THE LUNA WHO WALKED AWAY

Chapter4: THE WEIGHT OF MEMORY

Benjamin's POV

I make it halfway to the pack house before I shift and run because my human form cannot handle the chaos in my head, and the wolf takes over with relief while I let him, letting the animal simplicity of four legs and forest smells drown out the complicated mess of seeing Judith again. My wolf wants to go back to the cottage and guard her, wants to curl around her and protect her from whatever is killing her, but I force him to run in the opposite direction because I am still in control here, not the bond.

Seven years I spent building walls and learning to live without her, seven years convincing myself I was better off alone than with a mate who did not want me, and she destroyed it all in two days just by existing in my territory again. I run until my muscles burn and my lungs ache, run until the physical pain drowns out everything else, and finally collapse beside the stream where I first told Judith I loved her, but the memory rises up sharp as broken glass and I cannot push it away fast enough.

She was nineteen and laughing, spinning in the meadow with flowers in her hair, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, so I told her I loved her, and she kissed me like I was her whole world, like nothing would ever tear us apart, and I believed her.

Marcus finds me an hour later and tosses my pants without comment, sitting on a nearby boulder to wait while I dress, and his presence feels like judgment even though his face stays neutral.

"You want to talk about it?" he asks, which is his way of saying I need to talk about it before I do something stupid.

"Nothing to talk about," I say, pulling on the pants and wishing I could pull on emotional armor as easily. "She is here, she will stay until the blood moon, we will do the ritual, and then she will leave again, simple."

Marcus makes a sound that might be a laugh or a cough, and I know he sees through the lie because he always does. "Nothing about this is simple, Ben, you barely held it together at dinner and that was just sitting next to her, so how are you going to survive six weeks of this?"

"The same way I survived the last seven years," I snap, harsher than I intended, and the words taste bitter on my tongue. "By remembering that she chose to leave and nothing I did or said was enough to make her stay."

"Except she says she left to protect you," Marcus points out gently, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "She says there is something in her bloodline that made staying dangerous, so do you believe her?"

I dropped my head into my hands and dug my fingers into my hair, frustrated because I did not know what to believe anymore, and part of me wants to call it a convenient excuse while another part remembers the real fear in her eyes when she talked about her family. "I saw her face when she talked about her bloodline and saw real terror there, and Judith was never a good liar, but that does not change the fact that she made the choice to run without giving me any voice in the decision."

Marcus stands and claps a hand on my shoulder, the touch grounding me in a way I did not know I needed. "You have time to figure it out, six weeks is not forever, but it is not nothing either, so maybe use some of that time to actually talk to her instead of maintaining alpha distance and see what happens."

He leaves me alone by the stream and I sit there until the sun starts to rise, trying to sort through feelings I buried so deep I forgot they were there, and the mate bond hums in my chest like a second heartbeat that I hate because it feels so right to have Judith back in my territory even under these circumstances.

My phone buzzes with a text from Elena asking to meet at the pack house, something about Judith's medical condition, and I force myself up and back to civilization, shifting to running again because it is faster and also because my wolf is still restless with Judith so close but untouchable.

Elena waits in my office with medical files and an expression that means bad news, so I close the door and sink into my desk chair, bracing myself for whatever she is about to say.

"Judith is dying faster than I thought," Elena says without preamble, spreading papers across my desk with efficient movements. "Her vitals are unstable and the herb mixture she has been using to survive is starting to fail, which means she has weeks at most, maybe a month if nothing causes additional stress on her system."

The words hit like a physical blow and I realized some part of me thought we had more time, that six weeks would be enough to figure everything out, but now the deadline feels like a noose tightening around both our necks. "What can we do?"

"Complete the ritual as soon as possible," Elena says, pulling out diagrams that make my head spin with their complexity. "But there is something else you need to know, Benjamin, something Judith probably has not told you yet."

She slides a photo across the desk and my blood runs cold when I see what it shows, claw marks on a wall that are too large to be wolf and too deliberate to be animal, and beneath the photo is a name that makes everything click into a terrible place.

"This is from the night Judith's mother died," Elena says quietly, watching my face. "And these marks match the ones found at twelve other death scenes spanning three generations of Foster women."

I stare at the evidence and feel the ground shift beneath me because whatever Judith is hiding, it is worse than I imagined, and someone else already knows about it.