After My Mate Chose A Rogue, I Took Back My Crown

I am Emory Howell, Crown Luna of the American Lycans, heiress to the Moonveil Pack. I have walked into rooms that made Alpha males instinctively lower their eyes. I have settled inter-pack disputes with a single sentence. My Luna aura is the kind that other she-wolves whisper about in reverent, slightly envious tones.

And tonight, I was standing in the Silverfang Pack's kitchen at six in the morning, covered in flour, asking an Omega named Bess whether dark chocolate ganache needed to chill for one hour or two.

'Two, Miss Howell,' Bess said quietly, not quite meeting my eyes. She knew who I was. They all did. But I had suppressed my aura so thoroughly over the past months that I barely registered as anything more than a well-dressed visitor in their territory. That was intentional. Riley didn't like it when I reminded people of what I was.

So I didn't.

I pressed the ganache into the refrigerator and told myself this was love. This was what it looked like when it was real—not the political theater of Moonveil ceremonies, not the careful choreography of Luna duties. This was flour on my hands and a cake I had made from scratch for a man who had never once asked me to, because he was my mate, and tomorrow the Silverfang Pack was celebrating his promotion to Beta, and I wanted him to smile at me the way I had decided he was capable of smiling.

I had been deciding that for a long time.

The celebration was held at dusk, the whole pack gathered in the clearing behind the pack house. Torches, laughter, the warm smell of pine and woodsmoke. Riley stood at the center of it all, and he looked—for a moment, just a moment—like the man I had convinced myself lived underneath the silence and the cold. Tall, contained, his new Beta aura sitting on his shoulders like something he had been born to carry.

He had been born to carry it. I had just been the one to build the ladder.

I carried the cake out myself. I hadn't let anyone else touch it.

The pack quieted as I crossed the clearing. I could feel their eyes—some curious, some amused in the way that had become familiar to me, the particular amusement of watching someone embarrass themselves in slow motion. I had heard what they said about me. The Crown Luna chasing a Delta. Throwing herself at a wolf who didn't want her. Pathetic.

I kept my chin up. I kept walking.

'Riley.' I said his name the way I always said it—carefully, leaving room for him to fill the space with something warm. 'Congratulations on Beta.'

He looked at the cake. Then he looked at me.

The platter hit the dirt before I understood what had happened.

The sound was sharp and final. Dark chocolate and cream and four hours of my hands scattered across the ground, and the pack's laughter rose like smoke, and Riley's