The Alpha Regrets; He wants his Luna back.

Lara's POV

"Lucien, mark me."

I moaned the words like a prayer I had been holding back for five years, helpless and wanting as we were both soaked from the shower. I had woken up from sleep and come to him in my nightwear - the thin kind that could be pulled off with one hand - and somehow we had ended up here, under the running water, his body warm against mine while the steam curled around us both.

The water ran down my skin in sheets. And then there was the other kind of wet that had nothing to do with the shower. 'Wet squared,' you could call it. The kind that made thinking straight feel like a joke.

I was already turned on beyond any point of return. My back was pressed against him, one hand crossed behind me to grip the back of his head and my fingers curled into his damp hair as I tilted my neck to the side. It was more like an open invitation or better still, a silent plea.

"Please." My voice dropped lower. "Mark me and make me yours. Truly yours."

Five years of marriage and he still hadn't done it. Five years of being called his Luna in every room that mattered, introduced at every clan function, seated at his right side at every table - and yet no mark. Nothing permanent that could feel real and part of him. I was the Luna of the most powerful Alpha in the territory, and that much was true. But it was also the biggest open secret in the entire clan. Because as much as the title was mine by name, I knew exactly what I really was to him. Which was something convenient. Something to use and put down whenever it suited him to fill the position.

I felt him behind me. I mean, all of him. And there was absolutely no question about what his body wanted, even when his mouth would not say it. He was hard against me, and the heat of that alone was enough to make my knees unreliable. My mind had already jumped ahead - to the bed after this, to the possibility of a pub forming from a moment like this. That had always been the quiet dream underneath all the other dreams. A pub, just something that belonged to both of us that he couldn't deny. You know, something he would have to look at and finally see me through.

His breath was warm against the back of my neck and his hands were on my waist. Everything in me was leaning into the moment, into him, into the hope I had been foolish enough to keep alive all these years.

And then abruptly he stopped.

It wasn't gradual as it all felt like a switch in the way his hands left my waist, while his body pulled back. The warmth disappeared like it had never existed, and I felt it the way you feel a door slamming in your face even when you knew, somewhere deep down, that it had never been fully open to begin with.

I turned around.

He had already moved to the shower knob, twisting it to the right and so, the water cut off.

The silence that replaced it was loud in a way that pressed against my ears. He reached for a towel from the hanger without looking at me, wrapped it around his waist, and by the time he turned back his face was already that straight face. The same one I had spent five years trying to soften and had failed at every single time without exception.

I stood there dripping. Still in the thin nightwear now plastered completely to my skin. Still wanting as I was still embarrassingly and exhaustingly hopeful.

"I warned you." His voice was flat and certain as if he was stating something as obvious as the weather. "I will never mark you. Don't even think about it."

The words weren't new. Even though I wish I could say they hit differently this time and that I had somehow built up a wall thick enough by now to keep them out. But the thing about words you have heard before is that your body already knows exactly how to hurt from them before your brain even has time to catch up.

I swallowed and tried to keep my voice steady. You know, I tried to sound like a woman and not like the seven-year-old girl who had first walked through these clan gates with nothing but a small bag and wide, frightened eyes. "We have been married for five years." I reached up and touched his jaw gently, the way I always did when I was trying to reach him. "I am your luna."

He looked down at my hand like it was something that had landed on him by accident.

Then he grabbed my wrist and shoved it away real hard. It was a deliberate shove, with enough force behind it that I lost my balance completely and went down to the bathroom floor, catching myself on my palms as the cold tile bit into my skin.

For a second I just stayed there with my palm flat on the floor, cheek angled down, and the wet fabric of my nightwear twisted around me. There was a part of me that wanted to stay exactly in that position and not get up. Not because I couldn't, but because getting up meant facing him again, and I was running very low on whatever it was that I had been using to do that for five years.

"So what?" He didn't raise his voice. He never needed that to pass those saucy words. "You have made me sick of you ever since you schemed with that wolf shaman 5 years ago and used my parents to trap me in this marriage."

He pulled the towel tighter around his waist and looked down at me the way you look at something you have already decided is below you.

I pressed my palm to the floor and pushed myself up slowly, sitting upright. My brown hair was dripping onto my shoulders. At this point, my hands were shaking and I hated them for it.

How? How did we go from almost cloud nine to this in the space of 60 seconds. I could still feel the ghost of his hands on my waist. I could still feel what his body had wanted - and it had wanted me. And yet here we were, on opposite sides of a bathroom that suddenly felt like the size of a stadium, the steam was still hanging in the air between us like it hadn't gotten the memo yet.

This was not new, and I reminded myself of that every time without missing out on that. But knowing something was old didn't make it stop cutting. If anything, familiarity made it worse, because it always came with the extra weight of every previous time stacked on top. Every cold look. Every dismissal in front of the clan. Every night I reached for him and found nothing. Every single morning, I had woken up and quietly talked myself into trying again.

And so, I hoped for today again that I had let myself believe that something would be different. That the man who had once genuinely cared about me, without making a single thing about it was still in there somewhere, buried deep under all that pride and bitterness, and that tonight he might finally come to the surface.

Now it all felt like that hope was going to be the end of me one day.

"Lucien, I didn't..." The words came out broken as I couldn't help stuttering and I hated that too. "I never schemed you into this. I never planned any of this, I..."

He was already moving toward the door.

"Wait." I pushed myself to sit up fully and ignored the sting in my palms. "What if we had a baby? Would you look at me differently? Even a little?"

I don't know why I asked it. Maybe because I had nothing left to throw at the wall. Maybe because some stubborn, unreasonable part of me was still hunting for the one sentence that would crack him open, and a baby felt like the last card left in my hand.

Then he stopped and for one terrible, breathless second I thought it had worked.

He turned around slowly. Walked back toward me. And instead of the softness I had been reaching for, he crouched down right in front of where I was sitting on the floor. His hand came out and gripped my jaw - not gently - his fingers pressing in at both sides, tilting my face up until I had no choice but to look directly at him.

"We will never have children." Each word came out separate and deliberate, nailed down one at a time. "And I will never let you carry my child."

His eyes did not waver and his jaw was tight. He meant every single syllable and he wanted me to feel the full weight of all of them. The grip on my jaw was firm enough that I could feel my teeth pressing together, firm enough that there would probably be a mark any moment from now. He held my gaze just long enough to make sure I understood he was not bluffing and never had been.

Then he let go as he pushed my face away as he stood. I fell back against the floor completely this time, the last of whatever composure I had been holding onto going with me, landing hard on the cold tile with zero grace and zero fight left in my body.

I heard his footsteps cross the bathroom. I heard the door open and also heard it close.

And then I just lay there for a while, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the slow drip from the shower head that hadn't fully stopped.

*****

I don't know how long I stayed down on that floor.

Maybe long enough for the tile to stop feeling cold and start feeling like just another surface. Or let's say, long enough for the shaking in my hands to slow down to something I could manage without falling apart. I pulled my knees up to my chest and sat there, and I let the thoughts come, because there was no point trying to hold them back anymore.

I never tricked him into this marriage.

The wolf shaman had spoken the truth. The moon goddess had chosen this - had chosen both of us.

I hadn't bribed anyone. I hadn't planned a single thing or schemed any of these. I had just been a girl who loved a boy that the universe decided was supposed to be hers, and somehow that simple, honest thing had become the crime he sentenced me for every single day we had lived under the same roof.

But Lucien never believed me. He had made up his mind about who I was long before I could offer any evidence otherwise, and five years of living beside him had not shifted that verdict even slightly. To him I was the schemer. The trap and the worthless omega who had used a prophecy as a ladder to climb above her station.

Never just Lara.

My phone buzzed on the edge of the sink where I had set it before the shower.

I stared at it for a moment before getting up. Although my legs were stiff, I crossed the bathroom floor, picked the phone up, and looked at the screen.

That was Dr. Asher....The clan's doctor.

I accepted the call and pressed it to my ear. "Hello, Dr Asher."

"Yeah! Luna Lara." His voice was careful and measured...a typical voice of a man choosing his words before saying them. "Your results suspect you may be pregnant. Come to the hospital as soon as possible."

The line went dead before I could respond.

I stood there with the phone still pressed against my ear for a few seconds after he had already hung up, staring at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Those damp hair and tired eyes. Also the faint red marks along my jaw from where Lucien's fingers had pressed.

"Pregnant?"

I said it out loud to the empty room. To nobody in particular though, but to my own reflection.

The word sat strange in my chest - not quite joy and not quite fear either, but something caught right between the two that I didn't have a clean name for. This was the thing I had quietly been wishing for. And at the same time, it was the very thing Lucien had told me, not ten minutes ago, with his hand on my jaw and steel in his voice, that he would never allow it.

Would it change anything? Would this finally reach the part of him that five years of trying had never managed to touch?

Or would it make everything so much worse?

I stared at my reflection a moment longer. Then I set the phone down.

Whatever Lucien felt about this was his business to figure out. But this - this was good news to me. And the earlier I decided to see it that way, the better.

Regardless of what came next.

Lara's POV

I didn't waste a single second after that call.

I threw on the first decent outfit I could find, grabbed my bag, and was out the door before the thought of breakfast even crossed my mind. Whatever was in that hospital report wasn't something I was going to sit at home and stare at the ceiling over. I needed to hear it properly. From Dr. Asher's mouth, in his office, with the actual paperwork in my hands. That was the only way any of it was going to feel real to me.

So that was exactly where I went.

The hospital corridors were already busy by the time I arrived - the usual morning movement of clan members coming and going, nurses cutting from one wing to the next with their arms full. I kept my head down and walked straight to Dr. Asher's office, knocked once, and let myself in when he called out.

I sat down across from his desk. Folded my hands in my lap as I tried to look like a woman who had everything under control. If Dr. Asher believed it, he was being very polite about it, because even I could feel how unconvincing that was.

He looked up from the papers he had been reviewing and adjusted his glasses carefully up the bridge of his nose. Then he smiled in a way that answers the question before the mouth even opens.

"Congratulations, Luna Lara." He reached across the desk and held out an A4 sheet that had neatly printed words across the page. "You are having a baby."

I took the paper from him, and just stared at it for a moment.

Something cracked open in my chest suddenly and cleanly, like a window thrown wide after being shut for too long. The smile came before I could do anything about it. Wide, unguarded and completely beyond my control. And then the tears followed right behind, spilling before I even felt them coming, and I pressed my free hand to my mouth and tried to blink them back but failed completely.

"Really? I am actually pregnant?" I was all smiles but then the tears wouldn't stop, and I wasn't even embarrassed about it.

I already knew as he had told me over the phone barely an hour ago. But there is a version of something you hear with your ears, and then there is the version that lands when you're sitting in the room with the paper right there in your hand and the person who confirmed it is looking at you from across a desk. That second version was the one that hit me now which felt all solid and real in a way the phone call hadn't quite managed to make it.

"That's right," Dr. Asher said, still smiling.

"Oh my God." A small, watery laugh slipped out before I could catch it, which probably looked ridiculous, but I couldn't help it. "This is amazing. I'm... I'm going to give Alpha Lucien an heir."

The thought had come out ahead of my thinking - running straight from that quiet, stubborn corner inside me where I kept hope stored like something too fragile to throw out. I knew it was fragile. I knew better than most people exactly how fragile it was. But it was still there, and this news had given it a little oxygen.

Because even after this morning - I mean those words from him on that bathroom floor, and that grip on my jaw that would probably still be visible by tomorrow - there was still a part of me that couldn't quite stop itself from wondering. What if this was the thing that got through to him? News like this which is real, undeniable and already in motion, had a way of shifting things that nothing else could. People rethought decisions when something like this landed in front of them. Including difficult people and the ones who delivered verdicts the way Lucien did.

Just maybe.

I held onto that thought for exactly as long as it took Dr. Asher to speak again.

"We should tell Alpha Lucien as soon as possible," he said, leaning forward slightly in his chair. He clasped his hands together across the desk in that genuinely warm expression. "He will be delighted to hear this."

And just like that, the warmth in my chest cooled right down.

My mind went back to this morning without being invited. Back to the bathroom. The cold tile under my palms. Him crouching down in front of me with his fingers pressed into my jaw, his voice completely level and eyes giving absolutely nothing away.

'We will never have children. And I will never let you carry my child.'

Not in the middle of a fight. Not something blurted in a heated moment that he could later walk back. He had said it deliberately and slowly, looking straight at me like a man closing a door he had already made a final decision about. There was no generous reading of those words and there was no version of that sentence that ended in delight.

And I knew it. The hopeful part of me knew it too, even if it wasn't ready to admit it yet.

"No." The word came out before I had finished thinking it through. "No, no, no. Please don't tell him just yet. I..." I caught the slight shift in Dr. Asher's expression and smoothed my voice out fast. The last thing I needed was for him to leave this office carrying the wrong impression of what life looked like inside our walls. "I want it to be a surprise in person," I said, reaching for something that sounded reasonable and settled. "You know how these things are."

Dr. Asher held my gaze for just a beat longer than felt comfortable, then nodded once. "Of course, Luna Lara. Whenever you are ready."

"Thank you." I let out a slow breath and looked back down at the paper still in my lap.

Whatever Lucien was going to feel about this - whatever that conversation was going to look like when it eventually came - it could wait. Right now, in this office.with this paper still in my hands and nobody else in on it yet, this was entirely mine. I wasn't going to rush past that.

I folded the paper carefully and was about to slip it into my bag.

While I was just pulling myself back together, thinking of what else to say to Dr. Asher, when the voice came from outside. It cut right through the ordinary noise of the hospital corridor like it owned the space.

"Quick! I need help! I need a doctor!"

My whole body went still.

I knew that voice even from a distance. I knew it the way you know something you have had no choice but to memorize over five years of sharing the same walls, the same rooms, the same silences. I knew how it sounded giving instructions at a clan gathering. I knew how it went flat and quiet when he had already decided he was done with something. I knew how the edges of it sharpened when he was genuinely angry and hadn't decided yet whether to show it.

This version - loud, stripped bare of all that usual control, carrying something that sounded dangerously close to real alarm - was not one I usually get to hear much from him before.

"Lucien?"

His name came off my lips before I had processed a single thing and I was already on my feet.

What was he doing here? What had happened? Because those words - 'quick, I need help, I need a doctor' - are not used by one who is fine because that was all about urgency. So, it means that something was genuinely wrong.

"Is he hurt?" I asked out loud, to nobody in particular, and I was already moving toward the door before Dr. Asher had a chance to say a single word back to me.

My feet had already decided and the rest of me was just along for the ride.

Lara's POV

I moved out to the corridors, and guess what?

Alpha Lucien was right there, placing a lady into a wheelchair that one of the nurses had just wheeled over - on his instruction, obviously, since that was what all the urgency had been about... The emergency. The 'quick, I need a doctor.' That was what had sent me flying out of Dr. Asher's office like something was on fire.

I mean this.

"Doctor," he said to one of the physicians standing nearby, his voice back to its usual composed authority now that the drama had settled. "Take a look at her leg. It's flaring up."

I was still far enough down the corridor that he hadn't spotted me yet. Standing just close enough to see every detail and just far enough that I could still pretend, for another few seconds, that I had the option of turning around.

But then, I didn't turn around.

I would have thought he was simply helping out a stranger if I didn't know better. More like a good deed and maybe an Alpha doing the right thing because that was what Alphas did.

But I knew better than that. I had known better for a long time now, even when I was busy convincing myself otherwise.

The lady in the wheelchair was Raina.

Raina was Alpha Lucien's childhood sweetheart. The woman who had never quite exited the picture, even after the marriage, even after five years of me standing in the same house with him and trying to be whatever it was he needed. She was always somewhere within comfortable reach of him. And Lucien always found a way to make sure she stayed there.

To a fault, I wasn't as surprised as I probably should have been. I had felt it in too many silences. In the way he looked through me at clan dinners. In the distance that never seemed to close no matter how hard I leaned toward him. I knew something was pulling him in another direction. I just hadn't stood here and watched it happen in real time before.

And knowing something in the back of your mind is a completely different thing from watching it play out two meters in front of you. The 'knowing' doesn't prepare you for seeing it for real. Not even a little.

"Thank you so much, Lucien." Raina's voice was soft and carefully warm. She reached out and moved her hand slowly up his arm, her fingers trailing like she had every right in the world to be doing exactly that.

Alpha Lucien had squatted briefly to meet her at eye level where she sat in the wheelchair, close enough that their faces were almost level, and Raina was looking at him like the rest of the corridor didn't exist. "I don't know what I'd do without you," she added, her thumb pressing gently into the inside of his wrist.

"Don't say that." He said it easily like there was nothing complicated about any of this. He was smiling in that kind of soft and unhurried smile I hadn't seen on his face in so long I had almost stopped remembering it was something he was capable of. "You hurt your leg trying to help me. It's the least I can do."

I stood there and felt those words settle somewhere cold inside me.

When was the last time he had smiled at me like that? Not the tight, controlled one he occasionally produced in public when appearances demanded it. I mean, the real one. The one that was easy, warm and reached his eyes without being dragged there. The one he was wearing right now, for Raina, without even thinking about it.

I genuinely could not remember. And that, somehow, was the worst part.

My hand tightened around the strap of my handbag. It was the only thing available to hold, so I held it like it was load-bearing.

That was exactly when Raina's eyes drifted over Lucien's shoulder and found me at the far end of the corridor.

She didn't flinch. She didn't look away quickly or pretend that she hadn't seen me. She held my gaze for a long, steady moment in a calm and unhurried manner. And in those few seconds I understood every single thing about what I was looking at. The ''I don't know what I'd do without you.' The hand on his arm. The carefully timed softness of her voice. The smile she had drawn out of him without even trying. None of it was accidental. Every single part of it had been placed exactly where it would do the most damage, and she wanted me to know that. She wanted me to stand here and see all of it.

And it worked perfectly well as she could see from my face that it had landed exactly where she intended.

Alpha Lucien must have caught the change in her attention, because he started to turn around. His head was already shifting toward the direction she had been looking. But Raina was faster. Her hand came up and curled around the back of his neck before he could complete the turn, drawing his eyes back to hers.

"Alpha," she said, her voice dipping into something soft and helpless. "I think I have something in my eye. Can you take a look?"

"Yeah." He turned back to her without the slightest hesitation.

Just like that.

And then they were back in their little world - their heads tilted close together, her hand still resting at the back of his neck, him leaning in with all his attention on her like she was the only thing in the space worth focusing on.

I stood there and watched it. And felt the pieces fall into place one by one, quietly and certainly.

This was why he had never marked me.

Five years of marriage and not even in a moment that felt close. I had told myself so many things over the years to make sense of it; That he was guarded. That he needed more time. That the coldness was his own damage and not a reflection of someone else. I had stretched every benefit of the doubt I had until it was thin enough to see through.

But there was nothing left to misread here.

It was her. It had always been her. Every wall he kept between us, every time he pulled back, every morning I reached toward him and found nothing - all of it pointed here; To this corridor. To this woman sitting in a wheelchair with her hand at the back of my husband's neck.

It just dawned on me that I had never been the one he wanted. The marriage, the title, the five years - all of it a sham dressed up as something real.

Abruptly, my free hand moved to my stomach without intending. It just rested there, with my fingers flat against the fabric of my gown.

'I should have known from the start.'

My legs went unsteady all at once without any warning, in a way one's body does when it is done being held upright by sheer willpower. Luckily, there was a seat right behind me and I dropped onto it before I hit the floor, the legs of the chair scraping the tile on the way down.

The sound must have been heard more than necessary, because in the corner of my vision I saw Alpha Lucien's head begin to turn.

But a nurse was already moving across the corridor between us, cutting his sightline before it could fully land on me. She had probably been passing through and clocked me on the way, because she doubled back without missing a beat and was at my side almost immediately.

"Ma'am, are you okay?" She placed a steady hand on my waist, warmly and evenly.

I nodded because that was the reflex, even when the honest answer was something else entirely.

She didn't wait for a more convincing response. She guided me up from the seat and steered me gently toward a small side room just a little further down the corridor quietly, away from the open space. But to me, that was away from all of these.

I let her lead me. You know, there was nothing left to resist.

The door closed softly behind us.

And I sat down in the quiet of that room with one hand in my lap and the other still resting on my stomach, staring at nothing, trying to figure out which part of the last ten minutes I was even supposed to start with.

As much as I needed to take this breath... it just occurred to me that I forgot the pregnancy report paper on the doctor's desk and I needed to go pick it up.

For security purposes, I wouldn't want a 3rd party involved in it, for now.