Fated: The Alpha's Unwanted Luna

Chapter 184: The Crazy husband at her doorstep_Part 2

Across the room, Laila had been watching Sebastian from a distance since he walked away from her, looking for the right moment to make her way back over to him again. She was already moving in his direction, intending to sit herself beside him since his useless Luna wouldn’t be coming, when she spotted Javier near the far corner of the hall, leaning in with that charming smile of his, working hard to make a good impression on one of the female guests.

Laila had heard whispers that he was looking for another wife, as his current wife was sick and could not perform the duties of a mate, nor could she bear him a child. He was using this ceremony, which had brought many important she-wolves to the pack building, as an opportunity to pick another wife.

However, no matter how he was planning to marry another woman, Laila was aware that he would not like it if his insane wife was with his rival’s wife.

Laila changed directions and went to Javier instead.

She touched his arm lightly to pull his attention from the she-wolf in front of him and leaned in close enough that only he could hear.

"Just thought you should know, your wife came out of your room this morning. I found her in a bad state outside the elevator, throwing up all over the ground." She said casually. "I tried to help her but the Luna dismissed me and took her away. If I am not wrong, that is the reason she didn’t make it to the breakfast."

Something immediately shifted on Javier’s face. The smile stayed exactly where it was but the warmth behind it disappeared entirely. His eyes moved to Laila. "Are you sure it is my Sofia you saw?" He asked, because it was impossible for that little fool to have come out, he had made certain of it. What was she doing outside their room?

"Mm." Laila replied, already pulling back with the easy expression of someone who had simply passed along a piece of information they had no personal stake in.

Javier turned back to the she-wolf in front of him with a pleasant smile, excused himself smoothly, and walked out of the hall at a pace that looked perfectly casual to everyone who saw him go.

---

In Viola’s penthouse, she was tucking Sofia into the guest bedroom bed to rest after finally coaxing the she-wolf into bathing, a process during which it had been Viola herself doing the washing, watching the grime of what looked like weeks accumulate and gather darkly at the bottom of the tub.

It had taken more attempts than she could count to finally part the curtain of Sofia’s hair and reveal the face hidden behind it, and when she did, Viola had gone completely still for a moment.

Though thin and a little gaunt, Sofia was a strikingly beautiful woman, with eyes that shifted between blue and green depending on how the light hit them. But she was so frightened, or perhaps so deeply conditioned to smallness, that she couldn’t seem to hold her gaze in one place for more than a second at a time.

It had taken washing her hair more than four times before the water finally ran clean. Her body was covered in scars, old ones and new ones layered over each other, and Viola had stood there looking at them with a pity that curdled quickly into anger at the husband responsible for every single one of them.

She couldn’t help the thought that crept in after, whether Sebastian would ever treat her the same way if one day her pheromones drew men to her the way it had last night. After all, she was cursed with the strongest pheromone of any she-wolf alive, a scent so potent that it turned an entire building of men restless the moment she failed to conceal it. No she-wolf in this world carried anything close to what she had.

But then she caught herself and pulled the thought back before it could settle. Sebastian didn’t take her the way a mate and husband takes his woman, if she was being honest with herself, what they had was closer to friends with benefits than anything else. A temporary arrangement that would last only until he found the one he had told her about.

The prophesied one. The one meant to break his curse. That thought twisted something in her heart just as sharply as it had the very first time he had said those words to her, and she still hadn’t found a way to stop it from doing that.

Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to believe Sebastian would ever behave like his cousin. He had been more than kind to her, kinder, in fact, than Evan had ever been in all the years she had given him.

He had taken care of her during her menstrual pains without being asked and cooked for her without expecting anything in return. And even when he had first refused to accept her into his pack, he had never once raised a hand to hurt her physically. In fact he had looked murderous when Evan beat her.

No. She knew, regardless of anything else between them, that Sebastian would never hit her or treat her the way Javier had treated Sofia for a crime that was never her fault. She could swear to that with certainty. And just as that thought settled over her, her mind wandered traitorously to the memory of his hands on her hips, rolling them deliberately against his hardness last night, and she felt her lower abdomen pulse from nothing more than the thought, and a deep flush of embarrassment settled over her face as she finished tucking Sofia into the bed.

Viola’s brows drew together in quiet confusion. She didn’t understand how the mere thought of him could make her body react like that, especially now that his temporary mark had faded and Evan’s had resurfaced. It was while she had been bathing Sofia that she had felt the shift, the precise moment Sebastian’s mark disappeared and Evan’s crawled back to the surface of her skin like it had been waiting patiently the whole time.

But even Evan’s mark didn’t seem to stop her mind from wandering back to Sebastian’s intimacy with her the night before, and the pain that usually came with such thoughts wasn’t hitting as hard as it had before. She turned that over quietly, not sure what to make of it.

She had also been turning over what Sofia had said about seeing Sebastian drag away Evangeline’s body. She didn’t know what to do with it. Sebastian hadn’t denied killing his wives, he had told her that himself, but he hadn’t told her the how of it, or whether the curse was what drove him to it rather than his own will. Would she have ended up on that list too, had he marked her?

And then there was the breakfast she had missed, how was she even going to make it up to their guests? On one hand she felt that inexplicable relief she still couldn’t fully explain to herself, and on the other hand the worry was quietly eating at her, because she knew that as Luna, her responsibility to stand beside her Alpha and maintain the good graces of the important people who supported their pack was not something she could treat lightly. That was supposed to come first. Always.

Viola was still somewhere inside that thought when Sofia’s small voice broke through it.

"I should go back to my room. Mi vida won’t be happy that I came out. He will beat me..." She said, already trying to push herself up from the bed.

Though Sofia couldn’t recall the last time she had worn anything this clean and soft against her skin, or been cared for by anyone in the way this woman had cared for her this morning, she didn’t want to bring her husband’s wrath down on someone who had shown her nothing but kindness.

It was best she leave now and return to finish the food he had so lovingly fed her, the food that had wolfsbane in it. She had felt the burning of it working through her and in her panic had scrambled out of the room seeking help, only to bump into Laila in the hallway and throw up right there in front of her.

But Viola pressed her gently but firmly back down and pulled the blanket back up over her.

"You need to rest. Don’t worry, I will deal with your husband. I will have some words with him." She assured her, but Sofia shook her head frantically.

"No. Don’t say anything to him. Mi vida is not a calm person, he gets angry very quickly and he will hurt you too. Please just let me go back to our room before he comes looking for me, Luna. I am sorry for imposing on you but I really should leave." Sofia muttered, frightened and quietly scolding herself for stepping out of that room in the first place and not finishing the food.

Not that she could have helped it, the burning of the wolfsbane had been immediate and impossible to push through. But if she didn’t leave and Javier found out she was here, there would be trouble.