Page 126 of Untamed

Silence hangs over us, heavy and thick.

"She is his, Dove," Old Alpha says. "It's not a weak bond between the two. I don't think our personal beliefs feature much here."

Mama shrugs. "Mates aren't everything," she snaps. "Isn't that right, Alpha?" she confronts him with flashing eyes, moving away from him. I watch her in wonder. She has always been strong but never confident enough to act this way with Father. Old Alpha is much, much more formidable than Father was. I wonder why she isn't afraid of him?

"You think that I don't believe mates are important? You couldn't be more wrong. My life wasn't meant to be this, my Dove." Old Alpha looks at his hands; the fingers clenched into fists. I look, too, at the worn skin, the scars, the rough callouses. Purple-hair said that hands show their age. When I look at Old Alpha's hands, I understand what she meant. He is weathered and beaten in hard ways.

"What did you expect your life to be?" Mama asks him...sarcastically.

It makes me think. What did Mama expect her life to be? I never thought of a future outside of my forest. I never really imagined anything else. Finding Mactiir and the pack wasn't planned, but then... I didn’t have much of a plan beyond freeing Mama from Father. I didn't know I could have more plans.

"I would have a happy life. Be the alpha. Have my luna at my side. My..." his fingers clench and whiten, release, then clench again. Mama holds still and glares at him, unrelenting. "Pups. I would be a dad." He swallows, his throat moving hard as he swallows the emotion I can see swelling in his eyes.

"You are unhappy you losther?" Mama asks him.

I blink at her in amazement, some of the tiredness drifting away. She isjealous; envious, begrudging, resentful. And I realize; Mama is eyeing up Old Alpha too.

"I lost my mate, Dove, because she left. She left, and I let her go. I can grieve that," he says cautiously. "I don't miss her. Just what I thought she was. She isn't important, Dove." He takes a deep breath, his body shuddering hard, so hard it looks painful. "My son... my son was my world. He died because I was blind and stupid."

Mama's ire melts away. "Oh," she says softly, tears pricking her blue eyes that search for me frantically to reassure herself that her pup isn't dead, too.

"Blind how?" I ask. "There is nothing wrong with your eyes?"

"To the truth, Little Luna. Better to be truly blind than be so ignorant of the truth. My son was in love with a female who wasn't his. He turned from his truemate, and I didn't realize. If I had, I could have talked to him, shown him the real consequences of a wolf without their mate."

"What happened?" I ask. I scent his secrets leaking out. My sleepiness has vanished, adrenaline chasing the pain in my muscles away.

"I believed a lie. I caused a great deal of harm, irreversible, unforgivable hurt, to our future luna," his eyes flash to the Moon, "to my son's truemate."

"A luna is the female who is the leader of the pack," I tell him. Proud that I remember what the Moon told me before.

His lips quirk in a sad parody of a smile. "Sure, Little Luna. The alpha leads with her."

I frown. "I am a luna, and Mactiir is my alpha." My frown deepens when Old Alpha's confession hits me. A luna. I look at the Moon, startled. "You hurt the Moon?"

"The goddess?" he asks, confusion in his voice.

I shake my head, impatient, "no, not your silly moon goddess, the Moon." I point at her startled face. Gnome guffaws, then lets out a cough and wanders off.

Old Alpha blinks at me, a grin overtaking his face. "You have a worrisome lack of respect for the moon goddess even as you call Lyri 'the Moon' and have a great deal of respect for her."

I wave my hand at his conclusion. He may be correct, but there are more important secrets afoot. "You hurt her? She is the luna, correct? She was your son's truemate, but now she is mated to the sky's males."

"Ah... yes?" Old Alpha shakes his head at me in bemusement, but I am not the one harboring secrets. "I made a terrible mistake and Lyri, the Moon, paid for it."

The Moon lets go of me, taking a step backward. "Jax..." her voice trails off.

"Let me tell her, Lyri," Old Alpha holds my gaze. "I allowed her to be Shamed, Little Luna. Do you know, ah," he licks his lips. "Do you know what that is?"

"No."

He inhales deeply. I see a flash of his wolf. His old, grey-muzzled, powerful wolf shifting on his feet, eyes steady, but his shoulders curl inward as if he's readying himself to take a blow.

"To be Shamed is to be humiliated, essentially. Sometimes you are paraded nude with your sins painted on your skin, usually in your own blood. Sometimes you are just made to stand trial and confess your sins in front of your pack, but usually, there is a harsh physical punishment, too." He looks back down at his hands. "Lyri was stripped naked after being weakened by imprisonment for days. Then she was chained with silver so she couldn't shift to a tree in the glade of the forest. It was a full moon." His voice drifts off into nothingness.

I look at him, this male who is so different from any other male I have ever met. His secrets are bleeding his spirit dry of life.

"Something dreadful happened?" I ask him. I was chained to a dead tree in the open space. It wasn't so bad, but I wasn't left under the cold eyes of the moon, was I? At the moon's zenith, I was tucked in our nest with Mactiir.

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