The Moon Goddess Gave Me Two Alpha's.

The Goddess Speaks

I was asleep and then I was somewhere else entirely.

"You were not supposed to die," she said, and her voice was not gentle either, it was the voice of someone correcting a mistake that should never have required correcting. "What was done to you was not fate. It was not destiny. It was not my design. It was theft, and I do not tolerate theft."

I stood there and looked at her and felt my wolf press forward inside my chest, not afraid, just deeply, completely awake.

"Okay," I said.

She moved toward me and the silver light moved with her.

"The bond fractured when you died. What was always meant to be two was forced into one because someone corrupted the path before it could complete itself. Two mates. Two bonds. One holds your power and one holds your truth and you were always supposed to carry both."

"Which one is which," I said.

"You will know when you stop trying to figure it out," she said.

"That's not an answer."

"It is the only one I have for you right now." She stopped and looked at me and I felt what was coming before she said it. "Only one mate survives this lifetime."

I went very still.

"Which one," I said.

"That," she said, "is in your hands."

"Why," I said, and I wasn't being respectful about it anymore, I was just angry, "you sent me back, you fractured the bond, you built all of this and now someone I am supposed to love is going to die and you are making it my decision, that is what you are telling me right now."

"Yes," she said.

"That is not a gift," I said. "That is a punishment."

"It is a correction," she said, and the silver light flared once, sharp and white and furious. "And you are the only one in this lifetime who can make the right choice so I suggest you stop arguing with me and start paying attention to what you already know."

She was gone before I could say another word.

The Moon Goddess told me one mate survives this lifetime and then disappeared before I could tell her what I thought about that, which was probably deliberate.

I woke up at five in the morning and lay there in the dark and thought about power and truth and which mate held which and then I got up because lying there was not going to answer anything and I had somewhere to be before sunrise.

I needed to start ruining Lyra.

I knew about the rogue contact because in my first life I had been the one accused of meeting him.

His name was Crest, he operated out of the forest two miles east of the Ashford border, and Lyra had been building that relationship for eight months.

Before she used it to frame me, feeding him pack information slowly, earning his trust, setting up the meeting logs that she had later handed to Kael as evidence of my treason.

In my first life those logs had been the centrepiece of everything, the thing that made the forged letters believable, the paper trail that nobody had questioned because the rogue himself had confirmed the meetings when the pack sent wolves to find him.

He had confirmed them because Lyra had paid him enough to confirm anything.

I got to his meeting point at four thirty in the morning, a hollow in the forest floor beneath a wide oak that he used as a dead drop.

I sat down in the dark and waited and at five fifteen Crest came through the trees and stopped when he saw me and put his hand on the knife at his belt.

"You're not Lyra ," he said.

"No," I said. "I'm the person she's planning to frame for everything she's paying you to do."

He looked at me for a long moment. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You've had four meetings with my sister," I said. "She pays you in silver, she leaves it in the hollow on the east side of this oak, she has been feeding you border information and building a record of meetings that she intends to eventually attribute to me. You are the evidence, Crest. You are the part of her plan that makes everything else stick."

The hand on his knife didn't move but something in his face did.

"How do you know that," he said.

"Because she already used you once," I said, "in a life you don't know about, and I am not going to let her do it again."

He looked at me like I was unhinged, which was fair.

"I'm going to make you a different offer," I said. "Better money, better terms, and all you have to do is stop meeting with my sister and confirm to anyone who asks that you have never had contact with anyone from the Ashford pack."

"And if she comes back," he said.

"Tell her the arrangement is over," I said. "Tell her whatever you want. But the meetings stop today and the records you have been keeping for her disappear."

Silence.

"Why should I trust you," he said.

"Because I know exactly what she is planning and I know exactly how it ends and you do not want to be the rogue who helped frame a future Luna when it all comes out," I said. "And it will come out. I promise you that."

He thought about it for longer than I expected, which meant he was actually considering it, which meant Lyra had not paid him as well as she thought she had.

"Double what she's paying," he said finally.

"Done," I said.

He nodded once and melted back into the trees and I sat alone in the forest in the dark and felt eight months of Lyra 's careful construction dissolve in a single conversation, the whole centre of her plan just gone, pulled out from underneath everything else she was building, and she had absolutely no idea it had happened.

She was going to find out when she came to the dead drop next week and found nothing and sent word to Crest and heard nothing back, and she was going to stand there with her careful plan suddenly missing its most important piece and not know how or why or where it had gone.

And I was going to be at breakfast when she figured it out, eating my eggs, smiling at her across the table, being the sister I had always been.

First blood, I thought, walking back through the forest in the dark with my wolf running warm and easy in my chest.

His name was Crest and I just took Lyra's secret weapon..