Luna POV
Caden told me about the dinner the same way he told me most things.
Briefly. Directly. With exactly as many words as necessary and not one more.
"Pack dinner tonight. Small group. You should come."
I looked up from my laptop. "Should I or do I have to?"
A pause. "Should."
"Is that Alpha for have to?"
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Almost. "Seven o'clock. Dress however you want."
Then he walked away.
I stared at the empty doorway and told myself the almost-smile meant nothing.
I spent more time than I wanted to admit getting ready.
Not for him. Not for any specific person. Just because I was going to walk into a room full of wolves who already had opinions about me, and I was not going to give them anything easy to pick apart. I wore something simple, dark, fitted, mine, and I put my shoulders back and looked at myself in the mirror and said out loud, "You are Marcus Reyes's daughter, and you do not shrink."
It helped. A little.
The dining room was already half full when I came downstairs. Round table, warm light, eight or nine people talking in the easy overlapping way of people who had known each other a long time. The sound hit me like something physical, full and alive, and completely unlike the silence I had been living in for the past week.
I stopped in the doorway.
I did not know a single person in that room.
"Luna."
I turned. Eli was right there, appearing out of nowhere the way he always seemed to, with a glass of something in each hand and a grin that made the tension in my shoulders drop about three inches.
"You look like you're about to walk into a courtroom," he said.
"I feel like I'm about to walk into a courtroom."
He handed me one of the glasses. "It's just dinner. Half these people are boring, and the other half are nosy, but none of them bite." He paused. "Hard."
I laughed. Actually laughed. It surprised me; it felt strange in my chest, like a muscle that had not been used in days, which it had not.
"Come on," Eli said. "I'll introduce you to the ones worth knowing."
He was not wrong about boring.
The pack's head of security was nice but talked exclusively about perimeter fence upgrades. The woman who ran the pack finances asked me three polite questions and then looked at her phone. A couple about my age smiled and said hello, and then went back to their own conversation.
But Eli stayed close and kept things light, and for the first twenty minutes, I almost felt normal. Just a person at a dinner table. Just someone eating bread and listening to easy conversation.
Caden was at the head of the table.
I sat near the middle, which was deliberate, which meant I had to work to not look at him, which I was mostly managing except for the moments when his voice came through the general noise low and clear and carrying the way voices do when a room is used to listening for them.
I was not listening for it.
I just happened to notice when it was there.
He had not looked at me since I sat down. Or if he had, he had done it when I was looking somewhere else. He was talking to the security man about something I could not hear, and his face was in full Alpha mode, present, attentive, completely composed.
Across the table, the woman next to him was talking and laughing and leaning in slightly, and I noticed without meaning to that she was beautiful in the specific, deliberate way of someone who worked at it.
Then the dining room door opened.
She walked in like she owned not just the room but everything in it.
Tall. Polished. The kind of confidence that announces itself before you say a word. Her eyes moved across the table in one smooth sweep, cataloguing, assessing, and then landed on me and stopped.
Caden looked up.
"Sienna." His voice was even. "You are late."
"Fashionably," she said, and smiled at him with the ease of someone who had smiled at him like that many times before.
She moved around the table, and her hand found his arm, not grabbing, not dramatic, just landing there with the casual ownership of someone who believed the territory was already theirs. She bent slightly to say something close to his ear, and I looked at my plate and focused very hard on the food in front of me.
It was fine. It was completely fine. Caden Wolfe's personal life was none of my business.
Then Sienna looked across the table at me.
She looked me up and down once. It took about two seconds. It was the most efficient dismissal I had ever received.
"You must be Luna," she said. Sweet voice. Light tone. Eyes like ice. "Marcus's daughter."
"That's me," I said.
She tilted her head slightly. "It's so generous of Caden to take you in." A small pause, just long enough. "Especially given everything you've been through. Losing your father. Having nowhere to go." Another pause. "It must be such a comfort."
The table had gone slightly quieter.
Not silent. Not obviously. Just the way rooms do when people are listening while pretending not to.
I smiled.
I made a good smile. Warm and easy and giving absolutely nothing away.
"It is," I said simply.
Sienna waited a beat, like she expected more. When she did not get it, her smile stayed exactly the same, which was somehow more unsettling than if it had changed.
She sat down, and the table noise came back up.
Under the table, out of sight, my hands were shaking.
I pressed them flat against my thighs and breathed through my nose and kept my face smooth and easy and completely fine.
Orphan. The word was sitting in my chest like a splinter. She had not used it, but she had meant it. She had nowhere to go, having to be taken in, and the worst part was not that she had said it. The worst part was that it landed in the exact spot where I was already bruised.
I had nowhere to go. My father was dead, and I was sitting in a stranger's house because a piece of paper said I had to be, and the only person in this room I knew was a man who looked through me more than at me.
I was fine. I was absolutely fine.
I took a very careful sip of my drink.
From the head of the table, I felt, without looking up, Caden's gaze.
I did not look at him.
I talked to Eli instead, who smoothly redirected the table conversation to something that required my input, which I was grateful for in a way I could not express out loud. He was good at that at filling space before it became uncomfortable, at making people feel included without making a production of it.
Sienna talked to Caden for most of the meal. He answered in short sentences.
I did not watch them.
I was very busy not watching them.
Dinner ended slowly, people drifting away from the table in ones and twos. I helped carry plates toward the kitchen because I needed something to do with my hands and because my father raised me to help clean up, and old habits were apparently indestructible.
I was setting things on the counter when I heard Sienna's voice in the hallway, bright and carrying, aimed at Caden. I did not hear his response. I did not try to.
I just stood at the kitchen counter and waited until I heard her heels on the floor moving away.
"Hey."
I turned. Eli was leaning in the kitchen doorway.
"You did great," he said.
"I didn't do anything."
"That's exactly why you did great." He came in and leaned against the counter beside me, easy and unbothered. "Sienna does that to everyone when they're new. Finds the soft spot and presses it just hard enough that she can say it was nothing if anyone calls her out."
"She's very good at it," I said.
"She's had practice." He paused. "Don't let her get in your head. She is not what she is trying to make you think she is."
I looked at him. "And what is she trying to make me think she is?"
Eli was quiet for a moment. Then: "A permanent fixture." He said it carefully. Like someone choosing exact words. "She is not."
I did not ask what that meant. I was not sure I was ready for the answer.
"I should go up," I said.
"Luna." He waited until I looked at him. His voice was still easy, but his eyes were serious. "Don't let Sienna get in your head. And don't let my brother's cold face fool you."
I kept my expression neutral. "I'm not fooled by anything."
Eli smiled slightly, knowing and annoyingly perceptive. "He watched the door for you all evening," he said quietly. "Every time someone came in, every time someone moved. Every single time." He paused. "He doesn't do that."
I did not say anything.
"Just thought you should know," Eli said, and pushed off the counter and walked out, leaving me alone in the kitchen with the silence and the counter and the feeling of a splinter being replaced by something else entirely.
Something warmer.
Something I absolutely could not afford.
I pressed my palms flat on the counter and stared at the wall and thought about silver-eyed women in photographs and dead fathers and legal documents and wolves who made promises and men who watched doors.
Then I turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs.
Luna passes Caden in the upstairs hallway on the way to her room. They both stop. The hallway is narrow, and it is late, and the house is completely quiet. He looks at her for a moment, really looks, not the carefully managed way he usually does, and then says, very quietly, "She was wrong. About you having nowhere to go." Luna's breath catches. Before she can answer, he adds, "This is your home for as long as you need it." He walks past. Luna stands in the hallway with her heart doing something catastrophic and hears, very faintly from behind his closed door, something that sounds like a fist hitting a wall. Once. Hard. Like a man arguing with himself.