Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 117

Chapter 117

Jaxon

The drive back to Ironwood Pack takes three hours. I don’t remember a single mile of it.

Noah drives. I sit in the passenger seat and stare at the road disappearing behind us in the side mirror/and think about the look on Skye’s face. Not the anger. Not the exhaustion. The certainty.

You will always choose to believe the worst of me first.

She said it like she’d finally finished a math problem she’d been working on for years. Like the last variable had resolved and the answer was exactly what she’d suspected but kept hoping was wrong.

I went to Woolf territory to find answers. And fuck if I didn’t find them. They just weren’t the ones I was looking for.

Cassandra is still in the guest house when we arrive. Brave of her to stick around considering the way she set me up. But there she is, waiting with that put-on anxiety she’s so good at-pacing in front of the huge bay window, looking toward the main house every few minutes. The performance of a woman who needs something and has staked everything on getting it.

I don’t send someone for her. Don’t call ahead. I just walk across the grounds and open the guest house door.

She turns immediately. “What did they say? Was I right? Is the baby-‘

“The inquiry was dismissed.” My voice is flat. Empty of everything except the words themselves. “The accusation was baseless.” I step inside and close the door behind me. “Fabricated. Like everything else you’ve ever told me.”

Cassandra’s expression shifts. The fake anxiety morphing into something else entirely.

“The timeline-the photographs-”

“Meant nothing. Were nothing. Everyone in that room knew it inside five minutes.” I don’t sit. Don’t give this conversation the comfort of furniture. “I’m going to ask you something. And you’re going to tell me the truth.”

She waits with her arms crossed over her stomach like she’s trying to protect herself from something. Me probably.

“We conducted a DNA test on Skye’s unborn child from the amniotic fluid. The results cleared her.”

We haven’t but she doesn’t know that. So I watch Cassandra’s face and wait.

The calculation happens behind her eyes. I can almost see it-the assessment of what I know, what I could know, whether the lie is possible to sustain.

“That’s impossible. Unless-” She stops.

The stop is everything. “Unless you made it up,” I say quietly. “Did you?”

Something goes out of her. Not remorse. Not shame. Just the particular exhaustion of someone who’s been running a long con and has finally, conclusively, run out of road.

The confession comes slowly. Not dramatically-there’s no theatrical collapse, no tears she hasn’t manufactured specifically to affect me. Just the slow, tired dismantling of someone who knows the game is over and is deciding, piece by piece, how much to give up.

Yes. She skewed the photographs. Yes. She knew Skye was innocent.

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Cassandra says nothing. Which is the only honest thing she’s done in this conversation. It doesn’t make the fantasy of wrapping my hands around her neck and squeezing the life out of her any less real.

“There’s something else you need to know.” I’d forgotten Noah was there.

He’s been in the doorway through all of it-so quiet, so still, that he became part of the architecture. I turn now and find him looking not at me but at Cassandra. His expression is something I’ve never seen on him in twenty years of friendship.

Not anger. Not judgment. Grief, maybe. Or the exhaustion of someone who has been carrying something heavy for so long that putting it down feels less like relief than collapse.

“She’s my mate,” Noah says. “Scent-matched. I knew the moment she came back to Ironwood Pack.”

Cara Anderson Author

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