Underwater: The Silent Luna novel Chapter 206

Chapter 206

Joseph was mad about what Ashley did and why she tricked him. The anger had been sitting at the side of his mind while his mother’s condition swallowed everything else, but it had not gone anywhere. It waited. It stayed warm. Every time his thoughts had a spare moment to breathe, it rose again. Ashley was not pregnant. There had been no sign of pregnancy or miscarriage when she arrived. No baby. No loss. No misunderstanding. Just a lie.

He honestly wondered how she planned to succeed. Did she think a lie like that would carry forever? Did she believe she could take

a pregnancy long enough to trap him into something permanent? Or did she plan to get pregnant quickly and use timing to cover

the truth? That thought made his stomach twist with disgust. She had played a dangerous game with his family, with his mother.

with his own sense of duty. And he had believed her. That was the part that made him angriest at himself. He had believed her

because she put up a good act.

He scolded himself for not being vigilant enough to catch her in a lie. He was supposed to know better. He was not a fool. He had

seen manipulation before. He had seen people use tears, softness, fear, and desperation to get what they wanted. Yet Ashley had

still managed to slip beneath his guard because he had once cared for her. Maybe part of him had wanted to believe she would not

go that far. Maybe part of him had been too tired of conflict to dig harder. Either way, she had gotten away with it for a while, and

that angered him.

He wondered how she might have gotten away with it if Dr Rosenberg had not told him the truth. How far would she have gone? How long would she have stayed in his mother’s house, eating at their table, acting like she carried his child? How long before the lie cracked? And what would she have done then?

He planned to ask her why when she woke up.

One thing was certain; he would kick her out and never look back. That decision stood firm beneath all the confusion. The pregnancy had been the only reason his mother chose to defy him and house Ashley in the mansion. Amber had believed she was protecting a grandchild. She had believed she was protecting the future of the family, That truth had now been exposed as nothing. There was no pregnancy. No grandchild. No reason for Ashley to remain under their roof.

The thought should have brought him some kind of relief, but it did not. It only made him tired.

“What did Alpha Ethan say?” Adam asked, breaking the silence between them on their way home from the hospital.

Joseph looked out of the window for a moment. The road passed in dark stretches and familiar turns. He could feel Adam watching him, waiting. His beta deserved answers, at least some of them, but not all. Not the surgery. Not the truth about Ethan’s real

progress. Not yet.

“He said he would be returning tomorrow. He can’t be at the cabin while our mother is suffering,” Joseph said, deliberately omitting

the surgery part.

He felt weird lying to his beta. Adam had stood beside him. Adam had fought with him. Adam had nearly died with him. Trust had always mattered between them, and withholding the truth felt like a small betrayal even when Joseph knew it was necessary. But the fewer people that knew of Ethan’s surgery, the less likely Sebastien would find out or plan for it. That secret was too important to share because sharing it even with loyal people created more places where it could leak.

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12:30 Wed, Jun 17 MO

Underwater: The Silent Luna