The Betrayed Warrior Luna's Second Chance novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Mistress Offer
Cade returns from the front with Odette on his arm and offers his Luna a place as his mistress; Rhiannon divorces him before the elders, and the Lycan prince steps forward to claim her.
My husband walked into the great hall at his own welcome-home feast with another woman's hand in his.
Three hundred wolves stopped talking at once.
I was standing at the head table with the pack's war ledger under my arm.
An hour earlier I had signed the last supply order for the front lines.
I had signed one every week for a year, while Cade fought the border war.
Now he stood in the doorway in his dark leathers, tanned and rested, smiling at me.
The woman beside him was Odette, my assistant, who had refilled my lamp oil at the ledger table that very afternoon.
She wore the cream dress I had given her for her birthday.
Three weeks ago a message had come from the front, in Odette's handwriting.
Trust Odette with the books. She's the only one I trust besides you.
I had thought it was odd that he would dictate a note instead of writing it himself.
I had told myself the front had no paper.
Cade crossed the hall with Odette still holding his hand.
He looked well for a man who had spent a year in trenches.
When he came home on leave in the spring, he had a blade wound through his ribs that Gwen, our healer, swore would kill any other wolf.
I sat up with him that night, and by morning it was closed.
Gwen had called it a miracle and I had called it a good constitution.
Now he stopped at the foot of the head table, and the whole pack waited.
"Rhiannon," Cade said. "Before everyone, I owe you the truth."
"Then say it," I said.
"Odette is my fated mate."
Odette lowered her eyes.
"The Moon Goddess matched us. I can't fight that, and neither can she."
My fingers went white on the ledger.
At the long table to my left, one of the three pack elders put down her cup.
Cade held up a hand to keep the room calm.
"Nothing has to change for you," he said. "You'll keep the east wing and your seat at the table."
"You'll keep running the books, because nobody does them better."
"Everyone will know you're still mine in all the ways that matter. You'll be my mistress."
He said it in front of three hundred people, and he looked pleased with the offer.
Somebody at the back of the hall gasped.
Odette finally looked up at me.
"Rhi, I begged him to tell you in private," she said, and her eyes were wet. "I'm so sorry it happened like this."
I looked at the two of them.
I looked at Cade's hand in hers, and at the hall that had gone silent for me.
I thought of five years of full moons, and every night I had sat up with him after a hunt.
Then I set the ledger down on the head table, very gently.
"No," I said.
Cade blinked. "No to what?"
"No to all of it."
I turned to the three elders. "Under Crescent Moon law, a Luna whose mate takes another may end the marriage before witnesses."
"Rhiannon," Cade said. "Don't do this to yourself."
"Elders," I said, "I ask you to witness it."
The eldest, a gray woman who had sat on the council since before I was born, stood up slowly.
"We witness," she said.
The other two stood beside her and said it after her.
I pressed two fingers to the mate mark on my collarbone.
It burned for the space of one breath, and then it went cold.
I said it clearly, so the back rows could hear.
"I, Rhiannon Stanhope, end my marriage to Cade Rathburn. I am no one's wife and no one's mistress."
Cade stared at me.
"You can't just walk away from the pack's Alpha," he said.
"I can," I said. "I just did."
The mark on his own neck was fading too, and I watched him touch it.
Odette caught his sleeve. "Cade, let her go. She's upset."
Her eyes slid past me to the Luna's chair at the head of the table, the one with the silver crescent carved into its back.
She looked at it for a long moment, and she was not crying anymore.
I noticed it, and I did not yet know why it bothered me.
Nobody laughed, and nobody clapped.
But three hundred wolves looked at me, and not one of them looked away.
At the guest table, a chair scraped back.
Prince Soren Hallowell of the Lycan court had come north for the treaty, and he had not touched his food all night.
He was the tallest man in the hall, and he had been watching me since the doors opened.
He walked up the center aisle between the tables, and every wolf moved out of his path.
He stopped in front of me and ignored Cade completely.
His eyes had gone gold.
"You're free now, Rhiannon," he said. "That makes it my turn to claim you."
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