The Luna You Betrayed Is No Longer Yours

Chapter 13: Chapter 13 What the numbers say

_Kaelen’s POV_

Two days after the confrontation between Rowena and I, Grandmama Maelis called me into her sitting room before breakfast.

That alone told me something was off. Maelis didn’t summon people before breakfast unless she’d been awake thinking for hours and had reached a decision she wanted to deliver before anyone else was fully alert.

I found her seated in her chair with her hands folded and her expression arranged into something I recognized, the particular composure she adopted when she’d already decided the outcome of a conversation and was managing how to get there.

"Sit down, Kaelen," she said.

I obeyed and sat down.

"I want to talk about Rowena’s dowry."

I kept my face still. I only hoped it wasn’t what I was thinking. Elvira already suggested the same thing.

"What about it."

"The dissolution is moving forward," she said. "In eleven days, she walks out of this house. And she takes everything that came with her." She unfolded her hands and placed them flat on her knees, a gesture she made when she wanted to appear reasonable. "But there’s an argument to be made that certain assets, specifically the ones that have been physically integrated into this estate, have become pack property through use. The furniture, the equipment in the east annex, several of the investment vehicles that were folded into Moonreign’s operational structure."

I said nothing. I was listening to what she wasn’t saying.

"If we were to establish that those assets were gifted rather than loaned," she continued, "then their retrieval could be contested. It would require Rowena to demonstrate, item by item, that each piece remained her personal property rather than a contribution to the pack." She paused. "That kind of documentation burden takes time. More than eleven days."

"Wait, she suddenly wants to delay the dissolution?" Shade asked.

I had reached the same conclusion about ten seconds after she started speaking.

"Who told you to do this?" I asked carefully.

Maelis’s expression flickered. "No one told me anything. I’m trying to protect this family."

"By slandering Rowena’s property records."

"By ensuring that this pack doesn’t collapse when she leaves." For the first time, something genuine came through the composure — real worry flooded my chest. "Kaelen, do you understand how serious the financial situation is? Because I don’t think you do. Not fully."

"Then tell me," I said.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she called for her housekeeper and asked for the household ledgers.

I spent the next two hours in the estate office with the ledgers spread across the desk, and what I found was worse than Greaves had shown me.

The accounts Greaves managed were the operational accounts, the ones Rowena had formally administered. Clean, detailed, and everything documented in her careful handwriting or authorized by her signature. Those told one story.

The household ledgers told another.

Maelis had been running a secondary set of expenditures for years. Not fraudulent exactly though, everything was legitimate.

But the pattern was clear when you looked at it as a whole. Spending on things that served Maelis’s preferences and social standing within the regional pack community. Commitments made in Moonreign’s name that Moonreign’s actual accounts couldn’t sustain. Gaps that had quietly, consistently been covered by, I turned the page and confirmed what I already suspected— Ashthorne transfers.

Rowena’s money. Filling holes that Maelis had quietly kept from me.

"She knew," Shade said. "Maelis knew exactly how dependent this pack was and she never told you because as long as the money kept flowing there was no reason to have the conversation."

I set the ledger down and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

Three years. I had been operating under the assumption that Moonreign was financially stable with some Ashthorne supplementation. What I was looking at was a pack that had been on Ashthorne life support since before my wedding, with Maelis carefully managing what I saw and didn’t see.

And Rowena, who had administered these accounts, who had seen both sets of numbers, had said nothing. Had quietly kept filling the gaps. Had not once come to me and said your grandmother is concealing the true state of this pack’s finances even though she had every right to.

I didn’t examine too closely why that made something uncomfortable shift in my chest.

I went back to Maelis’s sitting room.

She looked up when I came in, read my expression, and her composure tightened slightly.

"You should have told me," I said.

"You had enough to manage already, at that state fair."

"I’m the Alpha. The pack’s finances are my responsibility. You should have told me." I kept my voice level, but she heard the steel in it. She always could. "How long?"

"Since your father died," she said, after a pause.

I closed my eyes briefly. My father had been gone for seven years. Which meant Moonreign had been running on borrowed stability for seven years, and I had been allowed to believe otherwise.

"And the plan now?" I asked. "Slander Rowena’s property documentation to delay the dissolution and keep her money in reach a little longer?"

Maelis didn’t flinch. "I’m trying to keep this family from drowning."

"By going after Rowena."

" I shook my head. "No. We’re not doing that."

"Kaelen....."

"I said no, Grandmother." The Alpha voice came through fully now, and Maelis went still. "I will not contest her asset retrieval. I will not manufacture a documentation dispute to trap her here. She fulfilled every obligation she had to this pack and more. We don’t get to rob her on the way out because we were careless with what she gave us."

The room was quiet.

Maelis looked at me for a long moment. Then, very quietly: "Then what do you propose we do?" ƒreewebɳovel.com

Good question, Shade said. What do you propose?

I sat down across from her and looked at the ledger I’d brought with me. The numbers. The gap. The specific, humiliating size of what Moonreign owed its own stability to a woman I had called dramatic for asking to leave.

"I’m going to speak to her," I said.

Maelis raised an eyebrow.

"Not to pressure her," I said, before she could ask. "Not to demand anything." I looked at the ledger again. "She deserves to know what I found. What was hidden from both of us." I paused. "After that, it’s her decision."

"You know what her decision will be," Shade grumbled.

"I’m aware."

"And in the meantime," I continued, "I want every secondary account you have been running to be brought into the main ledger. All of it. No more separated books." I looked at my grandmother directly. "From this point forward, I know exactly what this pack’s finances look like. No more management."

She sat with that for a moment. Then she nodded, once. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

I stood and picked up the ledger.

Shade was uncharacteristically quiet as I left the room, which usually meant he was thinking something he expected me to figure out on my own.

I already had.

Rowena had held this pack together with her own money and her own silence, and I had come home and handed her a humiliation.

I wasn’t going to fix that. It was probably too late to fix it. But I could at least stop making it worse.

That would have to be enough.