Chapter 147

Elroy POV

The task before us was clear. We not only had to root out the remnants of Emma’s schemes but also reform the political and social environment in which they had been hatched and supported.

What wasn’t clear was just how to do it.

I had started by talking to Emma’s willing supporters, but what I got from them wasn’t some grand desire to overthrow the Pack, but rather complaints that they had never felt like Pack in the first place.

“Ravencrest has always been the Pack blamed for Lunaris’s problems,” I was told by Alexander, an omega and distant cousin of Hermes and Emma, as we sat in the interview room. He sat there almost primly, long-fingered hands folded in his lap, his thin moustache twitching just slightly over thinner lips.

“As the smallest of the three meaningful Packs that make up Lunaris, we are looked to whenever there is some disruption in Pack harmony, whenever there is a dissenting voice, whether by a member of Ravencrest or not, we are assumed to be behind it. We are looked at with disdain, and our power is checked whenever we get out of line.”

“And how have you experienced this?” Sam asked.

“We have—”

“Excuse me,” Sam said. “I would appreciate if you would respond personally.”

Alexander frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I would like an example of how you personally have experienced being suspected by others or of being made to feel less than members of other packs.”

The moustache bent as Alexander pursed his lips. “I’m only saying what everyone knows.”

“All right,” Sam said easily. “But could you offer personal experience of what everyone knows?”

“I would like to speak with a lawyer.”

Sam nodded. “Of course.”

An hour later, Sam and I were sitting with Joyelle, an omega from White Paw. She looked nervously around during the entire interview and seemed at any moment to expect some sort of blow. Yet her appearance was immaculate, from her highly coiffed hair to her modestly manicured nails.

“When we first came here, we thought we had been saved,” she said. “We were excited, even overjoyed.”

“That sounds like a good thing,” Sam said.

“But soon enough, we saw how the treatment of omegas in our own pack was mirrored by the treatment of Ravencrest Pack. We heard all about—”

“Excuse me,” Sam said. “I would appreciate if you would respond personally.”

She scowled, and then her eyes darted once again to the left and right. “What does that mean?”

“Did you only hear about this discrimination against Ravencrest, or did you witness it?”

“I didn’t have to witness it. It was obvious in the ways that Ravencrest Pack acted.”

“Which was?”

Joyelle snorted. “I know the signs of the abused when I see them.”

“Abuse? You feel members of Ravencrest Pack were being abused?”

She snorted again. “I suppose you’re one of those alphas who think it only counts as abuse when it’s physical.”

“I’m a beta, actually.”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure you are.” Her eyes then widened in alarm, and she hunched her shoulders in. “I’m sure I believe you.”

Another hour had passed and we were sitting in front of Laurence, a beta from Eclipse.

“Excuse me,” Sam said. “I would appreciate if you would respond personally.”

Laurence looked offended. “What? Do I really have to spell it out for you?”

And then there was Edgar, and then Collen, and then Miranda, and then Janice.

After three days of “and thens,” Sam and I met officially with Olivia, Claudia, David, and Hermes’s replacement, Dillon. It was difficult not to stare at my wife, and by that I didn’t just find my eyes drawn to her again and again by her swollen stomach but also by the determination in her eyes and the way her hands moved like a dance when she talked.

Now that I had been released to acknowledge Olivia as my true fated mate, I found myself growing increasingly dazed by her, unable to believe my luck, my astonishingly good fortune that this woman whose beauty had made me instantly ache to take her to my bed had become my wife, my Luna, my life companion, and the mother to my future child.

Then she caught my eye and smiled, and I made myself stop staring. Tonight we would hold each other with my hand on her belly to feel our child, our daughter, grow strong enough to come into the world. Then we could revel in being future parents.

Right now, we were Alpha and Luna.

“We have to consider that Emma grew up here,” Iris said. “She knew what weaknesses to exploit when she was studying with the humans in Albsraca and wherever else she went.”

“But what exactly was, and is, this weakness?” Olivia asked, obviously rhetorically. The answer seemed to float somewhere above us, invisible, dancing from our grasp. “Is it just that Ravencrest has felt lesser-than?”

“But has it?” Claudia asked. “Or is it just that their feeling has become so-called common knowledge?”

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg, the feeling of others disdain them or the general knowledge that they feel others disdain them?” Olivia asked.

“If you tell wolves something over and over, they do tend to believe it,” Sam noted.

“It’s more than that,” I said. “More than just propaganda. It’s almost become dogma. Several of those we interviewed were indignant we would even question it.”

“Thou shalt feel slighted,” Olivia said with pure Luna tone, which made us chuckle.

“I’d love to think it started with Emma,” Iris said, “but several of your older interviewees said they felt that way since birth.”

“So,” I said. “If it didn’t start with Emma, what was the initial cause?”

“I keep thinking of what Ines said when we were under Emma’s sway,” Claudia said. “That at first White Paw felt welcome but then learned Ravencrest was the new lowest caste instead of omegas. She has only been with us for a few months, yet she knew this ‘general knowledge’ among the packs.”

“She was saying what Emma wanted her to say,” Iris said.

“Yes, but why did Emma pick that particular weakness in our Pack? And why did it work so well?”

“Because there is a germ of truth in it,” Olivia said. She raised a hand against objections. “That germ isn’t that we want to blame Ravencrest for everything or that we need to have a ‘lowest caste’ at all.”

“Then what is it?” Claudia asked.

Olivia looked at her mother with soft eyes. “It almost killed me, losing you, losing the bond of mother and daughter we had, and, in a strange way even more, losing my Alpha.” She looked at us all in turn as we waited for her to speak again.

“The germ of truth in the propaganda of ‘Ravencrest isn’t really us’ is that no one is ‘really us.’ We are a Pack made of Packs.” She shook her head and murmured, “Orlando said, ‘I am Moonshadow first.’ I chastised him at the time, but I didn’t really see how wrong it was for him to say it but also how it wasn’t his fault.

“Lunaris does not follow the natural way of wolves, and slowly Lunaris has been falling apart because of it. Somehow, we have to find a way to unite Lunaris more closely, to be a Pack, not Packs.”

I found I was shaking my head. Everyone looked at me.

“No,” I said. “Lunaris could never be more united than it is. That is the real problem.”

“Which means?” Olivia asked me.

“Lunaris must end.”