The Discarded Luna

Father's daughter

Kade Ashborne started to laugh.

It was the worst sound I had ever heard him make. We've both laugh from the kitchen at midnight when we were twenty and stealing bread. This one came up out of his chest in pieces, high and delighted and rotten.

I've knew Kade many version but not this villain version of him, trying to taunt me with the past he had once protected me from.

Rhydian stopped walking.

He'd been three strides from his convoy, hand already on the door of the lead vehicle. He turned around slowly, Kade laugh has crawled up behind him.

"What does she mean?" he asked.

Kade laughed harder. He put a hand flat on the doorframe and let his head hang, shoulders shaking, and when he lifted his face, his face was filled with wicked grimace and there were actual tears at the corners of his eyes.

"Kade." My voice cracked. "Stop it."

"Ashborne." Rhydian's tone had gone very flat. "Whose daughter is she."

He said nothing and kept laughing. Kade wiped his eye with the heel of his hand and shook his head, still grinning, and I understood with a slow horror that he wasn't going to answer — that he'd realized in the space of a breath that not answering was the sharpest knife he had left, and he intended to use it until it broke.

And that was the part of him I had never seen.

I want to be honest about this, because it matters. Kade Ashborne had not always been cruel to me. He had been the best thing that ever happened to me. When I was fifteen and the pack pups threw stones at my back and called me traitor-get, it was Kade — sixteen, gangly, not yet Alpha, who put himself between me and the stones and took two of them on the shoulder without flinching.

When the elders wanted me put out past the tree line, it was Kade who stood in the hall and said she stays or I go.

For four years he was the only warm thing in a cold territory. He was my shining armor. He walked me through a pack that hated my blood, and when he became Alpha at twenty-three the first thing he did was take my hand in front of all of them and call me his mate and his Luna, and dare a single one of them to say a word.

That was the man I had waited three years for. Not the man who forgot my ceremony. Not the man who put my moonstone on his brother's widow.

And not this man, laughing in the frost while a Alpha king Rhydian asked about my father.

Rhydian moved.

I didn't see him cross the ground. One second he was by the convoy and the next he had two fists in Kade's shirt and Kade's spine was against the courtyard wall hard enough to knock mortar dust out of the stone.

"ANSWER ME." He roared.

The Alpha King's voice came out with all of it behind it, the full weight of his aura that ruled a third of the north and the courtyard went down. Two hundred wolves, flat. Rhydian's own soldiers with their heads to their chests. Even the horses in the far stable screamed from his Alpha king aura.

Kade did not go down.

He was an Alpha too, born and blooded, and he set his jaw and forced his chin up under Rhydian's fists and held. Blood ran out of his left nostril from the pressure of it. His knees buckled an inch and locked again.

"Ask her," Kade rasped, grinning red. "Ask your runt Luna."

I heard someone behind me start to explain in a whisper, one of the young omega, telling a girl who was too young to remember and the words came apart before they reached me and reassembled somewhere older.

Beta Voss.

My father had been Beta to Kade's father. Right hand. Sword hand. Godfather to Rowan. And when I was eleven years old, three border villages burned in one night, and the wolves who burned them came through a gate that had been left open, and it was my father's seal on the order that opened it.

They said he sold Blackthorn to the Ravenmoor pack for gold and land. They said he'd been bought for two years before anyone noticed. They tried him in the great hall in front of the whole pack, and my mother stood there holding my hand while the elders read the count of the dead out loud, name by name, forty-one names, and then they took him down into the dungeon under the north tower and they left him there.

For six years. Not executed — Kade's father wanted him alive, wanted the pack to walk past that door and remember. My mother died in the fourth year. In the seventh they exiled him past the northern line and I never saw him again, and I was seventeen and I had no name that wasn't a curse.

Traitor's daughter, that was what they called me. That was what Kade stood in front of.

That was why I never fought for the moonstone. Why I said of course two hundred times. Why I drank whatever was put in my hand and thanked her for it.

Because somewhere under all of it I had believed, the way you believe a thing that's been said to you since you were eleven, that I was fortunate to be here at all.

"Whose. Daughter." Rhydian slammed him into the wall again.

And Kade laughed.

The shift took him mid-laugh. It came up out of him like water breaking a dam — bones going, coat splitting, the laugh turning to a snarl halfway out of his throat and then there was a black wolf the size of a plough horse in the courtyard with its hackles up and its teeth in the air, and Rhydian's coat was hanging shredded off his shoulders as he stepped back and let his own wolf come.

They both shifted.

The crowd broke and scattered.

Because Rhydian Vale's wolf was white and twice bigger than Kade wolf.

Kade's wolf took one step forward and stopped.

I watched him tremble. My mate, the Alpha of Blackthorn, the man who razed a Ravenmoor war band with forty wolves — stood in his own courtyard and shook, and every wolf watching saw it, and there was no coming back from that.

The white wolf came for him.

One bound, no wind-up, forepaw rising, claws out and level with the black wolf's eyes and Kade didn't even move to block, because he couldn't, because his body had already surrendered even if his teeth hadn't.

I scre

amed the answer alpha king Rhydian had shifted for, "MY FATHER IS THE TRAITOR!"