Chapter 113 She's Going To Be The Future Luna Of This Pack
ADRIANA
Leo had made a friend.
I kept turning that over in my mind as I watched him get ready to leave, moving quickly, actually looking forward to something, none of the reluctance that usually came with going anywhere.
The other boy was someone he’d met during his hospital stay. They’d found each other across a ward and apparently decided immediately that they were going to be important to each other. I hadn’t pushed for details. I’d just stood in the doorway and watched him go and felt something warm settle in my chest that I hadn’t been expecting.
With the house quiet and no one needing anything from me, I decided to go out.
It had been a long time since I’d walked the grounds alone. Hazel was usually beside me, or Elijah was nearby, or there was some arrangement that meant I wasn’t on my own. Today I couldn’t locate Hazel and Elijah was in a meeting, so I simply walked out. The quiet took some getting used to and then it didn’t, it just became pleasant.
I was near the gate when I saw him.
I slowed down. I looked more carefully. The build was right, the posture was right, and he was wearing a guard’s uniform, which was wrong in every way I could think of because there was absolutely no version of events in which Elijah would have allowed that.
“Luke?”
He turned and his whole face changed when he saw me. He looked pleased.
“Adriana. Hey.” He grinned.
I looked at the uniform again. Then at his face. Then at the uniform.
“What are you doing here?”
“Working,” he said simply.
“I mean what are you actually doing here? Be serious.”
“I am being serious. I came to the Alpha’s house, I asked for a job, and he gave me one.” He spread his hands slightly. “I’m a guard now, apparently.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. Not because it was funny exactly, but because there was something so completely absurd about it. Elijah, who had made his feelings about Luke entirely clear on more than one occasion, sitting across a desk from him and handing him employment like that was a natural progression of events.
I decided to let it go for now. There was clearly something I didn’t understand about the reasoning and I wasn’t going to figure it out standing at the gate.
“Alright then. Welcome to the pack house. How’s the work treating you?”
He tilted his head. “It’s more involved than I expected. And the Beta looks at me like she’s planning something every time she sees me, so that’s enjoyable. But overall I’m managing.”
I had almost forgotten about Hazel’s dislike for him. It had been present from the very first day I brought him anywhere near her. I still didn’t fully understand the source of it. I filed it away.
“It’ll even out,” I said. “Have a good shift.”
I continued into town.
The grounds were beautiful. I felt good being out in it. Light in a way I hadn’t felt in days.
The stares started almost immediately.
I had known they would. Nearly five months inside this pack and I was still the unfamiliar face, still the one people looked at twice and then away from, still the subject of expressions that ranged from guarded to openly unwelcoming. I kept my posture easy and my pace steady. I had learned how to move through that kind of attention without letting it find a way in.
The man at the water stall was harder to move through.
I called to him once. No response. I called again. Nothing. I walked around to the side where he could see me clearly, where there was no way he hadn’t registered my presence, and I watched him look directly at my face and turn away. Within moments, someone else approached from behind me and he was already reaching for what they needed before they’d finished asking.
I stood there.
I understood it. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. I was an outsider in a pack that had not asked for me and had not been given much reason to welcome me. Understanding it didn’t make it feel better. It just made it more manageable.
I found water somewhere else, from a woman who handed it to me without drama, and I started back. The ease I’d felt earlier had mostly gone. I walked and thought about what it would actually take to become someone this pack could accept. I couldn’t push. Pushing would make it worse. But things couldn’t simply stay like this either, not if Elijah and I were genuinely moving toward each other, not if this was supposed to become home.
Luke gave me a small nod as I came back through the gate. I returned it.
Elijah was in the main hall, coming out of his office with a group of men behind him. He saw me across the hall and I was already quietly calculating a route around all of them when he spoke.
“Gentlemen.” His voice was easy, completely deliberate. “I’d like you to meet Adriana. My mate and the future Luna of this pack.”
Everything went still.
I felt it in my own body first, the surprise, the immediate wish that he had given me even a moment’s warning, the instinctive awareness of every eye in the hall turning toward me at once. The men behind him stilled too. I watched the understanding travel across their faces and settle into something that wasn’t quite displeasure and wasn’t quite shock but sat somewhere uncomfortable between the two.
“But Alpha, she isn’t one of us.”
I had heard this sentence in various forms so many times that it had lost most of its ability to land. It was just the sentence. The one that followed me everywhere in this pack, the one that explained every turned back and every cold look. I knew it was coming in some form every time I entered a new room.
It didn’t land on Elijah the same way.
“Is she a wolf?” His tone was even. Precise. “She is. So I want you to explain to me what the actual difference is.”
They shrank back, and I understood that these were men from smaller packs. The deference was too physical to be anything else.
“Our apologies, Alpha. We were caught off guard. We meant no disrespect.”
“You didn’t disrespect me.”
The silence stretched longer than was comfortable. I saw the anger moving underneath their faces and I watched them hold it down and point their eyes at me.
“Please, really.” I kept my voice gentle. “It’s fine. It’s a reasonable reaction—”
“It isn’t,” Elijah said quietly. “Apologize to her.”
“Our deepest apologies.”
I smiled at them. It felt like the wrong shape on my face.
They left. The hall was quiet again. I stood where I was and looked at Elijah, and he looked back at me with an expression that didn’t ask for anything. He just looked at me steadily, like he had said the thing he meant and was comfortable having said it.
“You’re going to be Luna of this pack,” he said. “I won’t have anyone speak to you that way. Not while I’m standing there.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I just stood in the quiet of the hall and looked at him and thought that I genuinely did not know, most of the time, what to do with who he was.