Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 277

Ch.47

Cassandra

I’m not sure why I’m so surprised. I’ve been telling myself for weeks that I’m ready for this. I’ve known for weeks that this was coming, that Noah was going to choose Piper, that I wanted him to, even because he deserves to be happy after everything I did and didn’t do.

I told myself I was ready. I told myself a lie. Because this… this pain that feels as if my ribs have been cracked open and my heart ripped from my chest, it’s unbearable.

My breathing accelerates until I’m gasping for air. Torturous thoughts flood my mind and I’m helpless to stop them. My hands are wet where they cradle my face and I taste salt on my lips.

He chose. He chose her and she stayed over and it’s done now, it’s actually done, and somewhere in this building there is a man and his wolf—his wolf who is my fated mate, who knows it, who has always known it-and he chose someone else, and it’s all my fault.

A high-pitched keening reaches my ears before I realize it’s coming from me. The sound cuts off on a choked sob when I feel Liam stir next to me. But it doesn’t cut off my suffering.

The pond is still there. That’s the part I can’t make sense of tonight. Warm and present and entirely certain. Still pulling and tugging, urging me to go to him and prostrate myself at his feet, regardless of what he chose and regardless of what I deserve and regardless of the fact that I made my decisions at that gate before I understood what I was throwing away.

The bond doesn’t care about any of that. I’m sitting on the edge of a bed in the dark in a house where the man I love just spent the night with someone else, and I earned every second of this, and I know that, and knowing it doesn’t make it not hurt.

“Are you okay?”

I look up, startled by the sound of Liam’s voice and finding him sitting beside me with his hand on mine. He wasn’t asleep. He’s been watching me fall apart in the dark and that knowledge is worse than suffering alone.

“Yes,” I lie, quickly wiping away my tears and painting on a smile that doesn’t reach my eyes but hopefully fools a four-year-

old.

He doesn’t believe me. I can see it in the way he scrunches his nose and the tiny wrinkle between his eyes. He watches me carefully, deciding if he’s going to call me on the lie or not. Finally, he sighs and presses against my side, his head dropping onto my shoulder.

“No you’re not.” He calls me out. “But that’s okay. I’ll take care of you, Mamà,

It takes all the strength I possess to hold in the whine fighting its way up my throat at hearing those words from my sweet little boy. “I know you will.” I manage instead. “We’ll take care of each other. You and me, from now on.” I promise.

I put my arm around him and we sit in the dark together and he lets me, and I’m aware that I don’t deserve this uncomplicated warmth and I’m taking it anyway because I don’t have enough left tonight to be noble about it.

After a while I feel his weight shift-the real sleep this time, the deep kind where his whole body lets go. I ease him down and tuck him in properly. Then I get into bed beside him.

But sleep doesn’t come. I lie awake and take an honest account of my sins, reminding myself of all the reasons she deserves him and I don’t, The reasons he deserves her and not me.

I stood at a gate with a fated mate bond snapping into place and I barely spared him a glance. I chose the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. And it doesn’t matter that I’ve spent every day since he rejected me making better choices. It doesn’t matter that the better choices are real, they don’t undo the earlier ones. They just… exist alongside them. That’s how choices work. They accumulate.

He found someone good. Piper is good-I know this, I’ve seen it, I’ve told her so to her face. He’s building a life with someone

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who came to him without the weight of what I brought. Who never looked past him toward his Alpha. Who never used her child

as a prop.

This is the consequence of those choices. This is what it looks like to reap what you sow. I tell myself this over and over again until I almost believe it. I almost convince myself I’ll be fine.

Sleep comes eventually, which is the most I can ask of tonight. I’m almost there-the half-under place where thoughts stop making sense-when I hear it. Footsteps in the corridor.

I know his walk. I’ve been learning it for months-the particular rhythm of it, the weight of it, the way it sounds different from every other footfall in this building. The pace that’s neither hurried nor not, just his. Noah.

The footsteps stop outside my door. I don’t breathe. He pauses there. Not long, three seconds, maybe four. Then he keeps walking.

I lie in the dark and wonder what that means, him pausing outside my door or what he’s even doing in this wing in the first place. Did the bond pull him to me the way it tries to pull me to him?

I think about all the reasons I’m not going to make it into anything-the many, many good reasons, the correct and honest and self-protective reasons.

The bond hums, warm and certain, in the direction of his retreating footsteps.

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