The Moon Goddess Made No Mistakes

The Rite

I couldn't sleep.

I lay in the dark of my rooms and stared at the ceiling and felt Selene's heartbeat in my chest like a second pulse, the way I'd felt it for three years except now it was afraid, and the fear was mine too, and I couldn't do a single thing about either of us.

The Choosing.

Three nights. Three nights and she'd stand under the Blood Moon and the elders would make her choose between me and my brother, and one of us would be bound to silence.

Whatever it costs.

The words wouldn't leave me alone. Maren had said them like a knife wrapped in velvet, soft and final, and no one in that hall had looked at me and told me what they meant. The elders hadn't. Lucian wouldn't. And Selene Selene had been too afraid to ask.

I was afraid to ask. That was the thing I couldn't admit, lying there in the dark, an alpha of the Blood Moon Pack, terrified of a word an old woman had thrown at me like a curse.

I'd been afraid before. The night I rejected Selene, I'd been afraid. I'd stood in front of the pack with my brother at my shoulder and called her a mistake because Lucian had looked at me with that cold, certain face and said she'll weaken us, Kael, you know she will, and I'd believed him, because he was my twin, because twins trust twins, because I'd spent my whole life letting Lucian do the thinking for both of us.

I'd been a coward.

Three years later, watching Selene stand in that hall with the bond glowing between all three of us and the pack calling her old power back to life, I understood that the cowardice hadn't cost me a mate. It had cost her everything. And now the pack wanted her to pay again to break the bond the Moon had built, to choose, to destroy one of us and I was still afraid, and it was still my fault.

I got up. I couldn't lie there anymore.

I needed to know what the rite cost.

The archives were in the oldest part of the pack house, stone and dust and light that hadn't been replaced in years. I went there because that was where the old laws lived, and the rite was old law, older than the pack, older than the Blood Moon name.

No one went there. I'd never gone there. That, I understood now, was probably the point.

I found the book behind a false panel in the wall, a leather volume so old the pages crackled when I touched them. The Rite of the Choosing. I'd never heard of it. I'd never heard of a triad mate, either, until the bond snapped into place three years ago and I'd spent every day pretending it hadn't.

I read the rite.

I read it twice.

Then I sat down on the floor of the archive, because my legs wouldn't hold me anymore, and I read it a third time, hoping I'd misunderstood, hoping the words would rearrange themselves into something I could survive.

They didn't.

The bond broken by the rite, whatever it costs.

The rite didn't just silence the bond. The rite didn't just free the chosen and release the unchosen. The rite took. It took the part of the unchosen wolf that had been given to the bond, the part that loved, the part that the Moon had touched. The part that made a wolf a wolf.

The one not chosen didn't walk away.

The one not chosen lost his wolf.

Forever.

I don't know how long I sat there.

Long enough for the candle to burn down. Long enough for the cold to seep through the stone into my bones. Long enough to understand, fully, what I'd done not three years ago, but right then, in that hall, when I'd let the elders announce the Choosing without fighting it. I'd let them put a death sentence on one of us. On my brother, or on me. And Selene would have to deliver it, because the pack demanded it, because the Moon's bond couldn't be unmade any other way.

She would have to choose, and choosing would break one of us, and the one she broke would lose the wolf inside him would lose the thing that made him an alpha, a Draven, a man.

I'd rejected her once, in cowardice.

Now the pack was asking her to do it again, in ritual, and one of us would pay for it the rest of his life.

I closed the book. I stood up. I walked out of the archive, and I didn't put the book back, because I was going to show it to Selene, because she deserved to know what they were asking of her, because I was done letting the wolves around me hide the worst of things from the woman they were about to break.

I made it halfway down the corridor before Lucian stepped out of the dark in front of me.

He'd been waiting. I don't know how long. His face was the same cold, careful mask it had always been, and for the first time in my life I looked at my twin and didn't know what was under it.

"You read it," he said. Not a question.

"You knew." My voice came out raw. "You knew what the rite cost. You knew, and you stood in that hall and let them announce it, and you didn't say a word."

"Because there was nothing to say." His pale eyes were steady. "The rite is the only way, Kael. The pack can't hold a triad bond. The Moon made a mistake "

"She never makes mistakes." I heard my own voice break, and I didn't care. "You're the one who taught me that, Lucian. You're the one who used to say it. And now you're standing here telling me the Moon made a mistake because it's easier than admitting you're about to lose your wolf."

Something moved behind his eyes. A flicker. The first c***k in that cold mask I'd ever seen.

"I've known what the rite costs since I was twelve," he said quietly. "Our father made me learn it. He said one of us would have to face it someday. He just didn't know which one." He looked at me, and for one second I saw the fear, the same fear I'd been drowning in, the fear Lucian had hidden from me our whole lives because one of us had to be the cold one. "I knew I'd lose, Kael. The moment the bond snapped into place. I knew it was going to be me."

I stared at him.

"You think she'll choose you," I said.

"I know she'll choose you." He said it the way he said everything flat, final, certain. But his hands, at his sides, were shaking. "She's afraid of me. She's always been afraid of me. You're the one she ran to stop the fight. You're the one whose heartbeat she reached for first. I've felt it down the bond for three years, brother. I'm not blind." A pause. "I just didn't want you to see it."

The corridor was silent. The candle in my hand guttered.

"You let the elders announce a rite you knew would take your wolf," I said. "You let her be the one who"

"Because if I refuse, the pack breaks the bond by force, and both of us lose our wolves, and she dies with us." He looked at me, and the mask came down again, smooth and cold, but too late I'd seen under it. "One of us has to survive this, Kael. One of us has to be the one who stays whole and protects her. It was always going to be you."

I looked at my twin.

I'd spent my whole life letting Lucian do the thinking for both of us, and the one time he'd thought it through, he'd decided to die a little so I could live, and he hadn't told me, and I hated him for it, and I loved him for it, and I didn't know which feeling was worse.

"There has to be another way," I said.

"There isn't."

"There is." I held up the book. "The old Luna didn't choose. That's why they erased her from the histories, Lucian not because she was wrong, but because she found the way out of the rite. She broke the rule. She kept them both."

Lucian went very still.

The candle flickered between us, and for the first time in three years, I saw hope move behind my brother's cold eyes, small, dangerous, terrified.

"Show me," he said.