[Leon’s POV]
The corridor to my room stretches longer every night, which is either an architectural defect or the universe's editorial on my character. I'm betting on the latter.
I've been avoiding my wife. Not the dramatic kind, just the small, surgical one: late reports, early runs, conversations steered to logistics the moment silence starts expecting something.
A masterclass in cowardice from a man who built his reputation on never flinching.
I chose this. The treaty, the peace my father bled out on a festival floor to build. The heir clause requires a child within two years, and every night I find reasons to stay out of that bed is a night the wolves who staked their safety on this marriage would regret trusting me.
I'm an Alpha who can't touch his own wife. The reason I bury under duty and strategy is that every time I close my eyes, the woman I see isn't Kailani.
The door opens, and the room is different. Kailani sits on the edge of the bed in silk that catches lamplight against her collarbone. Wine glass half-emptied. Perfume I don't recognize—warmer, heavier than her usual sharpness.
"Long day?" Her voice is softer than I've heard in weeks. She rises, crosses to me, fingers landing on my forearm.
"Metting ran late." I don't pull away, that would be a declaration. "Your father wants another revision on the trade clause."
"You work too hard, darling." She takes my jacket, fingers brushing my neck. "I thought tonight there’s enough of politics and we could just be us."
"There's always politics, Kai."
"There doesn't have to be." She steps closer, palm pressing to my chest. "Not tonight." Something in her eyes shifts—vulnerable, deliberate. "The heir clause… I think about it every day, Leon."
"I know you do." A very specific wording that I didn’t even register until it left my mouth.
Not me too, not the one she is looking for. The first error this evening, and I’ve barely passed the threshold of the bedroom.
"Do you?" The question lands without edge, which makes it sharper. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you'd rather sleep in your study than share a bed with me. Your wife, your Luna."
My jaw works around a response that doesn't exist. She's not wrong. That's the grotesque comedy of this marriage—the prosecution rests because the evidence is my own empty pillow.
"I'm not angry, though," she says, and her eyes hold mine without flinching. "And I'm not accusing you. I just want to understand what I'm doing wrong."
"You're not doing anything wrong." My voice comes out rougher than intended. "The transition's been hard. On both of us."
"Then let me make it easier." Her fingers trace my collar, her voice dropping. "I want us to try, really try. A family might bring us closer—give us something real, Leon. Something that isn't a treaty clause."
She's trying, and the guilt of it knocks against my ribs. This woman married a ghost who wears her ring and won't explain why the bed stays cold. She deserves better than the fraction of a man she's getting.
"Kai…" She kisses me before the sentence lands.
Her mouth opens against mine, body pressing forward, fingers working buttons with confidence. She tastes like wine and intention.
"Don't think," she breathes against my mouth. "Just be here with me."
I let it happen. She’s my wife, my duty. And she's beautiful and I must produce an heir.
Finally, my hands go to her waist, guiding her toward the bed as she pulls my shirt from my shoulders. Silk against bare skin, lips to lips, and I wait for my body to join the arrangement it legally already agreed to.
"You're shaking, my Alpha" she says, and there's something tender in it that makes the guilt twist deeper. "Is that what I’m doing to you, dear?"
I'm not shaking from desire. I'm shaking from the effort of being present in a room my mind left twenty minutes ago. But I kiss her shoulder because that's what a husband does, and she takes it as progress.
She's underneath me—warm, willing, legs wrapping around my hips—and I am performing this with the emotional investment of a man filing quarterly taxes. She arches up, nails dragging my back when I kiss her neck.
My cock lies soft against her thigh despite her hand working me with skill that should produce results. The grip shifts, rhythm practiced, effort shading toward desperation. The shame of it is a cold weight behind my sternum.
"Relax." Her whisper against my ear, both hands sliding down my torso. "Stop thinking, just feel me."
"I'm trying." At least that part is honest.
She tries harder—mouth trailing down my chest, hand stroking with renewed precision, body rolling beneath mine. Her teeth graze the tendon in my neck, leg wrapping higher around my hip.
"Stay with me," she murmurs against my skin. "Right here. Nowhere else."
I close my eyes and try. Treaty, heir clause, her body… Border reports, Ashton's footwork, the east wall… Everything is cycling like a wheel that won't catch.
Skyler's hands.
The thought arrives without clearance, without permission.
Familiar and elegant long fingers wrapping gauze around my forearm, precise and unhurried. That strand of silver-blonde hair sliding across her cheek. Her stunning blue eyes that seem shining sometimes when she looks at me.
Her scent beneath the antiseptic—clean and soft, and something my lungs refused to release since the first time I inhaled it. The almost-touch in the clinic, her breath changing when I was close…
I harden so fast the shift borders on violent. Kailani gasps—relief and triumph braided in the sound—and pulls me into her, hips rising. I thrust forward because the woman behind my eyelids just tilted her chin up with those blue eyes and my nervous system had detonated.
I move, and none of it is for the woman underneath me.
Silk sheets dissolve into the clinic's exam table. Heavy perfume becomes antiseptic and something warmer beneath it. Skyler's neck… the curve of it, the pulse I've spent weeks imagining pressing my mouth against, biting into it. Marking, claiming her…
My hips snap harder, almost desperate and Kailani moans beneath me. But the pitch is wrong, the breathing is wrong, everything in this room is damn wrong except the image behind my closed eyes.
Skyler's fingers threading through my hair.
The sound she'd make, the way she'd say my name.
My breathing shreds and I grip the sheets until my knuckles grind, moving with an urgency that belongs to a woman who isn't here. A body my mind has built in exacting, desperate detail.
The orgasm coils at the base of my spine, building with each thrust until my vision whites. I bury my face in the pillow and come apart, burying myself inside my wife. But the name that tears from my mouth isn't whispered, isn't contained.
"Skyler…" It fills the room the way a confession fills a cathedral—total, echoing, irreversible.
The silence that follows is crystalline and heavy as Kailani goes still beneath me. I pull back, chest heaving, and for one unguarded second—before composure descends like a blast shield—her face holds something I have never seen on it.
Not hurt. Not surprise. Something colder and more precise. The expression of a woman who's been hunting for weeks and just received the enemy's exact coordinates, hand-delivered by the target himself.
She slides out from beneath me with the composure of someone leaving a board meeting. The silk barely whispers as she reaches for the wine glass, and her hand doesn't shake. Mine would.
"Kai, I… I’m sorry."
"For what?" She tilts her head sideways to catch my eyes. She’s smiling—even brighter than when I entered the room “It was great. You were great.”
"No, for what I said…" I gasp, trying to find an answer to my own actions that would prove my—or Skyler’s?—innocence, but she arches her eyebrow questioningly.
"What you said? Sorry, I didn’t hear. I was too… distracted." She let out a little laugh, biting her bottom lip. "What did you say, darling?"
I stare at her and try to swallow the lump in my throat.
“Nothing,” I whisper, because it could be a game she’s playing that I don’t know the rules of. Or—she might’ve genuinely not heard me, in which case repeating it would be putting Skyler under guillotine.
So I don’t. I lay down, and Kailani got back in bed to rest her head on my shoulder, discarding the wine, and it all feels surreal.