Chapter 13 The Luna’s Empty Chair
Bella’s POV
I hadn’t been looking for anything.
I was just sitting on my bed that evening, scrolling through my phone the way you do when you’re tired but not quite ready to sleep — when a notification came through.
A new message. Unknown contact.
I opened it.
Bella? It’s Logan. I’ve been trying to reach you. I got this number from Rita.
I stared at the screen for a moment.
Then I scrolled up. The message wasn’t new — sent three days ago. And not to me, not originally. I frowned and followed the thread properly this time, zooming in on the details.
Same words. Same timing. Same message — but it had started somewhere else before landing here.
Rita had given Logan a contact. Just not mine.
Kattie’s.
I sat very still.
So Logan had tried to reach me. Just not through me. And somehow that message had ended up in my inbox, sitting there like it had always belonged.
A small laugh slipped out before I could stop it.
Oh that's tidy.
Not confusion. Clarity — the specific kind that arrives right before everything starts to look deliberate.
Kattie hadn’t panicked when the pup reacted to me. Hadn’t flinched during the tour. Hadn’t thrown anything together in a hurry.
She had simply taken what fell into her lap and arranged it. Neatly.
I looked at Logan’s message one more time, then locked my phone.
I didn’t reply. There was nothing to say to him — and nothing that would undo what had already been set in motion.
\-----
The formal dinner was announced the next morning.
Mira told me with the careful tone of someone unsure how to deliver information. Full pack attendance. Elder table. The Alpha presiding.
“What do I wear?” I asked.
She helped me find something — a deep green dress, fitted and simple. Nothing that tried too hard. I sat still while she pinned my hair back and decided that composure was the plan for the evening. Composure and the ability to eat without looking like anything was wrong.
I had done harder things than a dinner.
Probably.
\-----
The hall was full by the time I came down.
Long tables, warm firelight, the low hum of a room full of people who knew each other well. The kind of noise with texture to it — comfortable, settled. Everyone exactly where they belonged.
I scanned the head table.
Rhys was already seated. Back straight, composed, the complete picture of an Alpha presiding over his pack. He looked up when I entered — just for a second — and looked away again.
And beside him, in the chair at his right hand, was Kattie.
Not just beside him. In the chair. The one set slightly apart, carved differently, meant for someone specific.
The Luna’s chair.
She was already talking to him, laughing at something, her hand resting on the table close enough to his that the gap barely existed. She looked completely at home. Like she’d sat there a hundred times before.
Which she probably had.
Something in my chest tightened — quick, sharp, gone before it could settle into anything I had to deal with.
I found my seat.
Far down the table. Not the very end — that would’ve been too obvious, even for this — but far enough that the message was clear. The two pack members on either side of me offered polite nods. The kind from people who’d been told to be civil and were doing exactly that and nothing more.
An elder two seats down caught my eye when I sat. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the head table, then at me, then went back to his food.
His silence had a shape to it.
Yes, it said. I see it too.
I unfolded my napkin, put it in my lap, and picked up my fork.
The food was good. Obviously. It was always good here, which remained quietly infuriating. Hard to maintain the right emotional distance from a place that kept feeding you this well.
I ate and I watched, because watching was what I did when I had no better options.
Kattie leaned close and said something low to Rhys. He didn’t pull away — didn’t lean in either, that controlled stillness fully in place — but he didn’t put distance between them. Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The closest thing I’d seen from him in public.
The tight thing in my chest did something I decided not to examine.
You don’t care, I told myself firmly. You barely know him. You’ve had maybe forty words of actual conversation with him.
True. Didn’t help.
I looked back at my plate.
Here was the thing about watching someone from a distance — you only ever got part of the picture. I knew that better than most. I’d spent enough of my life being half-seen, turned into a version of myself that wasn’t quite mine.
But I also knew what it looked like when a woman had decided something belonged to her.
Kattie had decided. A long time ago, probably. Long before I existed in this equation.
I ate, kept my face easy, said the right things when the people beside me required it. One of them — broad-shouldered, introduced himself as Cael — turned out to be decent company. He asked about the city with actual curiosity. No detectable agenda.
We talked for a few minutes about food, human versus pack, and he made a deeply troubled face when I described the bakery near my old street.
“Humans eat sweet things in the morning?” he said, like I’d told him something mildly alarming.
“Every morning,” I said. “Happily.”
He looked genuinely disturbed.
It was the most entertained I’d been all evening, which counted for something.
\-----
Somewhere in the middle of dinner, Cael said something that surprised a real laugh out of me. The kind you can’t manufacture on purpose.
I glanced up at the wrong moment.
Rhys was looking at me.
Just for a second — his gaze had drifted down the table and caught me mid-laugh, turned toward Cael. His expression didn’t change. But something behind it did. A small, almost invisible shift. Like something that had been slightly open quietly wasn’t anymore.
He looked away.
I looked back at Cael.
We are both clearly doing great, I thought, and took another bite.
\-----
The dinner wound down slowly. People rose in groups, conversations loosening, the hall relaxing into something easier.
I stood, smoothed the front of my dress, and headed for the side door.
“Bella.”
I turned.
A man fell into step beside me — easy, unhurried, like he’d been heading the same direction anyway. I’d noticed him at the edges of things since I arrived. Dark hair, a face that knew exactly how to arrange itself. He moved with the loose confidence of someone used to being liked.
And believed.
“Ronan,” he said, offering it helpfully. “Rhys’s brother. His Beta.”
“I know who you are,” I said.
He smiled — full, warm, the kind that made you want to smile back before you’d decided to. I didn’t.
“I just wanted to say,” he started, voice dropping as we reached the corridor, “I think you’ve handled everything remarkably well. All of this.” A sideways glance. “It can’t have been easy.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Of course.” He nodded like he’d expected exactly that answer. “I just — I heard this wasn’t your choice. That you had a life before. Plans.” A small pause. “It’s a lot to give up.”
I kept walking.
“Is there a point coming?” I asked.
He laughed. Short, genuine-sounding.
“I could have you back in the city within a week,” he said. “Quietly. Cleanly. No disruption to the alliance — on paper.” A slight tilt of his head. “You wouldn’t have to stay somewhere you don’t want to be.”
I stopped.
I turned and looked at him properly for the first time.
His expression was perfectly warm. Open. The face of someone doing a kind thing for no reason but kindness itself.
But his eyes were doing something else. Still. Watchful. Flat in a way the smile wasn’t — already waiting for an answer he’d probably already prepared for.
I held the look a beat longer than he expected.
“That’s very generous,” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“I’ll think about it.”
His smile widened — satisfied, smooth.
I turned and kept walking. Pace easy, shoulders relaxed, like the conversation had meant very little.
But the back of my neck was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the corridor.
Ronan wasn’t offering me a way out of kindness. That much was clear.
The only question was what was waiting on the other side of that door — and whether he already thought I was desperate enough to walk through it without looking first.