Alpha Mute Bride

The letter arrived on a Tuesday. Selene Ashwood knew something was wrong the moment Alpha Brent Creed summoned her to his office. He never summoned her. In twelve years of living under his roof, she had learned that the best thing she could do for herself was remain invisible. She cooked. She cleaned. She stayed out of the way. And Creed, for the most part, pretended she did not exist. So when his Beta knocked on her small bedroom door at seven in the morning and told her the Alpha wanted to see her, Selene sat on the edge of her bed for a full minute before she moved. She dressed carefully. Plain grey dress. Hair brushed back. Hands steady, even though her chest was not. She walked down the long corridor of the Crescent Moon Pack house with her notebook clutched against her ribs. She never went anywhere without it. The notebook was her voice. Three hundred and forty two pages of conversations, observations, questions, and things she would never say out loud even if she could. She had filled seventeen of them since she was nine years old. Creed's office door was already open. He was standing by the window when she entered, his broad back turned to her, hands folded behind him. He was a big man. The kind of big that had once intimidated her terribly. Now she simply found it tiring. He did not turn around when she came in. "Sit down, girl." She sat. He waited another moment before he faced her, and Selene noticed immediately that he would not quite meet her eyes. In her experience, that meant one of two things. Either he had done something that benefited him at her expense, or he was about to. He picked up a letter from his desk and held it out toward her. She took it. Read it slowly. Read it again. The words did not change on the second reading. They did not soften or rearrange themselves into something more reasonable. They stayed exactly as they were, precise and formal and absolute. By order of the Ironmoon Pack and under the authority of Alpha Damien Cole, the following arrangement has been agreed upon between the Crescent Moon Pack and the Ironmoon Pack. Selene Ashwood, ward of Alpha Brent Creed, is hereby confirmed as the future Luna of the Ironmoon Pack. The ceremony will take place in four days. Transportation will be arranged. Selene looked up from the letter. Creed had finally found something on his desk to study very carefully. She opened her notebook. Found a clean page. Wrote four words and turned it around to face him. You sold me again. He had the decency to look uncomfortable. Only for a second, and only barely, but she had learned to read small things in people. It was what happened when you could not speak. You watched instead. You noticed the flicker before the mask came back up. "It is an arrangement," he said. "A political arrangement that benefits both packs. You should be grateful. Damien Cole is the most powerful Alpha in this region. You will want for nothing." She turned to a new page. Does he know I am mute? "He knows." Does he know why? Something crossed Creed's face then. Something that looked almost like guilt and then thought better of it and left before it could settle. "That is not relevant," he said. Selene closed her notebook. She looked at him for a long moment. She had spent a great deal of her life looking at people who had made decisions about her without consulting her, and she had learned that the most unsettling thing she could do in response was simply look. People who expected her to cry or plead or write frantic questions across her pages were always unbalanced by stillness. Creed cleared his throat. "You leave in four days," he said. "I suggest you spend the time preparing." She stood. She walked to the door. At the threshold she stopped, turned back, and opened her notebook one final time. How much did he pay you? Creed said nothing. Selene walked out. She did not run back to her room. She walked, the same measured pace she always used, past the kitchen where two of the pack women were already whispering, past the younger wolves who stopped and stared as she went by, past the back door and down the three stone steps that led to the narrow strip of garden behind the pack house. It was barely a garden. A few overgrown hedges, a broken bench, a patch of soil where she grew herbs because no one else wanted to and the kitchen needed them. It was the one place on the entire Crescent Moon property that was hers, even if it was not technically hers. She had claimed it through quiet persistence and the simple fact that nobody else cared about it. She sat on the broken bench. She looked at the letter again. Four days. She thought about what she knew of Damien Cole. Which was not much, and none of it was warm. He was twenty seven years old and had been Alpha since nineteen. His pack was the largest in the region by territory and the most feared by reputation. The Ironmoon Pack did not lose wars. It did not lose negotiations. It produced warriors and strategists and it was led by a man who was said to be as cold and immovable as the mountain the pack house sat against. He had not chosen her. She understood that. Whatever political equation had resulted in this letter, whatever debt Creed had agreed to settle by handing her over, it had nothing to do with Damien Cole wanting her specifically. She was a variable in someone else's arrangement. She had been a variable her entire life. She opened her notebook and wrote, not for anyone else to read, just for herself. He will not look at me. Men like that never do. I will be a signature on a document and a chair at the end of a dinner table and a room down the hall that he walks past without stopping. I know how this goes. I have been invisible for twelve years. I can be invisible for however long this lasts. She stopped writing. Read what she had written. Then, slowly, she crossed out the last line. She did not know why. Only that something in her resisted it. Some quiet stubborn thing that had survived twelve years of Creed's indifference and the pack's casual cruelty and the daily reality of living in a body that had decided, a long time ago, that the world did not deserve its voice. That thing was not ready to commit to invisibility. Not yet. She heard the back door open. She did not turn around. Only one person ever came out here. Nora sat down beside her on the broken bench, close enough that their shoulders touched. She looked at the letter in Selene's hands. Her face did the thing it always did when she was trying not to cry, the small furrow between her brows, the hard press of her lips. Nora reached over and took Selene's free hand. Squeezed it once. Then she signed, slowly and clearly, in the private language they had built together over years of practice and necessity. When? Selene signed back. Four days. Nora's grip on her hand tightened. Are you scared? Selene considered the question honestly. She looked at the letter. She thought about the mountain pack and the cold Alpha and the life she was being delivered to like a package with someone else's name on the outside. She signed back. I have been scared every day since I was three years old. This is just a new reason. Nora made a sound that was half laugh and half sob and pulled her into a hug that Selene allowed because it was Nora and because there were exactly four days left and she wanted to use them well. Above the broken bench and the small unowned garden, the morning sky was pale and wide and completely indifferent. Selene Ashwood was going to be a Luna. She had not been asked. She was going anyway.