The Rouges Moon

Chapter 3

It took us eleven days to reach the border of Ashgrave territory, and somewhere around day six I stopped flinching every time I caught my own reflection.

That should have bothered me more than it did. A week earlier I'd screamed at a puddle.

Now I could look at Vera Sharp's face in a still pond and just see a face, sharp cheekbones and all, the way you'd look at a coat you'd gotten used to wearing even though it wasn't yours.

I wondered, walking beside Callum through the last stretch of scrubland before the tree line thickened into real forest, what that said about me. Whether grief just runs out of road eventually, or whether I was quietly becoming someone who could bury things faster than I used to be able to.

Both, probably. I was learning that most true things about myself these days came in pairs like that. Uncomfortable, and also useful.

We stopped in a rogue settlement called Hollow's End, a scattered collection of cabins and lean-tos tucked into a valley just outside Ashgrave's formal border, the kind of place packs tolerated because chasing off every unclaimed wolf in the region cost more than it was worth.

Nobody there asked questions they didn't need answered. Nobody there had heard of Vera Sharp, or Boras Kade, or a Luna who supposedly drowned in a river some hundred miles south under circumstances nobody outside Ashgrave's inner circle would ever be told the truth of.

It was, in other words, exactly the kind of place a woman rebuilding herself from scratch needed to disappear into.

Callum found work mucking stalls for a horse trader within two days, proud in that stubborn way of boys who've had to grow up faster than they should, insisting on paying his own way even though I'd have gladly carried both of us. I let him.

I was starting to understand that letting him hold onto some piece of his own dignity mattered more than making things easy for him, and that was a lesson I don't think Wren Calloway, gentle and eager to fix everyone's problems for them, would ever have learned on her own.

I found something else. I found Garrick.

He ran the settlement's only real training ground, a fenced circle of packed dirt behind the tavern where rogues sparred for coin, for pride, or because Hollow's End didn't offer much else in the way of entertainment. He was older, built like something carved out of a mountain, with a face that had clearly lost more fights than it won and eyes that missed nothing.

He watched me for exactly one match before he pulled me aside.

"You fight like two different people," he said, without preamble, wiping blood off his knuckles that weren't his. "One of you knows exactly what she's doing. The other one keeps trying to talk her way out of finishing it."

I didn't have an answer for that, because it was true in a way I couldn't explain to him. Vera Sharp's instincts moved my body with a brutal, practiced efficiency I hadn't earned.

Wren Calloway's conscience kept trying to pull the punches at the last second, kept looking for the version of every fight that didn't require actually hurting someone. I was two women wearing one set of scars, and Garrick, apparently, could see the seam.

"Pick one," he said. "Or the gap between them is going to get you killed one day, and it won't matter which of you was right."

I thought about that a long time.

I thought about it while I trained with him six days a week for the better part of two months, sparring until my borrowed muscles ached in ways that somehow still felt satisfying, learning the specific geography of a body that healed too fast and hit too hard and moved, sometimes, like it remembered things I'd never taught it.

I thought about it the night I finally asked him to teach me to use a blade properly, instead of relying on whatever half-formed instinct Vera's hands seemed to carry, and he looked at me for a long moment before he said, "You already know how. You're just scared of what it means that you're good at it."

He wasn't wrong.

I want to be honest about what those months did to me, because it would be easy to tell this like a story where I simply became strong and left it at that, tidy and satisfying. It wasn't tidy.

There were nights I woke up with my hand already reaching for a knife before I was fully conscious, some rogue instinct answering a threat that wasn't there, and I'd lie in the dark afterward genuinely unsure whether that reflex belonged to me or to whoever Vera Sharp used to be before I inherited what was left of her.

There were other nights I dreamed about Rhys, not the version who'd turned his back on me while he ordered my death, but the version from before all that, the one who used to trace slow circles on my shoulder in the dark and tell me, half asleep, that he didn't know how he'd survived twenty years without me in it.

I hated those dreams more than the nightmares about the river. At least the nightmares were honest about what he'd become.

Callum noticed the difference in me before I was ready to admit it to myself. About three months into our stay in Hollow's End, sitting across from me at the tavern's single splintered table while I ate slower than the appetite in this body actually wanted, he set down his cup and asked, carefully, "Are you even still my sister anymore?"

It landed like a blade between the ribs, mostly because it was such a fair question.

"I'm the person who's here," I told him, which wasn't a real answer, and we both knew it, but it was the truest thing I had to give him. "I'm the person who isn't going anywhere. That has to count for something."

He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face settled, not quite satisfied, but willing to let it be enough for now.

"It counts," he said finally. "Just... don't disappear on me. Whatever's happening to you. Don't let it take all of you."

I promised him I wouldn't, and I meant it when I said it, and some nights since then I've wondered how much of that promise I've actually managed to keep.

By the fifth month I'd stopped losing sparring matches against anyone in Hollow's End, Garrick included, and he told me, with the closest thing to pride I ever saw cross his face, that there wasn't much left he could teach me that fighting itself wouldn't finish teaching on its own. What he could still offer me, he said, was information, because a rogue who survived long past her prime the way he had usually did it by knowing things other people didn't.

So I asked him about Ashgrave Pack.

He knew more than I expected. Ashgrave was young for a major territory, its current Alpha having inherited the title at seventeen after his father was killed in a border dispute nobody outside the pack's inner circle fully understood.

Garrick had heard the boy was sharp, disciplined, well liked by his warriors, and increasingly influenced by an advisor who'd attached herself to his council in the years since his father's death. A witch, some said, though packs were cagey about that kind of thing. Marisol, if the rumors had her name right.

I sat very still when he said that name, and if Garrick noticed, he had the good sense not to ask why.

"You planning something up there?" he asked instead, eyes narrowed, reading me the way he always did.

"Eventually," I admitted, because there wasn't much point lying to the man who'd rebuilt my body into a weapon over the last five months. "Not yet."

"Good," he said. "Whatever it is, you're not ready. Not for something that size."

He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I spent the next two years in Hollow's End making sure he'd eventually be wrong.

I won't walk through every one of those months in detail, though I remember most of them more clearly than I'd like to. I learned to fight with blades and without them. I learned to track, to disappear, to read a room full of strangers and know within seconds which of them meant me harm.

I learned, slowly and against my own instincts, to let Vera Sharp's cold competence and Wren Calloway's stubborn conscience stop fighting each other and start working together instead, the way Garrick had told me they'd need to if either of us was going to survive what came next.

I sent Callum to a proper trade apprenticeship in a larger town two years in, funded by coin I'd earned doing work I still don't like discussing in detail, because Hollow's End was no place for him to build the rest of his life and I refused to let this new version of myself cost him the future the old Wren would have wanted for anyone she loved.

He didn't want to go. I made him anyway, the same stubborn way he'd once dragged me out of a cell I didn't remember being locked in, and when he finally hugged me goodbye at the crossroads, he held on a beat longer than either of us expected, and said, "You're still in there. Whoever you used to be. I can tell."

I didn't correct him. I wasn't entirely sure anymore where the line between who I used to be and who I'd become actually sat, and some days I still don't know, but I let myself believe him a little, because it was easier to keep walking toward Ashgrave territory with that belief than without it.

Four years after I woke up drowning in a river wearing someone else's hands, I stood at the edge of Hollow's End for the last time and looked north, toward a pack I'd never set foot in and a man who had no idea the wife he'd once ordered killed was about to walk directly into his life wearing a stranger's face.

Garrick found me there, arms crossed, watching me with the particular expression he saved for moments he already knew he couldn't talk me out of.

"You're going now," he said. Not a question.

"I'm ready now," I said, and for the first time since I'd woken up in that river, I actually believed it.

He nodded slowly, and didn't try to stop me, and as I turned to leave he said one last thing that stayed with me longer than I expected it to.

"Whoever hurt you enough to build all this," he said, "I hope you remember, when you finally face him, that you're allowed to want more than just his ruin."

I didn't answer that. I wasn't ready to yet.

I turned north instead, and started walking toward Ashgrave territory, toward the rest of the seven years I'd been given, and toward the exact moment I intended to finally make Rhys Ashgrave look at me again.