The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 413

Chapter 413

Of course. Of course she was here. I couldn’t escape her in my last lifetime, and I couldn’t escape her in this one.

I had to tell my father about her. And Dominic. He would already be home by now, but he needed to know before he wasted too many resources looking for her.

Pushing away from the wall, I continued making my way down the corridor. There was a door at the end, partially cracked. I heard the sound of my father’s and Stephanie’s voices before I reached it, and I slowed.

“-not asking you to undo it,” Stephanie was saying in a low and furious tone. “I’m asking what you were thinking. In front of everyone. Without a word to me first.”

“It was the right thing to do.” My father sounded tired. “She’s my daughter, Steph. My firstborn. I owed her this

much.”

“And the boys? What do you owe them?”

“Everything. You know that.”

I stopped just short of the door.

“Then explain it to me,” Stephanie said. “You’ve just handed this pack to a stranger who could have all kinds of intentions.”

There was a long pause. When my father spoke again his voice had dropped, and I had to strain to catch it.

“It’s a title, Stephanie. A gesture. It honors Fay, it honors the bloodline, and the Goddess knows it’s eighteen years late.” A breath. “It doesn’t change anything that matters. The boys are my blood, too. But she was my firstborn. It’s what the pack expects. A gesture of tradition and goodwill.”

A gesture. What the pack expects.

I knew they shouldn’t, but for some reason, the words struck me right in the gut. I supposed it was because I’d heard a version of them before, in another life, in a colder house, when I was a wife in name and nothing else. A figurehead. A box to be checked off. Unwanted, unloved, and only given what I was given out of necessity.

I’d thought, walking in tonight, that maybe this time it would be different. That maybe I’d finally found a place where I was wanted for myself and not for what I stood for.

I should have known better, of course. I didn’t know these people, not really. Perhaps we were bound by blood, but I wasn’t a Lycan, not in the way my father was. The dress I wore now was just a costume. My three brothers may not have had Lycan blood, but they had lived their whole lives in this pack and knew it better than I ever could.

Why did I think, even for a moment, that I truly belonged here?

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