The Luna He Threw Away Runs the Rival Pack Now

Chapter Two: The Border She Chose

I did not run.

Running is what they expected. Running is what a thrown-away omega does, stumbling and weeping into the dark until something with teeth finds her. And I was done, as of one hour ago, doing what the packs expected.

So when the blade slid free in the shadows, I turned toward it.

"You're Nightriver," I said. "You're on the wrong side of your own border, wolf, so before you point that at me, ask yourself why an Ashfall Luna is walking east toward you instead of west toward home."

A pause. Then a soft laugh, and the shape detached from the trees and became a man. Tall. Dark. A warrior's build and a warrior's stillness, and around his throat the black-and-silver of the Nightriver pack, the pack Ashfall had feuded with for thirty years, the pack whose alpha the pups were taught to fear before they could walk.

"Because you've lost your mind," he said. "Rejection does that. I've seen it. They wander." He tilted his head. "You should sit down before you fall down, little healer. The bond-break will drop you soon enough."

"It already tried." I lifted my chin. "I'm still standing. Take me to your alpha."

That got me a real reaction. His brows rose. "You want me to take a cast-out Ashfall Luna to Alpha Dain Corwin. The Lycan King. The wolf your pups call the Nightriver Beast." He almost smiled. "Why would I do that instead of just leaving you here for the cold?"

"Because I know things," I said. "I was Ashfall's Luna and Ashfall's healer for eleven months, and there is a poison moving through my old pack that is going to spread, and I know who is brewing it, and I know what she wants, and your alpha is going to want to hear every word of it before she turns it on you next." I met his eyes. "You can leave me for the cold. Or you can bring your king the best intelligence he has had on Ashfall in thirty years, walking in on its own two feet, asking to talk. Choose fast. The bond-break is coming and I would rather be indoors when it hits."

He studied me for a long moment.

I have been studied by a great many powerful men, and most of them are weighing what they can take. This one was weighing what I was worth, which is a different thing, and a rarer one.

"Bael," he said at last, sheathing the blade. "My name. If you're going to walk into the Beast's hall and lie to him, I'd like to know the name of the woman I'll have to kill for it."

"Wren," I said. "And I don't lie. It's a useless habit. The truth is frightening enough."

"We'll see," Bael said, but something in the set of his shoulders had shifted, the way a man shifts when he has decided you are a problem worth solving instead of a body worth burying.

He took me east, over the border I had been raised to fear, into the dark of the enemy's woods, and the whole way the bond-break clawed at me, waves of cold and grief and the wolf inside me keening for a mate who had thrown her to the snow. I did not let it show. I had a secret to protect and a pack to destroy and a child who was going to be born somewhere, and none of those things had room for me falling down.

Nightriver's hold was nothing like Ashfall's.

Ashfall was all gold and show, a beautiful pack that rotted quietly from the inside. Nightriver was stone and firelight and hard clean edges, a pack that did not care how it looked because it cared very much whether it survived. Warriors watched me pass with open suspicion. No one bowed. No one performed.

And at the top of the hall, in a chair of black wood, sat the Nightriver Beast.

He was younger than the stories. That was the first thing. The pups of Ashfall described a monster, and what sat in the chair was a man perhaps thirty, broad and scarred and utterly still, with pale grey eyes that moved over me once, head to foot, and missed nothing.

"An Ashfall Luna," said Alpha Dain Corwin, in a voice like gravel under a boot. "In my hall. Rejected, by the smell of it, and pregnant, by the way she's holding herself." His grey eyes lifted to mine. "You've had a busy night, little healer. Give me one reason I shouldn't send your head back to Roderic Ashfall as a courtesy."

The hall went silent.

And I understood that this was the moment. That everything, my life, my child's life, the whole long revenge I had promised on the packhouse stones, came down to the next thing out of my mouth in front of a king who ate my kind of pack for sport.

So I told him the truth, because the truth was frightening enough.

"Because in six weeks," I said, "the poison in Ashfall is going to reach your water too. And I am the only person alive who knows how to stop it. Send my head to Roderic, and you lose the only healer who can save your pack from what is coming. Or keep me breathing, and I will hand you Ashfall's throat." I held his terrible grey gaze. "You threw me nothing to lose, Alpha. That makes me the most dangerous ally you will ever have. Kill me, or use me. But decide quickly, because I have been holding off a bond-break for two hours, and I am about to hit your floor."

And then, exactly as I said it, the wave finally took me, and the world tipped, and the last thing I saw before the dark was the Lycan King coming up out of his chair faster than a man that size should move.