Lies Beneath the Moonlight Chapter 06
(Kane’s POV)
Kane couldn’t stop thinking about the way Selene had looked at him at the end. That look in her eyes – love, goodbye, pain – it followed him everywhere. He saw it when he closed his eyes. He felt it in his chest like a stone.
Even after the healer at the pack medical center said Vivra and the pup were fine – just a scare, no real damage Kane felt nothing. No relief. No joy. Just that heavy, aching stone.
Once Vivra fell asleep, he walked out of the room and stood in the hallway. He stared at the white wall and tried to breathe.
He tried to mind-link Selene. Nothing. Just silence. She had blocked him again. Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to him. He couldn’t blame her.
He thought about how he had ended up with Vivra in the first place. It felt like a bad dream he couldn’t wake up from.
He had met her during a routine patrol in the North. A group of rogue wolves had attacked a traveling party. Kane and his squad fought them off, and among the people they saved was a young woman with golden hair and a frightened smile. Her name was Vivra. She told him she was just a trader’s daughter.
Later, the Alpha King came to thank him in person. That was when Kane learned the truth. Vivra was the King’s daughter. The princess of the Northern territories.
She started visiting him after that. Bringing him food, asking about his day, showing up at his training sessions with a soft smile. He told her, politely at first, that he wasn’t interested. He had a mate. A woman he loved. A woman named Selene.
“She cheated on you,” Vivra said. “Why do you still love someone who betrayed you?”
He didn’t have an answer. He just knew he did.
She chased him for six years. Six years of saying no. Six years of turning her away. He tried to be kind about it. Then he tried to be cruel. Nothing worked. She always came back.
Then one night, she invited him to a party at the Alpha King’s hall. He didn’t want to go, but his commander ordered him to attend. He drank too much. He never drank that much. And when he woke up the next morning, Vivra was in his bed. She had dressed like Selene – the same color hair, the same style of clothes, the same perfume. In the dark, he had thought she was Selene.
Afterward, he sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands and told her the truth. He didn’t love her. He never would. Selene might have broken his heart, but she was still the only woman he would ever love.
Vivra cried. He still said no.
Then his mother sent him a wedding invitation. Selene was getting married. To the wolf she had cheated with.
Harlan.
The invitation arrived on a Tuesday. By Wednesday night, Kane was in the hospital. He had drunk himself into a stupor – whiskey, vodka, anything he could find – and his stomach had started bleeding. He almost died.
Vivra sat by his hospital bed. She held his hand. She fed him soup when he was too weak to lift a spoon. She stayed with him for three weeks, sleeping in a chair by the window.
When he got out of the hospital, he said yes to dating her. What else was he supposed to do? Selene was gone.
Selene was getting married. Selene didn’t love him anymore.
Six months later, Vivra told him she was pregnant. He stared at the positive test in her hand and felt nothing. Just that same stone in his chest.
When she begged him to bond with her – to hold a ceremony, to make it official – he agreed. He didn’t see a reason to say no. She was carrying his child. She had been loyal to him for years. She deserved something for her
trouble.
They came back to the pack to hold the ceremony. And the first person he saw when he arrived was Selene. Sitting in a wheelchair. Pale as paper. Looking at him with those eyes.
Now he stood in the healing house hallway, staring at the floor, trying to reach Selene through the link. Nothing.
He called her mother.
Mary’s voice came through, thick and rough. Like she had been crying. “Why are you calling?”
“Is Selene okay?” he asked. “After the restaurant – is she okay?”
A long pause. “She’s fine,” Mary said. “Don’t call again.”
She hung up.
He called his own mother.
“Honestly, Kane,” Ilsa said, “why did you push her like that? I had to listen to Mary yell at me for an hour before she calmed down. You know how protective she is of that girl.”
“Is Selene hurt?”
“Just a scrape on her forehead. It’s already bandaged. Her fiancé came to get her. She’s staying at his place now.”
Fiancé. Wedding.
The words stabbed him like needles. He felt them go in, one by one.
He walked outside. The night air was cold. He splashed water on his face from a trough by the side of the building. His hands were shaking.
Then Vivra’s voice came through the mind-link. “Kane, I had a nightmare. I’m scared. Come back to bed.”
He went back to her room. He sat on the edge of the bed, and she curled into him, her head on his chest.
“Kane,” she whispered, “will you always be with me?”
“Yes,” he said.
But he was looking out the window at the moon.
He remembered another night. Another moon. He was nineteen years old, lying on the grass by the Moon Spring with Selene’s head on his shoulder. She was playing with the moonstone around her neck – the one he had given her for her seventeenth birthday.
“Moonstones are the moon’s tears,” she had said. “If I hold onto it, the moon will help you find me. No matter how far apart we are.”
He had kissed her forehead and said, “We’ll never be apart.”
She had made him promise anyway. “Promise me,” she said, “that even if I do something to make you angry – even if I hurt you – you won’t give up on me. Promise.”
“I promise,” he had said.
He had broken that promise. He had given up on her the moment he saw her kiss another man under the old oak tree. He hadn’t asked questions. He hadn’t listened to explanations. He had just walked away.
Now he lay in bed with another woman in his arms, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the promise he had
broken.
