The Heartless Alpha's Beloved Luna Novel

---- Chapter 214 She would not be able to bully me again. Gideon's POV I stared out the window of my office and watched the distant shape of Avery disappearing down towards the village. A few moments later I saw Dierdra stalking up the walk to the pack house. I was struck, not for the first time, by the way these two women seemed to represent two sides of the same coin. Both were important to me, and I wanted to try and resolve some of the tension that was perpetually present between them. If Avery was continuing on as Luna, then I needed Dierdra to be willing to accept that.

So far, I hadn't been able to get them to reconcile their differences. To be honest, I had my own difficulties with letting the past stay in the past. My trip with Avery had made it even harder to return to Dierdra and I felt ashamed about what I had almost let happen. Avery had fled from my kiss. A part of me was still angry that she had rejected me, while a more rational part of my mind said that it was for the best. Dierdra was my mate, and I genuinely had nothing to apologize for now. I had broken no oaths, and crossed no lines. But that didn't mean I didn't wish I had.

Avery and I had kept a respectable distance for the rest of the ---- time we were at the Alpha Council estate. It was hard not to try and get close to her. The relative privacy we had compare to here in the village, was indulgent. Avery was the one who had maintained the professional facade, and after a little while, we fell into a comfortable working relationship that reminded me of the first few weeks she had spent in our pack, when I had her working as my assistant. She had a calm and capable manner, and was willing to tackle anything. Working on pack business with her was fun.

I wasn't used to it feeling that way. And I could tell that Dierdra felt hurt to have been left behind, and to now experience the sensation of being an outsider in our business. She didn't openly complain, but I saw more than a few expressions of insecurity on her face. She was worried about what might happen, or had happened, between us. If left both to their own devices, they were likely to end up at each others throats again. I decided to ask my family to plana luncheon and invited both of them to show up.

"he's at the end of her rope," Avery said with misgivings, when linformed her about the luncheon, "I suspect she will do something rash and reckless if you push her too far." I wasn't sure exactly what she was talking about, but I tried to soothe her worries regardless. "Do you remember that potion I made for you on our wedding night?" ---- Iraised my eyebrow. I remembered many things about our wedding night. Often. 'The way Avery had appeared in my room in a decadent black dress. The way she had kissed me, as though her life depended on it.

Oh, and I supposed she had said something incoherent about Dierdra's mark being fake and had given me a vial of some potion she had made. 1 suddenly remembered that I had left it on my side table, and then later pushed it into one drawer or another. "What about it?" I asked. "Just... maybe keep it handy," was all Avery would say, pressing her lips together. It was obvious that she still had suspicions about my mate, but she had learned that I wasn't willing to indulge her baseless accusations.

Still, when I watched both of them walk into the luncheon and sit on either side of me, I felt the small hard bulge in my pocket. I wasn't sure exactly why I had bothered to find the vial from that night so many weeks ago. I didn't like the idea that any potion or substance could reveal secrets. The truth was a slippery thing, too subjective. Thad other ways of extracting information, and they had served me for far longer than Avery's alchemical experiments. ---- So, as we all sat down to eat, my family on either side of me and both women I cared for at the table, I took a moment to fix them.

both with my most stern Alpha look and asked into the suddenly tense atmosphere, "Does anyone have anything they wish to confess?"