The Hypocrisy of Duty

The suffocating silence stretched across the Alpha’s office, heavy enough to crush the breath from their lungs. Nyssa’s final words hung in the stagnant air, irrevocable and sharp. She stood in the center of the room, a statue carved from frost, while the people she once called family stared at her in stunned silence.

Then, the stillness shattered.

Cormac moved. He tore himself away from Talia’s trembling, weeping form. He stood up straight, his massive shoulders tense and rigid. His jaw locked tightly. He glared at Nyssa, his chest rising and falling in harsh, erratic jerks. The crushing weight of his guilt clawed its way up his throat, twisting into a defensive rage. He needed to justify his sins.

"Enough, Nyssa!" he barked. His dominant voice echoed against the stone walls, aggressive and harsh. "You’re not being fair."

Nyssa barely blinked. She tilted her chin up. "Fair?" she repeated. Her tone was a quiet whisper, making the word sound like a foreign concept.

He took a heavy step toward her, his large hands curling into tight fists at his sides. "You think you are the only one suffering in this room? You think making this choice was easy for me?" His voice fractured, but he forced the volume higher, desperate to make her understand. "I never asked for fate to play this cruel trick on us! I never intentionally planned for Talia to get pregnant. Do you think I don’t feel the mate bond ripping through my chest every time I look at you? Do you think it doesn’t kill me to stand this close and know I cannot have you?"

He took another step. The anger and desperate self-justification bled together in his eyes. "I chose Talia before I knew. I made a commitment before the Goddess ever revealed you to me. She is carrying my child. She is carrying this pack’s heir. And as the future Alpha of this territory, I do not have the luxury to follow only my heart. I have to follow my duty."

Cormac ran a hand through his hair, his broad chest heaving with exertion. He looked at the woman he was meant to spend his life with, his eyes begging for absolution. "Do you think it is easy to forcefully reject our sacred bond? Do you think I don’t feel the punishment from the Moon Goddess? I do, Nyssa. It bleeds me. Every single day, it tortures me. But I cannot abandon my responsibilities. I cannot abandon this pack. So stop standing there pretending you are the only one bleeding from this!"

For a split second, a flicker of raw emotion passed through Nyssa’s dark eyes. The sheer volume of his explosive outburst almost chipped her icy exterior. But the crack sealed back up instantly. She stared at him. When she finally opened her mouth, her quiet, measured voice cut sharper than a deafening scream.

"You bleed?" she asked softly. Her words dripped with an incredulous, biting disbelief.

She did not yell. She did not scream. She dismantled his pathetic defense with surgical, merciless precision.

"No, Cormac," Nyssa said, holding his gaze until he looked ready to look away. "You made a choice. You took my body. You shared my bed, and used my body for your physical satisfaction. And after taking all of me, you still consciously chose her. You decided that my pain was worth far less than your political convenience. You stand there and call it duty. It was never duty. It was weakness."

Cormac flinched backward as if she had slapped him across the face.

Nyssa took a slow step toward him. "I never once asked you to brutally abandon your unborn pup. I never demanded you leave your child without a father. All I ever asked for was a fighting chance to be the Luna the Moon Goddess specifically created me to be. To be the mate I was born to be. But that was too much of an inconvenience for you."

Her gaze hardened into sharp obsidian. She looked at the man who was supposed to protect her soul. She felt nothing but disgust. "The Goddess gave us a sacred bond, and you spit on it. You spit on me. Whatever torturous punishment you claim to feel from rejecting our bond, it is a fraction of the agony I endure. So do not dare speak to me of your pain."

She threw a brief, dismissive glance at Talia, who was still weeping pathetic tears in the corner of the room, before snapping her focus back to Cormac.

"You do not get to claim any portion of my suffering," Nyssa declared, her voice ringing with crushing finality. "You do not know what it is like to be discarded. To be deemed unworthy of even a chance. You chose to use me for sex, and then you threw me away. You and everyone in this room chose to sacrifice me. You sacrificed my happiness and sacrificed who I am to save your own skins."

The sheer weight of her condemnation stripped away the last of Cormac’s false armor. The massive future Alpha stood frozen. He lost the ability to speak. His mouth opened, but no words came out. His hands hung at his sides as he began to physically tremble under a profound, consuming shame. He had no defense left. He was empty.

The air in the office crackled with electric tension. It was charged, thick enough to snap and spiral into physical violence at any second.

Before the silence could break into something worse, Luna Isolde intervened.

"Enough," Isolde’s voice echoed through the room. It was not a shout, but it carried the unshakeable, firm authority of her high rank.

The Luna rose gracefully from her large leather chair. She smoothed the front of her dress, her posture perfect, though the tight lines around her eyes betrayed her stress. She looked at her son, trembling in shame, and then locked her gaze onto Nyssa.

"This venom is destroying all of us," Isolde reasoned, stepping out from behind the heavy mahogany desk. "Nyssa, you speak these toxic words because you are harboring deep, unhealed pain. I see your suffering, even when you try to mask it with anger. But you must understand our reality. The bond between you and Cormac is real, but the life he has created with Talia is also real. We cannot undo what has already transpired in the past."

Nyssa clamped her jaw shut, maintaining her impenetrable stare.

Isolde let out a quiet sigh, her usually perfect composure slipping just a fraction under Nyssa’s piercing glare. "I do not deny that you were wronged in this matter. You should never have been forced into this terrible position. My heart breaks for you. But as the Luna of this territory, I must look at the survival of our people. This pack cannot fracture over this bond, no matter how deeply unfair it seems to you. We must move forward for the sake of everyone."

Isolde clasped her hands together in front of her. "Sometimes the Goddess gives us terrible trials we cannot understand."

Nyssa let out a low, bitter laugh. The sound was rough, scraping against the stone walls of the office.

"Trials?" Nyssa asked. She shook her head in sheer disbelief. "That’s what you call this?"

She raised her hand and gestured aggressively toward the cowardly Cormac and the endlessly weeping Talia.

"Trials are meant to strengthen us. This is a betrayal dressed up as sacrifice."