The Day I Stopped Being His Luna

"My mate, Kane Blackwood, was the most feared Alpha in the Northlands.For three years, he treated me like something that belonged to him.He would drag me into his arms on the stone steps after moon rituals, pin me against the wall in Blackthorn Keep’s long corridors, and bite the mark on the back of my neck beside the patrol trails in the border woods, as if he needed everyone to remember exactly whose Luna I was.I used to think that was his way of loving me.Rough. Possessive. Lacking tenderness.But love, all the same.Until one night, I stopped outside the council hall and heard an elder say in a furious voice, “Those charcoal sketches on the black market were released by your people, weren’t they? Every one of them is of you and Elena in bed. She has become a joke across the pack. Do you even understand what you’ve done?”There was a brief silence.Then Kane said, coldly, “She is the Luna the council chose for me. She is not the woman I wanted.”I stood frozen outside the door.All those years, I thought his roughness meant he loved me too fiercely to be gentle.But it was never love.It was humiliation.Punishment for taking the place of the woman he actually wanted.I lowered my eyes to the moonstone bracelet on my wrist, the one he had clasped there the day our mating contract was sealed.If that was all I had ever been to him, then I would leave."