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“No,” Adrian admitted. “You didn’t.” He laid kisses up and down her arm, cherishing her warmth. “What happened to her?”
Luna looked as though she might cry. She struggled to speak through the faint initial hints of sobbing.
“She passed away years ago before my dad started losing his mind. Sometimes I feel like she abandoned me.”
Adrian held her tightly, squeezing her shoulders and back. He pressed down on top of her gently.
Whatever he could do to help ease the pain, he would be there to comfort her.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Adrian caressed her hair, running his hand up and down the length of her back.
“If my mom didn’t go and die, everything would have been all right,” she said. “I’d still have my father and my pack …”
“But you wouldn’t have me,” Adrian offered, not offended but offering consolation.
“That’s true. You’ve been wonderful.”
“And you wouldn’t have Sasha, or the enforcers, or the pups either.”
Luna nodded. Adrian could tell that his massage comforted her, which was all that mattered.
“After my mom died, my dad felt like he lost everything,” Luna said. “He started slipping deep into the bottle, drinking away his pain.”
Adrian said nothing, just listening to her tearful confession.
“With my dad emotionally gone, I felt like I had nobody,” she said. “At first, I tried to fix him. I tried to help him find the help he needed. But he rebuffed me. And I was so young then.”
“Then what did you do?” Adrian asked, pulling away and looking her in the eyes.
“I thought if I could be the man of the house so he wouldn’t have to struggle so much, maybe I could finally earn his respect,” Luna continued. “He couldn’t see how much I was hurting. It was all about his pain. I was just a reminder to him of something he could never have again.”
“Sometimes, people lose themselves in grief,” Adrian offered. “But you didn’t.”
Luna looked at him quizzically. “Thank you for saying that, but I totally did,” Luna said. “My father turned to alcohol. I turned to sarcasm and silence.”
“Luna, one of those is far worse than the other. You know you’re not your father, right?”
But she never replied.
“I had a whole plan. I was going to make my father see my value, no matter what it took. I became a defender of my pack. But the stronger I became, the more my father grew to resent me. He couldn’t see that I was trying to help him. He just thought I was trying to replace him.”
Adrian looked out the window, seeing the first glimmer of the moon taking hold in the sky. The room had grown quite dark, and his stomach was starting to rumble.
“That’s when Darius approached me, to my father’s dismay,” Luna added. “He saw my strength, and unlike my father, he loved it.”
“It’s hard not to,” Adrian replied with a smile. “Sometimes you put even me to shame.”
“My father had only one choice … accept or be exiled.”
Adrian held his fingers up.
“Well, no, that’s two choices,” he contested.
“My father was going to die if he left the pack. So there was only one choice for him. He made me feel like I was betraying him by choosing Darius, but I didn’t have a choice either. Or that was my excuse. I loved Darius with everything in me.”
This part made Adrian’s heart hurt. He hated the thought that he was replacing her former lover, but he shrugged off the feeling.
