The Black Luna

5

Joye's POV

I ran before I let myself think about what I'd just heard.

Bianca's eyes had held something in them that wasn't wolf, wasn't even fully human, and every instinct screaming through what was left of my battered body told me that whatever she was, whatever she'd just been arranging in that room, I wasn't meant to survive having overheard it.

"Grab her," Bianca said, calm as anything, like she was ordering someone to fetch a coat instead of a person.

I didn't wait to see who moved first. I bolted down the servants' corridor, past startled faces too shocked to react in time, out through the side door I'd used a hundred times over the past weeks to carry firewood and laundry, and into the cold dark of the grounds beyond.

Behind me, I heard Bianca's voice sharpen into something commanding, something that carried an authority that had nothing to do with being anyone's future Luna.

"Don't let her reach the tree line."

I reached the tree line anyway.

The forest swallowed me whole, branches tearing at my arms, roots catching at my feet in the dark, but I didn't slow down. Every part of me — the part that had spent eighteen years being told I had no wolf worth speaking of — was screaming a single, wordless command: survive.

I didn't know where I was running to. I only knew Rivermoon wasn't safe anymore, hadn't been safe since the moment Jason said those words in front of the whole pack, and definitely wasn't safe now that I knew what Bianca really was.

The rejection ache still throbbed in my chest with every step, a wound that hadn't even begun to close, but underneath it, something else stirred — something I didn't have a name for yet, something that made my legs move faster than they should have been able to, made my senses sharper, made the dark forest feel less like a threat and more like something I could survive inside of.

I heard them before I saw them.

Not footsteps. Something faster, something moving through the trees with a speed no ordinary wolf could match, closing the distance behind me with terrifying efficiency.

I risked a glance back and immediately wished I hadn't. Two figures, moving low and fast between the trunks, pale in the moonlight in a way that had nothing to do with skin tone and everything to do with something fundamentally wrong about them. Their eyes caught what little light filtered through the canopy and threw it back red.

Not rogues. Whatever Bianca had been talking about in that room — whatever "shipment" and "emperor" meant — I was looking at it now, and it was hunting me.

I pushed harder, lungs burning, branches slashing at my face, and one of them closed the gap enough that I felt its hand graze the back of my dress before I twisted away, stumbling, catching myself against a tree trunk hard enough to knock the air from my chest.

"Don't run," the closer one said, voice smooth and utterly without warmth. "It only makes this take longer."

I didn't have a weapon. I didn't have a wolf to call on, not really, not one I'd ever felt shift beneath my skin. All I had was the desperate, animal need to survive one more minute, and then one more after that.

The second figure lunged.

I threw myself sideways, hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up running again on legs that shouldn't have still been working. Behind me, I heard something snarl, low and furious at having missed, and the chase resumed with even less patience than before.

I didn't see the third one until it was nearly on top of me.

It came from the side, faster than the first two, and I had just enough time to throw my arms up before impact — except the impact never landed on me. A massive gray shape slammed into my attacker mid-air, both of them crashing into the underbrush in a snarling, violent tangle of claws and teeth.

I stumbled backward, heart hammering, and watched in stunned disbelief as more shapes poured out of the treeline around me — enormous wolves, larger than any I'd seen at Rivermoon, moving with a coordinated precision that spoke of trained warriors rather than wild animals.

They tore through the pale figures hunting me with a speed and brutality that told me exactly how outmatched my pursuers had been from the very start. Within moments, the forest had gone from a death trap to a battlefield, and then, just as quickly, to something eerily quiet, the threat reduced to nothing.

One of the great wolves shifted, folding down into the shape of a man mid-stride — tall, dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, radiating an authority that made every hair on my arms rise even through my exhaustion.

He stopped dead the moment his eyes found me.

I must have looked like a nightmare — torn dress, blood from a dozen scratches, hair plastered to my face with sweat — but that wasn't what stopped him. He went utterly still, nostrils flaring, his expression shifting from wary alertness into something I couldn't name. Shock, maybe. Or recognition.

"Impossible," he murmured, more to himself than to me.

"Please," I managed, my voice barely more than a rasp. "I don't know what those things were. I don't know why they were hunting me. I just need—"

He crossed the distance between us in three strides, close enough now that I could see his eyes clearly in the moonlight — dark, but with a familiar shape to them, a familiar tilt that snagged at some buried, unexamined part of my memory.

He reached out, not touching me, just close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him, and inhaled slowly, like he needed to confirm something his eyes were already telling him.

"That scent," he whispered. "That can't be—"

My legs finally gave out from under me, exhaustion and shock and grief collapsing all at once, and as the ground rushed up to meet me, I heard him say the last thing I expected to hear from a stranger's mouth in the middle of a forest I'd never set foot in before.

"...Sister?"

Then the world went dark.