Alpha's Discarded Luna (Talia) novel Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Aires‘ POV

Go to her.

Vincent had been raking the inside of my skull since the second she hit the floor.

She’s bleeding. Something happened to our mate. Go-

“She’s fine,” I said coldly.

She was definitely faking it, just to get my attention. She’d done this trick too many times; I was sick of it.

But I could smell it. Through the antiseptic, through the strawberries on Imema’s tray, through the rosewater softness of the woman behind me–blood. Hers.

It wasn’t fresh–not from the fall just now. It smelled a day old, as if she’d been bleeding since before she ever got here.

The awareness sat wrong in me. My wolf was more uneasy still.

But I absolutely couldn’t fall for it.

She didn’t have a mark on her that mattered. Imema was the

one the doctors were still testing, the one who could barely 13:20

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stand. Imema was the one I should be concerned about.

Talia was performing. She was always performing.

I turned back to the room. Imema was holding a strawberry out to Aeson, the two of them laughing, my son’s face open and bright in a way it never was for his mother. Good. That was how a family was supposed to look. Warm. Uncomplicated.

I made myself watch it. I made myself not look at the door.

I lost.

When I turned my head she was already walking away–down the long white corridor, one hand on the wall, that oversized gown swallowing her, her hair loose down her back the way she’d worn it the first year, before she learned to pin it up small and quiet like everything else about her.

She didn’t look back. Not once.

And something in my chest pulled tight, an old hook in old scar tissue, and dragged me five years down into the dark.

I was twenty–four. I was dating Imema. She wasn’t my fated mate, but I was sure I’d be with her forever.

Then a scout dragged a half–dead she–wolf out of the eastern gorge, and the second the wind carried her scent to m–rain3:20

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something pale and flowering under the blood and silver–my whole life cracked down the middle.

Mate, Vincent breathed, reverent, ruined. Finally. Ours.

No.

I knelt over her anyway. She was beaten near to death, poisoned, her veins gone black at the wrists. I carried her to our healers and sat by her bed three days, telling myself it was duty.

When she finally opened her eyes, I had the words ready. I reject you. I’d practiced them in the dark like a prayer.

I opened my mouth-

“It’s you,” she breathed, before I could speak. Her eyes were steady on mine, clearer than they’d been in three days. “I knew you’d come back.”

And she pulled me down and kissed me.

I never said the words.

I’ve told myself a thousand times she knew what she was doing- that some cunning in her felt me slipping the hook and closed it for good. But the truth is I didn’t fight it. The second her mouth touched mine, every generation of Alpha control bred into me burned off like fog, and there was nothing left but the 13:20

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bond and her scent and the starving pull of finally.

“Stay,” she said against my mouth. Not begging–certain. “Just tonight. I want to have you, my mate.”

“You’ll regret this,” I told her. It came out rough, unsteady— nothing like an Alpha’s heir.

“Then let me.” Her fingers tightened in my hair. “Tomorrow’s yours to ruin. Tonight is mine.”

I stayed. I let the bond take what it had been screaming for since the gorge.

But even then, one cold thought stayed lit under the heat: Imema. I can’t betray her.

Vincent was wild for the rest of it. Mark her. Bite. Claim. Make it

true-

r

My teeth were at her throat, her pulse hammering against my mouth, my wolf howling for it.

I didn’t.

It’s the one thing I did right that night. You don’t get to keep this one, I told him. She isn’t ours to keep.

hyoke before dawn with her asleep on my chest and the weight

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of it caving in on me.

I dressed in the dark. Before I left, I stood over her for a long moment–asleep, small, her hand still open on the sheet where I’d slipped out of it—and I did something I have never been able to explain to myself.

I took the pendant from around my own neck. Old silver, my mother’s before me, the Perseus crest worn nearly smooth. The one thing I never took off.

I closed it into her palm.

Later, I forced myself to forget that night. To forget that I’d found my destined mate at all.

Imema and I were still together. But I was always distracted.

I knew the pull of a fated bond was something an Alpha couldn’t fully control. But I refused to let the mistake happen again.

A few weeks later, Imema left to chase her dream at the

conservatory.

No warning. A letter, a closed door, a number that stopped ringing–gone, the way she was always threatening to go when things got hard.

And in the wreckage she left behind, there was only one thing:20

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my mind kept circling back to.

Her.

So when the Coopers came–cars, lawyers, old–blood arrogance, her father at the front–and laid the pregnancy on the table between us like a winning hand, I didn’t feel trapped. That’s the part I can’t forgive myself for. Your heir. Our daughter. You’ll do right by both. She stood pale and silent behind her father, not begging, just watching me with those beautiful eyes—

-and I wanted to. Goddess help me, I wanted to say yes for the right reasons. A mate. A child. A second chance at the thing I’d just lost. For one breath I let myself believe the bond had been

mercy, not a trap.

Then Theo pulled me aside and told me a cruel truth.

The hunting “accident” that had taken Caleb the spring before- my oldest friend, the brother I chose, found dead in the cold two days too late–was no accident.

It was her brother. A Cooper. A blood debt buried quietly in the dark, and I’d been standing there one signature away from marrying into the house that killed him. Ready to hand them my name, my heir, my real and stupid heart, while they laughed at me behind their lawyers.

Something in me went out like a snuffed candle.

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I married her anyway. She carried my heir, and an Alpha pays his debts even to his enemies. No guests. No rings. No wedding she could ever show the world. I signed the papers with her hand cold in mine and hated her with everything the bond had tried to make me feel–because for one breath I’d let her in, and

that was the most dangerous thing I’d ever done.

Then, as if to prove I’d been right to seal myself back up, the money started to move. “Household expenses” at first. Then larger–sums leaving the pack’s accounts every month, vanishing into Cooper hands. The family that took Caleb from me, bleeding my pack dry through the woman they’d planted in my house. When I asked where it went, she went silent. Always silent, as if I were the one who should be ashamed for asking.

So I stopped asking. I stopped looking at her. I built the ice back inch by inch, thicker than before, until I could stand in the same room and feel nothing.

That’s the woman down the hall with a scratch on her palm and wounded eyes.

My mate. My enemy. The snare I’m still caught in.

“Aires?” Imema’s voice pulled me back. “You went somewhere just now.”

“It’s nothing.” Rougher than I meant.

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Chapter 2

I should have sat down and cut the next strawberry. Instead I was in the corridor.

Finally, Vincent breathed.

Third door on the left–the one with no flowers, no cards, no guard. I told myself I only meant to tell her to stop the theatrics.

I pushed it open.

The bed was stripped. The room was empty.

“Sir.” A nurse hovered. “Were you looking for-

“No.”

I turned away.

“Aires!” Imema came hurrying down the corridor, bright–eyed, breathless. “You’ll never guess. The piano–the one I’ve wanted for years. They found it. A little shop downtown, a real Di Lian.” Her fingers curled around my arm. “Come with me? You know how I sound when I play for you.”

I looked at Imema. She was the one I was supposed to want.

“Okay,” I said.

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