Blood and Moonlight

Chapter Three: Marchetti Line

The attack came two weeks before the wedding, on a night when Elena wasn't even supposed to be near the border.

She'd gone out walking along the tree line behind the Kastellan estate — restless, unable to sleep, craving the particular quiet that only came from being half-shifted, half-human, alone in the dark with her thoughts. It was a habit from home, one nobody at the estate knew to warn her against.

She smelled the strangers before she heard them. Wrong pack, wrong territory, the scent sharp and unfamiliar under the pines.

"Marchetti," a voice said from the shadows, low and pleased with itself, like he'd found something valuable lying unguarded. "The Voss girl. Wandering around without her leash."

Elena's pulse spiked, but she'd spent nineteen years learning not to let fear show on her face — pack politics had taught her that much, if nothing else. "I'm not lost."

"No," the man agreed, stepping into the moonlight with two others flanking him. "You're exactly where we wanted you."

She didn't get the chance to find out what that meant. A shape came out of the dark behind the men so fast it barely registered as movement — Kiran, already mid-shift, more wolf than man in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and the clearing dissolved into snarling chaos.

Elena backed toward the tree line, heart hammering, watching Kiran fight two men at once with a controlled brutality that told her exactly how much of the rumors about the Kastellan pack's training were true. The third man lunged for her.

She didn't think. Nineteen years of watching, of being underestimated because she was a daughter and not a son, came out in one sharp, practiced strike to the man's throat that made him stagger back gagging. It wasn't elegant. It worked.

By the time Damir arrived — alerted by some instinct or some guard's frantic radio call, she never found out which — the Marchetti men were already retreating into the dark, dragging their bleeding third member with them.

Damir's eyes found her first, raking over her for injuries with an intensity that had nothing composed left in it at all. "Are you hurt?"

"No. Kiran got here before—"

"You shouldn't have been out here." His voice had gone dangerously flat, the honesty she'd started to appreciate curdling into something sharper. "Not without a guard. Not with the border this unstable."

"I didn't know it was unstable."

"That's exactly the problem." He turned to Kiran, who was pulling his torn shirt back into some semblance of order, blood at his knuckles that wasn't entirely his own. "Report. Now."

---

She found out the rest of it an hour later, in Damir's study, where he laid it out with the same flat honesty he'd used on the terrace — the same honesty, she was starting to realize, that he seemed to reserve only for her.

"The Marchettis have wanted that border land longer than my father's had a claim to it," he said. "Taking you would've given them leverage — a hostage, a bargaining chip, proof the Kastellans can't protect what they claim. It wasn't random."

"So I really am just a border," Elena said quietly.

Something shifted in Damir's expression — not quite regret, but adjacent to it, close enough that she recognized the shape. "You're not *just* anything. That was true before tonight, and it's true now. I said it wrong at the fitting. I'm saying it right now, while I still have the nerve to."

It was the closest thing to an apology she'd heard from him, and it landed harder than she expected it to.

---

Kiran was waiting outside when she left the study, leaning against the corridor wall with the particular stillness of a man who'd been standing there for a while, deciding whether to stay.

"You're bleeding," Elena said, nodding at his split knuckles.

"It's not mine." He studied her face, the same recalculating look he always gave her, except tonight there was something rawer underneath it. "You handled yourself well out there. That strike to his throat — that wasn't luck."

"My aunt taught me. Said a Voss daughter should know how to defend herself, since nobody else would prioritize it."

"Smart woman." Kiran pushed off the wall, closing some of the distance between them, close enough that she could feel the leftover adrenaline still coming off him in waves. "I should've gotten there faster."

"You got there in time."

"Barely." His jaw tightened. "I don't like how close *barely* was tonight."

Neither did she, though she suspected they meant different things by it — Kiran's fear was tactical, professional, the fear of a guard who'd nearly failed at his job. Hers was something else entirely, something that had less to do with the Marchetti men in the woods and more to do with the terrifying speed at which two different men in this house had become people she was afraid of losing.

She didn't say that part out loud. Some kinds of honesty, she was learning, cost more than the Kastellan family charged for anything else.