The Alpha's Forbidden Vow novel Chapter 13

POV: Selene

The welcome dinner for Isabella was the most exquisite torture I had ever endured.

I was seated at the far end of the long, polished mahogany table, as far from the seat of power as one could get.

I was an afterthought, a ghost at the feast.

Which was, I suppose, a small mercy.

It allowed me to observe the spectacle without having to participate in it.

Isabella sat to Zane’s right, the position of the future Luna.

She was radiant, her laughter like the chiming of tiny bells, her every movement graceful and deliberate.

She was playing her part to perfection.

And Zane… Zane was playing his.

He was a cool, distant king, but he allowed her into his space in a way he had never allowed anyone.

Especially not me.

She would lean in to whisper something in his ear, her lips brushing against his skin.

He did not flinch.

She placed her hand on his forearm as she laughed at a story Roman told.

He did not pull away.

She took the choicest piece of roasted lamb from the platter and placed it on his plate with a proprietary air.

He ate it without comment.

To anyone else, he might have seemed impassive, even cold.

But I knew him.

I had spent a decade studying his every micro-expression, his every shift in posture.

This was not the cruel, contemptuous indifference he showed me.

This was a quiet, tacit acceptance.

This was his consent.

He was allowing this. He was accepting her as his partner, his queen.

My food tasted like ash in my mouth.

My hand slipped down to my lap, my fingers spreading protectively over my still-flat stomach.

This was the man whose child I carried.

A man who was already building a family with someone else.

I thought of my baby growing up in this house.

An outcast. A dirty secret.

Always watching through the glass as their father built a life with his ‘real’ family.

Always living in the shadow of the perfect, pure-blooded children he would have with his perfect Luna.

No.

I would not do that to my child.

I would rather raise them in a shack in the middle of nowhere than subject them to a lifetime of being second-best, of being nothing.

The clinking of silverware and the murmur of conversation faded into a dull roar.

My decision, once a product of fear, now solidified into a diamond-hard certainty, forged in the fires of a broken heart.