The Black Luna

4

Joye's POV

The great hall looked different dressed for a celebration. Silver banners hung from the rafters, candlelight multiplied a hundred times over in polished stone, and every pack member who mattered had turned out in their finest to witness Alpha Jason Salford bind himself to Bianca in front of the Moon Goddess and everyone who'd ever doubted he would.

I hadn't been invited. I'd been ordered to serve.

That was its own kind of cruelty, I realized, standing against the back wall with a tray of wine in my hands, close enough to see everything and expected to feel nothing.

Bianca entered first, and the room made the appropriate sounds of awe — a gown the color of moonlight, hair woven with silver thread, a smile aimed at every important face in the crowd. She looked exactly like a woman who'd been born to stand in that spot.

Jason entered a moment later, and even from across the hall, I felt it — that thread between us pulling taut the second his eyes swept the room and found mine, just for a heartbeat, before he forced them away.

I told myself I wouldn't watch. I watched anyway.

The pack elder presiding over the ceremony began the traditional words, the ones binding a Luna to her Alpha before the whole territory, and I focused very hard on the tray in my hands, on not spilling wine, on breathing evenly, on being furniture instead of a girl whose entire chest felt like it was collapsing in slow motion.

Then the elder paused, and the room's attention shifted — not toward Bianca, but toward a cluster of pack elders near the front who'd begun murmuring among themselves, glancing between Jason and the back of the hall.

Toward me.

My stomach dropped.

"Alpha," one of the older women said, her voice pitched to carry. "Before this proceeds, there is a matter that must be addressed. Rumors have reached us — servants talk, Alpha, whether we wish them to or not — that a bond may exist between you and the black girl you purchased."

The entire hall turned to look at me at once.

I nearly dropped the tray.

"This ceremony cannot proceed," the elder continued, "with an unresolved bond hanging over this pack's future Luna. If there is truth to this, it must be settled here. Tonight. In front of witnesses."

Bianca's expression didn't shift, but something in her eyes sharpened, calculating, and I understood in that instant that this hadn't been a rumor that simply reached the elders on its own. Someone had made sure it reached them.

Jason's jaw tightened. For one long, unbearable second, he didn't move at all.

"Jason," Bianca said softly, though the whole hall heard it. "Settle it. For us."

He looked at me across the room, and I watched something in his face close like a door being locked from the inside.

"Bring her forward," he said.

I don't remember setting the tray down. I don't remember the walk across that hall, though I must have made it, because suddenly I was standing in front of him, in front of everyone, close enough to see the muscle jumping in his jaw and the apology he wasn't going to say out loud.

"Say it," the elder instructed him. "The formal rejection. So there is no ambiguity for the pack, or the Goddess."

Jason's eyes met mine one final time.

I want to say I saw regret there. I did see it — I know I did — but it didn't change what came out of his mouth next.

"I, Alpha Jason Salford," he said, voice carrying to every corner of the silent hall, "reject Joye Watson as my mate."

The bond didn't shatter quietly.

It felt like something reaching into my chest and tearing, a physical wound where a heartbeat ago there had only been a thread.

I gasped, my knees buckling slightly before I forced them to hold, and somewhere in the hall, someone laughed under their breath at the sight of me swaying.

"Accept it," the elder said to me, not unkindly, but not with any real concern either. "So the bond is fully severed."

I looked up at Jason. I don't know what I expected to find in his face. Whatever it was, I didn't find it.

"I accept," I whispered, and the words cost me more than days of scrubbing floors and swallowed insults combined.

The ceremony continued around me like I'd already stopped existing. Bianca's smile widened. The elder resumed the binding words. I turned and walked back to the wall on legs that didn't feel entirely like mine, tray forgotten, wine forgotten, everything forgotten except the hollow place in my chest where something had lived for exactly one night before being ripped back out.

I made it to the servants' corridor before the nausea hit.

I barely reached the small washroom off the kitchens before I was sick, gripping the edge of the basin, my whole body shaking. When it passed, I sat back against the cold stone wall and pressed a hand flat against my stomach, and a thought settled into me with quiet, terrible certainty.

It's too soon to know anything.

But I knew anyway. The way you know a storm is coming before the first drop falls.

🖤

I didn't return to the celebration. I couldn't. Instead, I wandered the servants' halls until exhaustion pulled me toward Bianca's private wing — not intentionally, just aimlessly, grief steering my feet somewhere I wasn't paying attention to.

That was when I heard it.

Voices, low, coming from behind a half-open door I recognized as Bianca's receiving room. I should have kept walking. Every instinct told me to keep walking.

I stopped instead.

"...the shipment needs to move before the next full moon," Bianca was saying, her voice stripped of its honeyed public warmth. "The territory patrols are getting suspicious."

A male voice answered, low enough that I only caught fragments. "...emperor grows impatient... the omegas aren't enough anymore..."

"I know what he wants." Bianca's tone sharpened. "Tell him he'll have it. I have something better than omegas coming. Something with real blood in it."

My skin went cold. Emperor. That wasn't pack terminology. That wasn't anything I'd ever heard a wolf call another wolf.

"And the debt girl?" the male voice asked. "The one Jason rejected tonight?"

My heart stopped entirely.

"Watch her," Bianca said. "There's something wrong with her scent. I want to know what, before she becomes a problem."

I stepped back from the door too fast, my shoulder catching a small side table, and a vase toppled with a crash that seemed impossibly loud in the silent hallway.

The voices inside went dead silent.

Bianca's door swung open, and her eyes found mine instantly, no warmth left in them at all — something ancient and hungry looking out from behind a face I'd mistaken for merely cruel.

"Well," she said softly, stepping into the hallway. "It seems we have a listener."