CURSED TO BE HIS LUNA

CROWNED

The crowning dress was not a dress.

It was moonlight made solid.

Elder Mara and the pack seamstresses had worked all night. They brought it to me at dawn, while I was still tangled in Ronan and his black sheets, his mark warm against my cheek.

"For the true Luna," Mara said, bowing her head, but her eyes were twinkling. "No Luna has worn silver in a hundred years. Black was Vivian's color. Silver is yours."

Ronan propped himself up on one elbow, his hair messy, his chest bare, his silver mark glowing in the morning light, and stared at the dress.

Then he looked at me, naked under his sheet, silver-eyed, marked.

"No," he said.

Mara froze. "Alpha?"

"No one sees her in that but me," he growled, pulling me closer, possessive even in the morning.

I hit his chest. "Ronan!"

He grinned, that rare real grin that made him look twenty instead of two hundred. "Fine. But I get to take it off later."

Mara pretended not to hear that.

An hour later, they had bathed me in milk and moon flowers, brushed my hair until it shone, and slipped the dress onto me. It was silver-white, sleeveless, backless to show my mark, made of some kind of wolf-silk that clung to every curve and flowed like water. The front was modest but the back was completely open, so everyone could see his bite.

When I walked out, Ronan was waiting at the bottom of the stairs in his full Alpha King suit - black suit, black shirt, no tie, long hair tied back, silver crown on his head. He always wore black. But today, for me, he wore a silver tie.

He looked up and stopped breathing.

The entire hall of wolves behind him stopped breathing too.

His eyes went pure amber, his claws punched out, digging into the banister.

"Mine," he said, so low only I could hear it.

He came up the stairs two at a time, lifted me, and kissed me hard in front of everyone, one hand on my bare back, right over his mark, branding me again.

"Ronan! The ceremony!" Elder Mara hissed, but she was smiling.

He set me down, forehead to mine. "You look like the Moon Goddess herself. I want to lock you back in this room and never let them see you."

"Too late, Alpha King," I whispered, kissing him back. "You already promised me to them."

The ceremony was held in the Moon Forest, where we had marked each other. Overnight, the pack had built a stage of white wood in the clearing where white flowers now bloomed everywhere. Hundreds of wolves sat in the grass, in human form, dressed in white for the first time in fifty years. White was the color of a Luna crowning. They had worn black for fifty years because there was no Luna.

Jace escorted me down an aisle of flower petals. Ronan waited at the end, on a throne made of living wood that had grown overnight, his own throne beside an empty one - mine.

Elder Mara held a crown. It was not gold. It was silver, woven like vines, with a single crescent moon diamond in the center that glowed.

"Maya Cole," she said, her voice carrying through the silent forest. "Born curseless, born wolfless, born under a death curse to save your life. You broke the curse with love. You woke your wolf. You brought the dead forest back to life. Do you accept to be Luna Queen of the Northern Packs, to protect the pups, to heal the sick, to stand beside your King until death and beyond?"

My wolf Luna was howling inside me with joy.

"I accept," I said, my new Luna voice ringing.

Mara placed the crown on my head. It was light as air, but I felt its weight - responsibility, love, pack.

The forest exploded. Wolves howled, humans cheered, drums started beating.

Ronan stood, took my hand, and pulled me onto his throne with him, onto his lap, in front of everyone, crowning me with his body too.

"My Queen," he whispered, kissing my mark while they cheered.

Then he stood and turned to the pack, his arm around me.

"Tonight we crown, tomorrow we build!" he shouted. "This forest is our new home! We will build a city here! A pack city for my Queen, where no pup will ever be called curseless again!"

They roared.

After the ceremony, after the feast where I had to meet a hundred wolves and remember names, after the pups fell asleep on my lap, Ronan carried his tired, crowned Luna back to the truck.

But we didn't go back to the mansion.

He took me deeper into the Moon Forest, to a small lake that had appeared overnight where there had only been mud before. The lake glowed silver under the moon.

He set me down at its edge.

"Alone at last," he said, taking off his suit jacket.

I looked at the lake, then at him, then at my silver dress. "Ronan, it's cold—"

He didn't let me finish. He picked me up and jumped into the lake with me, dress and suit and crown and all.

I screamed, then laughed, because the water was not cold. It was warm, like bath water, and it glowed, and it smelled like him.

The silver dress floated around me like moonlight.

He swam me to the middle, holding me, his crown gone, my crown floating beside us.

"Do you know what this lake is?" he asked, pushing wet hair from my face.

"What?"

"Werewolf legend says when true mates mark each other in a dead place and bring it to life, the Moon Goddess cries with happiness and her tears make a lake. This is her tears. For us."

I stared at the glowing water, at his grey eyes, at his mark on my throat that matched his.

"I love you," I said, for the first time, and meant it. Not as a scared girl. As his Luna, as his equal, as his Queen.

His eyes widened, then softened, then flared amber.

"Say it again," he growled.

"I love you, Ronan Wolfe. My Alpha King. My mate."

He kissed me in the middle of the glowing lake, deep, slow, his hands under my dress, under the water, worshipping his Queen.

"I have waited two hundred years to hear you say that," he whispered against my lips. "Now I will make you say it all night."

He marked me again in the lake, not with fangs, but with love, and I marked him back, and the lake glowed brighter, and the forest around us grew a hundred new trees, and somewhere in the pack city they were building, a new pup was born with silver eyes like mine.

Our story, which had started with a curse in the rain, ended with a crown in a glowing lake.

And it was only the beginning.