He Crowned Another Luna, So I Let His Pack Burn

Chapter 1 The Twelfth Moon

The wound in Maeryn's palm had barely closed when her Alpha announced he was taking a second Luna.

She still smelled of the shrine cold stone, crushed silverleaf, the copper-bright tang of her own blood on the tithe bowl. Twelve years of full moons, and Priestess Verah's ritual words never changed: By the blood of the bound, the border holds. Twelve years of walking back down the hill with her palm wrapped and her head high, telling anyone who asked that she'd been praying for the pack's prosperity.

She had been. Just more literally than they knew.

The great lodge was full when she slipped in through the eastern door full and loud, which was wrong for a threat-briefing, and it took her three heartbeats to understand she hadn't walked into a briefing at all.

Garlands. Mead barrels with their wax seals cracked. And on the speaking stone, her mate of twelve years, holding the hand of Ilsabet Renn.

"no wolf here doubts the Goddess's hand in this," Corvan was saying, in the warm carrying voice he used when a decision had already been made and the pack was merely being informed of it. "I scented her at the ridge memorial. On her father's own ground. If that is not Selene's blessing, nothing is."

The lodge roared its approval. Of course it did. Ilsabet Renn had hauled two wounded warriors off the eastern ridge at seventeen, the night her father died holding it. She trained with the young wolves at dawn and delivered winter stores to the widows with her own hands and had never once, in the four years since she'd come of age and risen to prominence, been seen to do a selfish thing where anyone could see it.

Maeryn stood very still by the eastern door, tithe-wound aching under its wrapping, and watched her marriage end to applause.

Corvan found her in the crowd he always could and his expression did something complicated. Not guilt. She searched for guilt and found only that faint, bracing regret men wear when they're about to ask you to be reasonable.

"Maeryn." The lodge quieted, hundreds of eyes swinging to her like weathervanes. "Come. Stand with us."

She came. She was the Luna of Hollowmere; she did not scurry and she did not flee. She crossed the floor at her own pace, and she watched Ilsabet watch her come and there it was, the thing nobody else would catch, because nobody else had spent twelve years reading rooms for this pack's survival. Behind the golden girl's brave, humble smile, something counted her. Cataloged her age. Priced her.

"Luna Maeryn." Ilsabet bowed her head, exactly deep enough. Her voice was clear, pitched for the rafters, a war hero's daughter accepting a burden. "I never dreamed of this honor. I know what you've built here. I only hope to serve Hollowmere half as well and I swear, before the whole pack, that I'll never take what's yours."

Beautiful. Every word humble, every word public, and buried in the middle of it, the knife: what's yours as if it were already being divided. As if Ilsabet were the gracious one. The young warriors near the front actually growled their approval. Somewhere behind Maeryn, old Beta Odran had gone dead quiet.

"You couldn't take what's mine," Maeryn said, letting it land soft as a blessing, watching Ilsabet's lashes flicker as she tried to parse it. "No one alive could. Welcome to Hollowmere, Ilsabet."

Corvan exhaled, visibly relieved, checking the box marked first Luna handled. He caught Maeryn's wrapped hand in his the tithe hand, and even now, twelve years on, he didn't ask; he had never once asked and pressed it to his lips before the whole pack.

"The moon rites are in nine days," he announced. "We'll seal the second bond then. Hollowmere has never been safer, never been stronger and now Selene has made us more."

Never been safer. Maeryn looked at her mate his certainty, his pride, the twelve quiet years he genuinely believed he had built and felt something in her chest go still and cold and very, very clear.

He didn't know. He had never known. The treaty priestesses had demanded secrecy as the tithe's price, and she had honored it through every full moon, every wrapped palm, every year the Varkoth never came. The wards were not the Goddess's gift. They were not Corvan's strength. They were her, opened vein by opened vein, and they had exactly one moon of power left in them before they needed feeding again.

A set-aside Luna owed no tithe. That was the law of the shrine, older than the pack itself. The moment a second Luna was sealed, Maeryn's obligation ended freely, lawfully, and silently, unless she chose otherwise.

Nine days until the rites. One moon until the wards began to starve.

"Priestess Verah will want to bless the bond," Maeryn said pleasantly.

Corvan smiled, squeezing her wrapped hand, oblivious to what he was holding. "Then it's settled."

It was, she thought. Just not the thing he believed was settled.

She was halfway back to the eastern door, the pack already toasting behind her, when Odran fell into step beside her, voice low and urgent. "Luna. The dawn patrol found something at the north ward-stone. Corvan's not been told yet he was… occupied." A muscle worked in the old Beta's jaw. "The stone was cracked, Luna. Hairline, but weeping. Krath said it looked like something on the far side had been pushing."

Twelve years, and the Varkoth had never so much as tested the wards.

They could feel it too, then. The tithe running thin. The border going soft.

Maeryn looked down at her wrapped palm at the blood price nobody had ever thanked her for and made no decision at all. That was the terrifying part, she'd think later. She didn't have to do anything.

All she had to do was exactly what her Alpha had asked of her.

Step aside. Gracefully.