The Heartless Alpha's Beloved Luna Novel

---- Chapter 188 Avery's POV That evening Gideon's sister took me shopping for a gown suitable for the final night of the Alpha Council. Apparently those upper echelons of Wolven society loved their social occasions, and I couldn't disgrace Nightwolf Pack by appearing under- dressed. Thad showered and grabbed a change of clothes from the pile Dierdra had begrudgingly piled up on the bed in my old room in the pack house. It felt strange to be pulling on these stiff, new garments after so many weeks of wearing the same soft work clothes that had been washed a hundred times.

These new clothes felt brand-new. Some still bore the tags of expensive brand names that Dierdra had bought in one of her many shopping trips. If she spent half as much time working on being the Luna this pack needed as she did trying to make herself look good, Gideon probably would have divorced me long ago, I mused. I wondered if she realized how much more she could accomplish if she just had diligently tried to be a better person. Then I surmised that only good people bothered to think about changing their behavior.

Dierdra would never be the sort of person to become mired in self reflection. She was too busy trying to force the world to worship her. T wondered what it said about me that I did wonder about these things. Was I a better person? Or was I just weaker? ---- Camila, Gideon's sister, was in charge of this shopping trip. She was normally a fairly friendly person, but she had been cold towards me so far. The atmosphere in the pack car was frosty as we sped through the night to a larger shopping center to the south, closer to the human territories.

Human settlements, like the one we were heading to, were on the fringes of civilization, while the wolves preferred to dwell embedded in the wilderness. They had greater access to infrastructure like electrical grids, and larger populations that gave them economic and trading advantages, but they paid hefty tithes to the wolf packs regardless, fearing attack from their northern neighbors who they viewed as savage barbarians. I wondered what these humans thought wolves really were like?

They didn't seem to bat an eye as Camila and I emerged from the pack car in front of a posh-looking boutique. Did they think we all wore hides and pelts and growled every word? I mean, Gideon did tend to growl his words, but that was because he was an arrogant prick of an Alpha. No one seemed to notice the two werewolves slipping through the parking lot and up to the doors of the cheerfully pink and white striped shop.

Right this way," Camila said sharply, as I craned my neck to look up at the winding staircase through several floors of brightly colored bolts of fabric stacked in massive shelves that extended upwards opposite tall, glossy floor-to-ceiling windows. Gideon's sister seemed annoyed that this task of refitting me fell to her. From her comments, | gathered that his family had been ---- pushing for Gideon to divorce me, and they were miffed that I was being re-elevated to the rank of Luna once more. I wished I could tell her that I wasn't too pleased about it myself.

While I hadn't enjoyed being Dierdra's personal slave, I wasn't looking forward to being poured into tight, corseted ball gowns and marched around as Gideon's well-behaved Luna at the council. Thad agreed to his terms. I would pretend to be everything he needed, but in my heart I was merely biding my time. Waiting until my mother could be rescued, and then I could drop the pretense of being anything other than Gideon's prisoner.

+ He had caught me off guard with the map and the promise of getting word to my mother, but now that the hours had ticked by after our meeting, I realized how easily I had been caught off guard and manipulated into agreeing. Once more, he was just dangling the tiniest scrap of what I needed to get me to jump in the direction he pointed, and I, the fool, had been too eager to do it. When would I learn that any kindness Gideon gave was simply because he needed me to fill an empty role in his life that he couldn't actually earn the normal way?

Dierdra may have been more blatantly narcissistic, self-serving, and scheming, but Gideon was no less calculating and conniving. It seemed as though I was forever doomed to act as someone's. pawn. I wondered when I would finally have the strength and the means to work for no one's agenda but my own? ---- »Wait here," Camila marched me upwards to a landing that looked out onto a floor filled with formalwear and elegant dresses, "Pick out colors you like while I go make the arrangements with the consultants."