run its course, pulling air back in slowly and not rushing it.

My throat burned. Also, my chest was still heaving.

I touched the side of my neck carefully, once, just to check. But at least, there was no broken skin. It was just the ache and the heat of where his hand had been. I dropped my hand and looked at him.

Lucien was standing with the papers in his hand, looking between them and me.

"All I asked was for you to give Raina a simple apology," he said, the edge in his voice climbing now and the control giving slightly at the surface. "And instead, you threaten me with a divorce?"

"It's not a threat," I said. My voice came out hoarse and stripped down, but it was there. I cleared my throat once and straightened up on the couch, done with looking like I was still recovering even if every part of my neck was still aching. "Just sign it and we are done for good." I looked straight at him. "And you will be free. Forever."

A beat passed. The room was very quiet around that last word.

"Lara, you shouldn't joke about divorce." Raina's voice drifted over from the wheelchair — soft and measured, wrapped in that practiced calm. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap. Her expression was gentle and composed in exactly the right measure.

With that, I already knew that every single part of it was a performance.

I would have really appreciated it if she had said absolutely nothing. I had nothing in me for her right now — no patience, no reaction, nothing she could pick up and use. Because I knew, and I had known for a long time, that the woman sitting in that wheelchair was not an innocent party to anything that had happened in this marriage. She had helped build every wall that ever stood between Lucien and I quietly and patiently. From the very comfortable position of someone nobody had been watching closely enough.

For her to sit there now, in this same room where she had just watched him grip my throat, and deliver lines about joking in that soft little voice — I simply did not have the space for any of it.

So I didn't even look at her for long.

Lucien looked at me. Then at the papers in his hand. His jaw shifted once, and the silence stretched the way it does when something is about to go one way or the other and nobody in the room is quite sure which.

"You think I won't do it?" he said.

He grabbed the pen off the table.

Placed the papers flat in front of him, and then signed it.

He went through every page without stopping — one after the other, no pause, no hesitation — like a man who had been waiting at a door for five years and wasn't going to waste a second now that it was finally open. The pen hit the table with a sharp click when he set it down. He straightened up and looked at me.

I held his gaze and didn't look away.

I knew this was exactly the exit he had always wanted. He had wanted out of this marriage from the day the shaman pointed at me instead of Raina, and the only thing he hadn't been prepared for today was that I had gotten here first. He had waited five years for me to get tired enough to give up, and the one thing his pride couldn't quite land on was the fact that I had done it standing up, on my own terms and also looking him dead in the eye while I did it.

He stood there, with the papers signed, and said nothing.

And then something lurched in my stomach suddenly and insistent.

Obviously, not remotely interested that this was ‘a wrong timing.’

The nausea hits fast and without warning — the specific kind that doesn't give you options and doesn't care what is happening around it. I pressed my lips together and held completely still for two full seconds, willing it to pass.

But it didn't.

So, I stood up from the couch and made my way to the restroom as quickly as I could without making it look like what it was, one hand on the wall as I pushed the door open and made it just in time.

I crouched over the basin, one hand flat against the cool tile, with my chest heaving, my eyes stinging, and let my body do what it had clearly already decided well before I got a vote in the matter.

And somewhere under all of it, quiet and steady and completely unbothered by everything else that had happened today, the thought came on its own.

‘This was the baby making itself known.’

The timing was almost funny. Almost… if the rest of this day hadn't already been exactly what it had been.

Because the worst I could do was to give anyone the slightest knowledge of this pregnancy… which I have decided to keep a secret.