The Moon Owns My Heart

CHAPTER FOUR Selene

The letter arrived on my third day at Blood Moon.Rowan brought it to me without comment, which was already notable — Rowan had comments about everything. He set it on the table where I was sitting with Mira, learning the names and territories of every pack within a hundred miles of the northern coast, and then he left without a word and closed the door behind him.I looked at it. Silver Fang seal on the outside, which meant it had come through official channels, which meant whoever sent it had done so deliberately and with full knowledge that Kael's people would see it.I opened it. It was from Selene.Three sentences. What was done to you was wrong. I want you to know that I did not ask for this. I'm sorry. I read it three times. Then I set it face-down on the table.Mira, who had been tactfully studying her maps, looked up."Bad news?" she asked."I don't know what it is," I said honestly. "It's from Selene. The woman he chose."Mira made a sound that was not quite a hum. "What does she want?""To apologise. Or to appear to apologise. I can't tell which.""They're different things.""I know they are."Mira studied me for a moment. "What do you feel?"I thought about it properly. "I don't think she's the enemy," I said finally. "I think she got handed a situation she didn't choose and she's trying to live in it the best she can. That doesn't make what happened to me her fault." I paused. "It also doesn't make us allies.""No," Mira agreed. "But it makes her human. Which is useful information."I tucked the letter into my pocket. I would think about Selene later, when I had more room for it. Right now I had territory maps to learn and a wolf inside me that was just barely beginning to lift her head, and those things took priority. On my fifth day, I attended training.Nobody had told me to. I woke up at six, heard the sounds of the pack moving in the yard below my window, and decided that sitting in my room waiting for my life to restart was not something I was willing to do anymore.I found the training yard on my own — two wrong turns and a staircase I had to backtrack from — and when I arrived, eight Blood Moon wolves were already mid-drill in a formation I didn't recognise.They stopped when they saw me.One of them — a tall woman with close-cropped hair and the posture of someone who had been fighting since before she could talk — looked me over with no particular warmth."Guest quarters are in the east wing," she said."I know," I said. "I came to train."A beat of silence."You're Silver Fang Omega rank," she said. Not cruel about it — just stating what she understood to be relevant facts."I'm nothing rank," I said. "I'm not Silver Fang anymore. And Omega is a Silver Fang classification. Blood Moon doesn't use it." I had read that in Mira's pack history notes on my first night. I had read everything I could find. "I want to train."Her expression did not warm, exactly. But something shifted in it — a reassessment, small but real."You'll slow the group down," she said."Probably," I agreed. "Today I will. Tomorrow I'll slow you down less."She looked at me for another moment. Then she turned back to her wolves."From the top," she said. "She runs the drill with us."Her name was Dane, I learned afterward. She was the pack's lead combat trainer. She ran me through drills that were three levels above what I had trained at in Silver Fang, and I failed most of them, and she made absolutely no accommodation for that, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me.Because in Silver Fang, failure was a verdict. You failed because of what you were — background, Omega, not meant for this.In Blood Moon, failure was a starting point. You failed until you didn't.I came back the next morning. And the one after. Kael watched the morning of my eighth day.I didn't notice him at first — he was standing on the upper walkway above the yard with a coffee cup and the particular quality of stillness that I was starting to recognize as distinctly his, that absence of unnecessary movement, like every action he took was considered in advance and the ones that didn't make the cut simply never happened.I noticed him when I got a drill right for the first time — a defensive sequence that had been defeating me for three straight mornings — and Dane said "better" in a tone that, from her, was roughly equivalent to anyone else doing a standing ovation. I looked up at the involuntary feeling of being watched and found him there.He didn't react to being caught watching. He just nodded, once, and looked back at his coffee."Don't," Dane said from beside me."Don't what?""Whatever you're thinking. You've got a drill to finish."I turned back to the drill. But something in my chest had shifted — a small recalibration, something settling into a slot it hadn't had before.Nobody in Silver Fang had ever watched me train. That afternoon, there was a message from Silver Fang.Not a letter this time. A formal communication, delivered through Rowan, who appeared in the doorway of the room I was using as a study with an expression that was more careful than usual."Silver Fang is requesting your return," he said. "Official channels. Alpha Blackwood is citing a pending pack matter that requires your testimony."I went very still. "What pack matter.""They haven't specified." Rowan leaned against the doorframe. "It's a thin pretext. Everyone knows it's a thin pretext. The question is what Kael does with it.""What will he do?""Deny it," Rowan said. "Obviously. You came here under Article Seven. Silver Fang has no legal claim on you anymore." He paused. "But Lyra — this means Blackwood is paying attention. Men who are sure of their decisions don't send formal requests three days after making them."I thought about that. I thought about what it meant that Damon had reached into official channels already, and what he thought he was going to get back, and why three days of me being somewhere else had apparently been enough to make him reach."Something changed," I said slowly. "In Silver Fang. Since the ceremony."Rowan looked at me with an expression that said I was catching up to something he already knew."What changed?" I asked."Several things," he said. "But the most relevant one is that five of Silver Fang's elder wolves have formally questioned the legitimacy of the rejection. They're citing a precedent from the Accord of Roan — that a fated bond cannot be permanently severed by rejection alone. That it can only be truly broken by the Goddess herself." He let that land. "If that argument holds, Blackwood is still technically bound to you. Which makes everything he's doing with Selene a violation of pack law."The room was very quiet."He rejected me," I said. "In front of everyone.""He did," Rowan said. "And now he might be discovering that some things don't come undone just because you say they do."I sat with that for a long time.I was not happy. I want to be clear about that — I was not sitting there with some warm feeling of satisfaction, because Damon Blackwood being trapped by his own decision did not undo what that decision had done to me. The pain was still there. The memory of the ground under my hands was still there.But something else was there too, quiet and new and still finding its shape.I was not the background wolf anymore. I was not the girl who fell.I was the problem that Damon Blackwood had created for himself, and I was just beginning to understand what that meant.