The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 367

Chapter 367

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My stepfather had made financial arrangements contingent on Dominic becoming Alpha King.

I thought about that on the walk home, and the further I got from the academy, the more pieces started shifting into place. Moments from my past life that I had nearly forgotten slowly filtered back in, and with each one, a realization started to build up in my mind.

I recalled my stepfather arguing with Dominic in his office. It had happened more than once. I could remember walking past and hearing raised voices. I had never thought much of it at the time. I had assumed it was pack politics, something that had nothing to do with me, the kind of thing that if I asked, they would just tell me it wasn’t my business.

But then I remembered how Dominic would come out of that office, and he would be more distant than usual. I wouldn’t see him for days at a time. Like he couldn’t even bear to look at me; which was saying something, because he usually couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to me back then.

It hadn’t occurred to me, not once, that my own stepfather might have been walking into that office and

squeezing Dominic for money and leverage and Goddess knows what else, using our marriage as a bargaining chip the same way Vivian had used everything around her.

Dominic had never said a word to me about it.

I didn’t know if that made it better or worse. Maybe he’d been trying to protect me from it. Maybe he hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me. Maybe it was somewhere in between, the way most things were.

But either way, the picture I’d been carrying around of my past life, the one where Dominic was the architect of all of it and I was just the casualty, cracked a little at the edges.

He’d been dealing with Vivian pulling strings behind his back. My stepfather trying to squeeze money out of him. A pack to run. A campaign to handle. And somewhere underneath all of that, a marriage that neither of us had fully signed up for.

I wasn’t absolving him, of course. He had made his own choices, plenty of bad ones. But I had spent two lifetimes assuming I was the only one being used, and it turned out that maybe I wasn’t the only one in

that house who had been.

I got home and stood in Lucas’s kitchen for a while, staring at the inside of the fridge. There wasn’t much to eat; neither Lucas nor I had much time to go grocery shopping, and Abigail had started a new job in the pack, so she wasn’t around much either.

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