MARKED BY THE MOON

Two Guards, One Traitor

Luna POV

Cassia is dead before we even reach the stairs.

I know it the second we walk through the pack house doors, because the air itself feels wrong, thick with the kind of silence that only follows something terrible. Guards stand frozen near the cell block entrance, faces pale, nobody quite able to look Kian in the eye.

"Report," Kian says, voice flat and dangerous in a way I've only heard once before, standing over Torin's body this morning.

"She's gone, Alpha." The younger guard's voice shakes. "We found her twenty minutes ago. Same as Torin. Throat, quick, clean. Whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing."

I feel the floor tilt beneath me, though this time it has nothing to do with dizziness. Cassia was the one thread tying us to the bloodline mark, to the true Alpha's network, to the entire shape of what we're fighting. And now she's gone, silenced the exact same way Torin was, exact same method, exact same message.

We're always one step behind.

"Who was on duty," Kian demands.

The two guards exchange a glance that tells me everything before either of them speaks.

"Us," the older one admits, shame and fear tangled together in his voice. "We were posted at the door the entire shift. Nobody passed us. Nobody came down those stairs."

"Then how," I say, my voice sharper than I mean it to be, "is she dead?"

Neither of them has an answer. Kian pushes past them, and I follow, down into the cell block where Bettina already kneels beside Cassia's body, her expression grim in the flickering torchlight.

Cassia looks smaller in death than she ever did in life, all that careful composure and cold authority stripped away, leaving behind just a woman who spent her final hours terrified and searching for a way to make things right. Guilt tightens in my chest, sharp and unexpected. I spent weeks hating her. Now I just feel the weight of everything she never got the chance to fix.

"There's no sign of forced entry," Bettina says quietly. "No struggle. Whoever did this, she either let them close enough to do it, or she never saw them coming at all."

"The guards say no one passed them," I say.

Bettina's eyes flick toward the cell bars, then up toward the small barred window near the ceiling, too narrow for a person to fit through, but not too narrow for something else.

"Look," she says, pointing.

A thin length of wire, dark with old blood, hangs caught on the edge of the window frame, dropped or forgotten in whatever haste followed the act itself.

"Through the window," Kian says slowly, understanding it is dawning fast and grim. "Whoever did this didn't need to walk past the guards. They came from outside, through a gap barely wide enough for an arm."

"That's not a random attack," I say. "That takes planning. Someone who knew this cell's layout well enough to know exactly where that window led, exactly how to reach her without ever setting foot inside."

Kian's jaw tightens, and I watch him running through the same short list I am, the same terrible question neither of us wants to ask out loud. Who in this pack knows the layout of these cells intimately? Who's had reason to study them, to walk these halls, to understand exactly how far that window sits above the ground outside?

"I want every elder's movements from tonight accounted for," Kian says to the guards, voice hard as stone. "Every single one. No exceptions, no excuses."

The guards scramble to obey, grateful, I think, for something to do besides stand here surrounded by the evidence of how badly they failed tonight.

Kian crouches beside Cassia's body, his expression unreadable, and for a moment I see something almost like grief cross his face, quick and complicated.

"She could have told us so much more," he says quietly. "If we'd had more time. If we'd protected her better."

"You think this is our fault," I say.

"I think everyone who's tried to help us today has ended up hurt or dead," he says, and the rawness in his voice catches me off guard. "Torin. Priya. Cassia. Sable, almost. I keep telling myself we're getting closer, and every time we do, someone else pays for it."

I kneel beside him, resting my hand against his arm, feeling the tension coiled tight beneath his skin. "We didn't do this to them. Whoever's behind all of it did."

"I know that." He doesn't sound like he fully believes it. "Knowing it doesn't make it easier to watch."

Bettina clears her throat gently, giving us a moment of privacy in the small, terrible silence that follows. I stay close to Kian, letting him have this brief pause before the weight of being Alpha pulls him back to his feet, back to the next decision, the next name to check, the next thread to follow before it's cut like all the others.

"There's one thing," Bettina says eventually, breaking the silence carefully. "Something in Cassia's hand. She was holding it when we found her."

She opens her palm to show us a small scrap of fabric, torn and stained, clutched so tightly in Cassia's final moments that it had to be pried loose.

I take it carefully, turning it over in the torchlight.

It's a piece of cloth, dark green, the exact same shade as the dress Cassia wore the night I first arrived at Blackthorn.

Except this isn't from her dress. The weave is different. Finer. Expensive in a way Cassia's practical council attire never was.

"This isn't hers," I say slowly.

Kian takes it from me, studying it with the same sharp focus I remember from the moment he first suspected I wasn't who I claimed to be.

"No," he agrees quietly. "It's not."

He looks up at me, and I watch recognition settle hard and cold across his face, the same recognition dawning in my own chest as I finally place exactly where I've seen that particular shade of green before.

"I know this fabric," he says slowly. "It's from the elders' formal council robes. The kind only worn by someone who's sat at that table for decades."

My blood runs cold.

Whoever murdered Cassia tonight didn't come from outside the pack at all.

They were sitting in that council chamber with us this very morning.