Page 22 of The Barren Luna

The male nodded and left.

“I hate you, Henry,” I said weakly and he closed his eyes at the sound of his name and took a deep breath. “I will never forgive you, no matter what you do.“

“We’ll see about that,” he said softly and left the room. I didn’t hear the lock click but I now knew there were guards posted everywhere. I saw no way out but in.

???

Over the next few days, whenever Henry entered the room, I would pretend to be catatonic. I would just lie motionless in bed as he sat next to me, held me by the hand, stroked my hair, and spoke to me in a tone I vaguely remembered from the first years we spent together.

“I missed your scent so much, Ginny,” he said one day, inhaling deeply. “It’s faint because of the wolfsbane, but it’s still there, clementine. I remember the first time I felt it like it was yesterday. Happiest day of my life up till then. The only thing that trumped smelling you was seeing you,” he then touched my cheek, and I struggled not to recoil in disgust. Interestingly enough, I no longer felt tingles when he touched me. Maybe it was the wolfsbane? I wanted to hope that our bond was broken beyond repair at this point, but would he not be feeling that?

“I'm so sorry, Ginny; you're the only real thing in my life. Everything else is a big fat lie. We were happy, Ginny, weren’t we, before I went and messed up everything?”

The next day he said:

“I would give up my Alpha title right now in exchange for going back in time and coming back home to one of your delicious dinners that you’d made with love, and your eyes lighting up when I entered the house. I was enough for you, wasn’t I? I don’t know why I couldn’t see that. I was blind in more ways than one.”

Since he had commanded me and was now dosing me with wolfsbane, he moved the guards to the yard and informed me I was free to roam the house if I wanted to. I only did that when he went to the office. I soon found my drug stash in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, but since I wasn’t allowed to harm myself, I simply hid it under a loose floorboard, not wanting Jessie to stumble upon it. She still came over once a day to cook and clean for us.

“You know what else I miss,” Henry said one evening before bedtime, “holding your soft, warm body in my arms as we drift off to sleep together, and finding your long hairs on my pillow.”

He choked up for a moment, genuinely distressed at the memories. “I sinned against you, my mate, in more ways than one. I committed several ultimate betrayals. I’m sick over what I have done, but I need you, I can’t lose you. We’ll be happy again, you’ll see, everything will go back to how it used to be.”

He was saying these things in a pleading tone, as if he was trying to imprint their truth on me, trying to convince both of us that this was a possibility, yet I still couldn't believe that he was that delusional. As my ribs healed, I feared that he would want to sleep in the same bed as me.

We had started having dinners together as soon as I was well enough to walk, and he would carefully pick out my clothes and lay them out for me to wear; he would then compliment me on my appearance when I came downstairs. I felt like I was trapped in an insane asylum. I would sit there like a doll that was dressed according to his wishes, not speaking, swallowing bites occasionally because I was terrified of more commands, and he would talk and talk as if nothing was wrong in the world, as if we were a normal couple eating dinner after a long day.

“We had three realistically great years before I ruined everything, Ginny, wouldn’t you agree? I keep going over the past in my head and I’ve realized that there are things I never told you. Do you remember that Alpha summit I went to when Lucy was about to give birth to Nora and you stayed behind to help her?” The doll, of course, remained silent.

“Alpha Larson had just welcomed his second pup and we were all at dinner, just us males, congratulating him and celebrating. Then later in the evening, Larson yelled out from his side of the table,just let me know if you need help, Giles, I can put a pup or two in that hot little mate of yours,” Henry clenched his fistsangrily at the memory and I thought the cutlery would break from his grip.

He’d never told me this. I wished he had.

“Two Alphas had to pull me off of him. He just laughed like an insane wolf as I kept punching him. After I came back, I kept thinking about that incident and his taunt. I feel like that started it all. Even before, my mother would make comments here and there but I never cared. All of a sudden, it was all I could think about. Seeing Calum and Lucy with Nora at the hospital pretty much wrecked me. I hated them, I hated how happy they were.”

Henry and I had never talked like this about how he felt about our puplessness, not once. I found myself leaning forward, eager to hear more.

“My mother kept telling me how unhappy you must be without a pup, and how big of a toll it took on her, how she wished my father had taken a concubine instead of subjecting her to those months of feeling like a failure, but I wouldn’t do that to you, I wanted to try all the medical procedures available to us first,” he grabbed my limp hand and caressed it gently as if those medical procedures hadn’t also been a form of torture.

“I told myself I just wanted to give you a family, but if I’m being completely honest, I also wanted to feel more like a male, to prove to everyone that I wasn’t shooting blanks,” he admitted, perhaps emboldened by my silence and lack of judgment.

“I kept imagining everyone mocking me behind my back, laughing at me as Larson did, the pupless Alpha providing entertainment for even the lowliest pack members who had managed to father pups,” he concluded bitterly and I was fascinated by how much of himself he'd managed to keep hidden from me in those months of repeated fertility treatments.

Maybe I was too lost in my own worries and insecurities to look at how my mate was feeling and what he was struggling with. But he should have told me, and it made me so angry that he was telling me all of this now, when it was already too late for us.

The next night at dinner, I sat across from him, wearing a purple blouse with black pants, an outfit that I wore to a pack function in the early days of our mating, which I could remember being enthusiastically taken off of me when we snuck off for a quickie in his office, and he continued his monologue.

“I love that color on you, Ginny. You probably don’t even remember, but you wore that outfit at the party after we opened the pediatric wing of the hospital. You were the most beautiful female in that room and most rooms. All rooms as far as I’m concerned. I just couldn’t get it out of my head, the idea of you being unhappy, resenting me, thinking me less of a male,” he paused for a bit, almost as if waiting for reassurance or denial from me. He could keep waiting until the end of time as far as I was concerned.

“I had these paranoid intrusive thoughts about being the one who was infertile, and every new pup around us just made me feel worse. When your sister announced her pregnancy with their pack’s heir, and her mate wasn’t even the Alpha yet, that’s when I lost my shit. The next day I approached the council and set the wheels in motion, thereby sealing our fate,” he was looking at something behind me now, lost in God only knew what thoughts, whereas I was reeling from the knowledge that it was him who went to the council. This whole time I'd assumed that he had been pressured into it by them. How naïve of me.

“Now I know that it was never about the pup for you, but I fear it is too late that I ruined us. Oh, God, Ginny, I ruined us! Please tell me it’s not too late,” he begged in vain. I remained silent.

That night, he came into the room to see me before bedtime, as always, only he was already in his sleepwear, and he sat down on the bed to take off his socks. I froze in fear. I was no longer stupid enough to put anything past him and I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Don’t worry, love, I’ll wait until your ribs are fully healed. I’m sorry it’s taking this long, it’s the wolfsbane. I can’t wait to feel you again, I missed you so bad,” he whispered as he threw his arm over me, kissed my temple, and fell asleep soon after. I was struggling to breathe. There had to be something I could do. I remembered my stash. Tomorrow night would be my last chance to escape whatever Henry’s insane mind had planned for me.

Dinner was steak and mashed potatoes. I was in the fight of my life, trying to swallow pieces of the meat like everything was fine, like I wasn’t planning to kill a male tonight. I was paranoid that he could hear my heart racing, that he could smell my anxiety coming off of me in aggressive waves, and that he would suspect something was wrong. But Henry just sat there like every night, behaving like this was a date I’d willingly agreed to, like I was still his loving mate and he was mine.

---