The Moon Owns My Heart

CHAPTER TWO The Offer

I sat in the trees for an hour.Maybe longer. Time does strange things to you after a rejection — stretches and compresses in ways that don't follow the rules you're used to. What I know is that the torchlight in the clearing burned down and the crowd dispersed and the sound of the pack's voices faded back toward the main territory, and I stayed on the cold ground with my back against a pine tree and my arms wrapped around my own chest like I was trying to hold something in.The mate bond was gone. I could feel its absence the way you feel a missing tooth — that hollow aching space where something should be, the way your tongue keeps going back to it even though going back makes it worse. Three hours ago I had felt it like a warm thread running from the centre of me out into the world, tethering me to something. Now there was nothing there but a raw frayed end and the cold.I should have been making a plan. I knew that. I was twenty-one years old and Omega-ranked in a pack that had just watched its Alpha publicly reject me, and if I was going to survive what came next with any dignity at all I needed to move. Needed to decide where I was going to sleep tonight that wasn't my assigned room, which technically still belonged to the pack, in a packhouse full of wolves who had all stood in that clearing and watched me fall.I should have been moving.Instead I sat against my tree and I let myself be absolutely wrecked for a little while, because I had held it together in public and I thought I had earned that much. I heard footsteps about twenty minutes in.Not from the direction of the pack territory. From the north.My wolf — quiet and wounded as she was — put her head up. The footsteps were even, unhurried, and wrong somehow. Not Silver Fang cadence. Not someone I knew.I got to my feet before the man came through the trees, which was the only dignified choice I had left. I was not going to be found sitting in the dirt.He stopped at the tree line.He was not what I expected. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in dark clothing that was practical rather than ceremonial, with the kind of stillness about him that you only develop through long, deliberate practice. He looked at me without urgency, without the particular expression people usually wore when they looked at me — that mixture of polite dismissal and mild surprise that I had spent twenty-one years trying to pretend I didn't notice.He just looked. Level and calm and waiting.There were two men behind him, half-visible in the trees. I clocked them without letting my eyes move, which was a habit I had developed in a pack where reading a room quickly was a survival skill."Lyra Hale," the man said.Not a question. He already knew my name."Who are you?" I asked."Kael Nightshade." He watched my face when he said it. He was expecting a reaction, I thought — and he got one, because I would have had to have been raised in complete isolation not to recognise that name. Alpha Kael Nightshade. Blood Moon Pack. Damon's greatest rival and the wolf that every Silver Fang mother used as a cautionary tale when her children were young. Dangerous. Cold. Not to be trusted. Not to be engaged with, under any circumstances.I had been publicly humiliated in front of my entire pack tonight. I was standing in the trees at the edge of Silver Fang territory with nowhere to go. I decided that not to be engaged with could wait."What do you want?" I said.Something moved in his expression. I thought it might have been respect, which surprised me."I attended the ceremony tonight," he said. "Uninvited. From the tree line. I saw what happened."I said nothing. My jaw was doing something I couldn't quite control."I am invoking Article Seven of the Northern Pack Accords," he said. "The right of another Alpha to offer claim to a rejected wolf before she leaves pack territory." He paused. "I'm offering you a place in Blood Moon Pack, Lyra. Formally and on the record."The silence that followed was the kind that has weight to it."Why," I said finally.He didn't hesitate. "Because I watched Damon Blackwood reject a wolf the Moon Goddess chose for him, in front of two hundred people, for political reasons dressed up as principle. And I watched those two hundred people stand there and let it happen." His voice was even throughout, which was somehow more unnerving than if he had been angry. "I know what it costs a wolf to walk out of a circle like that still standing. I'm offering you somewhere to stand."I looked at him for a long time. I was trying to find the angle — because there was always an angle, I had learned that much in twenty-one years — and I couldn't find it, which made me more suspicious, not less."You know what they say about Blood Moon Pack," I said."Most of it is true," he said, without apology. "We are not gentle. We are not warm. We do not do things simply because they are traditional or because they are expected." Something shifted in his face — not quite softening, but opening. "What I can tell you is that in Blood Moon Pack, wolves are judged by what they do. Not by what rank they were born into."I thought about the clearing. About two hundred wolves watching me fall.I thought about Petra's hand pressed to her mouth, and the guilt in her eyes, and the fact that she had said you look nice instead of the truth."If I go with you," I said carefully, "I'm not your property. I'm not a pawn in whatever game you're playing with Damon. Whatever this is — political strategy, a power move, revenge — I am not the piece you get to move around a board."He looked at me for a moment. Then he said: "No. You're not."Not you won't be. You're not. Like he had already decided that before he walked into these trees, and my saying it out loud was just me catching up.I looked back at the territory that had been my home for twenty-one years. The faint orange glow of pack lights through the trees. The smell of wood smoke and pine and the particular cold of a January night that I had known my whole life.Damon had stood in that clearing and said not strong enough. Had said not the Luna this pack needs. Had said it in front of everyone and then looked slightly past me so he wouldn't have to see my face when the bond broke.I reached down and picked up the small bag I had been sitting beside — the one I had packed this morning, because some part of me that was smarter than the rest of me had known, and I had packed it and not let myself think about why."Okay," I said.Kael Nightshade said nothing. He turned back toward the north and he started walking, and I followed him, and the Silver Fang territory went dark behind me. I did not look back.I wanted to. Every step of the first mile I wanted to turn around, and every step of the first mile I kept walking.That is the only thing I am proud of from that night. That I kept walking.