The Rouges Moon

Chapter 6

Idris put me through three days of testing before she'd say a single word to anyone about whether I was worth keeping, and every single one of those days, she watched me like she was waiting for me to make a mistake she already suspected I was going to make.

I didn't blame her for it. I'd have done the same thing in her position, back when I was still someone who trusted the world enough to think caution was a virtue rather than a survival skill.

What surprised me was how much I still recognized in her, four years and one death removed from the version of Idris who used to bring me tea in the mornings and complain, half fondly, about how stubborn her cousin was.

She didn't know me anymore. She'd never known Vera Sharp at all. And yet something in the specific, careful way she assessed everyone around her, weighing loyalty against liability with the patience of someone who'd learned the hard way that trust given too quickly gets people killed, felt exactly like the woman I remembered.

"Again," she said, on the third morning, watching me spar against one of her senior warriors in the training yard. "You're pulling your last strike."

"I dropped him," I pointed out, which was true. The warrior in question, a broad-shouldered man named Osric who'd been unnecessarily condescending about sparring against "the rogue" for two straight days, was currently sitting in the dirt looking considerably less condescending than he had five minutes earlier.

"You dropped him without finishing it," Idris said. "There's a difference. Out here, that difference gets you killed."

I thought about the crossbow woman in the market square four years earlier, the moment I'd chosen not to end a life I easily could have, and how certain I'd been at that moment that the choice mattered, that some part of who I used to be was worth preserving even inside a body built for exactly the opposite instinct.

"I know how to finish things when it matters," I said. "This didn't."

Idris studied me for a long moment, and something in her expression shifted, not quite approval, but something adjacent to it, the recognition of a philosophy she hadn't expected to find in a rogue with my particular set of skills.

"Most people who fight the way you do don't bother with restraint," she said. "It usually gets trained out of them."

"Maybe I never had it trained out."

"Maybe," she said, in a tone that told me she didn't quite believe that, and also that she wasn't going to push it any further today, and walked off to deal with something else, leaving me standing in the training yard with Osric groaning theatrically in the dirt and every muscle in my body aching in the particular satisfied way that only comes from a fight you actually won cleanly.

I settled into pack life faster than I expected to, and slower than I wanted.

The fast part was easy to understand. I'd been Ashgrave's Luna once, however briefly, however long ago in a version of this timeline that hadn't happened yet.

I knew the rhythms of this place in my bones, knew which warriors would eventually rise through the ranks and which would wash out, knew the specific creak of the third step in the eastern barracks and exactly how long it took the kitchens to start smelling like bread on baking mornings.

None of that had changed in four years, because none of it had happened yet, and there was something deeply strange about walking through a life I already half remembered living, except now I was watching it from the outside, a stranger in a home that used to be mine.

The slow part was harder. Trust, in a pack like this, wasn't handed out. It was built, warrior by warrior, mission by mission, small moment by small moment, and I'd spent enough of my life being handed things too easily, back when I was Wren and everyone assumed the best of a Luna simply because the title suggested she deserved it, that I found myself almost grateful for how hard Idris and her warriors made me work for every inch of acceptance.

Almost. Some days it just felt exhausting, being watched that closely by people who had every right to watch me closely and no idea how much I actually had to hide.

Rhys was the strangest part of all of it.

He didn't single me out, not obviously, not in any way that would have drawn the kind of attention that could have gotten either of us in trouble with pack gossip.

But I noticed, over those first few weeks, the small ways he found reasons to be in rooms I was in. A council meeting about border patrols that technically didn't require the newest recruit's presence, except he asked for my opinion on gully terrain anyway, since I'd apparently proven I understood it well enough to clear four fighters out of one.

A late evening in the training yard where I was working through forms alone, and he happened to be crossing the grounds at exactly that hour, and stayed to watch, and then stayed longer to correct my stance on a strike I hadn't actually gotten wrong, just because, I suspected, neither of us wanted the conversation to end yet.

"You keep finding excuses to talk to me," I said to him, one evening about a month in, more bluntly than I probably should have, though four years of rogue life had worn most of my old careful diplomacy down to something rougher and more direct.

He didn't deny it, which I hadn't expected.

"I know," he said. "I don't entirely understand it myself." He was quiet for a moment, looking out at the training yard rather than at me, the same careful, considering expression I remembered from the great hall on my first night here.

"There's something about you that feels like I'm supposed to already know it. Every time I think I've figured out what it is, it slips away again."

My chest ached with an intensity that frightened me, because some small, foolish, exhausted part of me wanted, badly, to just tell him. To say his name the way I used to say it, to watch recognition finally break across his face, to end four years of careful, grinding solitude in a single sentence.

I didn't. I couldn't. Not yet, and maybe, some cold practical voice in my head reminded me, not ever, because the version of him standing in front of me right now had never ordered anyone's death, had never let a witch's lie erase seven months of marriage without so much as turning around to look at the woman he was destroying.

This Rhys was still, in some fundamental way, a stranger to what he was going to become, and I didn't yet know whether telling him the truth would save him from that future or simply hand Marisol Thorne an early, more efficient way to finish what she hadn't started yet.

"Maybe I just remind you of someone," I said instead, echoing what I'd told him that first night, and watched something in his face flicker with what might have been disappointment, though he covered it quickly.

"Maybe," he said, and let the subject drop.

I lay awake a long time that night, in the small room Idris had assigned me in the warriors' quarters, staring at a ceiling I half remembered from a very different room in this exact building, and thought about Garrick's words at the crossroads outside Hollow's End. About being allowed to want more than just his ruin.

I still didn't know what I wanted. I knew what I'd planned, four years of careful, deliberate preparation building toward a moment I hadn't fully mapped out yet, some eventual reckoning where Rhys Ashgrave finally understood exactly who he'd murdered and exactly what he'd lost because of it.

I hadn't planned for the possibility that getting close enough to accomplish that might mean falling in love with him twice, once as a woman who trusted him completely and once as a woman who knew, with absolute certainty, exactly how badly that trust was eventually going to be repaid.

I closed my eyes and made myself think, instead, about Marisol Thorne, about the three years still ahead of me before whatever poison she was already quietly feeding into Ashgrave's council would fully take root. I had time, I reminded myself. Time to figure out how to stop what was coming instead of simply preparing to survive it.

Time, if I was being honest with myself in the dark, to figure out whether some part of this story could still end differently than the one I'd already lived through once.

I didn't fall asleep for a long while after that, and when I finally did, for the first time in four years, I dreamed of a version of Rhys Ashgrave who never turned his back on me at all.