THE LUNA WHO MARRIED HER ENEMY

Elara's POV My father did not ask me. He told me. "The Moon Goddess has spoken," he said, standing at the head of the long wooden table, not looking at me. "Peace comes at a price. You are the price." I stood by the window of our meeting hall, watching rain hammer the cedar shingles and pool in the ruts of the training yard below, running in thin brown rivers past the old bell post we rang whenever a patrol didn't come home on time, and I did not say a word for a long time. I had spent twenty years hearing about the Ashwood pack. I had grown up on stories of what they did to us. I had buried two uncles and a cousin because of that war. And now my father was telling me I would marry into the family that we had been taught started it. "Say something, Elara," he said. "What is there to say?" My voice came out flatter than I meant it to. "You already decided." He finally looked at me. My father is not a cruel man. I want to say that clearly, because everything that happened after made people think he was. But that day, in that room, he looked like a man who had been holding his breath for two decades and had just been told he could finally let it out, whatever the cost. "If I refuse," he said, "the Goddess withdraws her protection from this territory. You know what that means. Rogue packs are already massing past the northern ridge, close enough that our scouts can smell them on a west wind. We cannot fight them and the Ashwoods both." "So I marry my enemy to save us from other enemies." "You marry the Alpha of Ashwood," he said, "to end twenty years of dying." I dug my nails into my palm hard enough to leave marks. I wanted to ask him if he remembered my mother weeping every year on the anniversary of the day her brother died at the river crossing, gutted by an Ashwood patrol before he'd even finished his first shift. I wanted to ask if he remembered that I was twelve when two of our warriors came home wrapped in cloth so thick I never once saw their faces. I remembered. I remembered all of it. And I hated that none of it mattered now. "When?" I asked instead. "Three weeks." Three weeks to become the wife of a man I had never met, a man whose family had taught my whole life to fear. My cousin Mira found me later, sitting on the porch steps behind the longhouse, my knees pulled to my chest, picking splinters out of the old gray wood with my thumbnail just to have somewhere to put my hands. "I heard," she said, sitting beside me. She didn't say sorry. Mira never says sorry when sorry won't fix anything. "What are you going to do?" "What can I do? Run?" The sound that came out of me wasn't a laugh, not really. "There's nowhere in this territory the Alpha's word doesn't reach." "You could refuse in front of the pack. Make him drag you to the altar." "And then what? My father loses the Goddess's protection because his daughter was too proud to save her own people?" I shook my head. "I won't be the reason more of us die." Mira went quiet. Then she said the thing I'd been trying not to think. "They say Ronan Ashwood killed a man with his bare hands at sixteen. They say his eyes go black when he loses his temper, and nobody in his pack meets his gaze unless they have to." "Comforting," I said. "I'm not trying to comfort you. I'm trying to warn you. Whatever this marriage is, it isn't a love story, Elara." She caught my wrist and squeezed once, hard, before letting go. "Watch every door in that house. Both of them." I didn't need her to tell me that. I already knew exactly what kind of arrangement this was. It was the kind where two families who despised each other handed over their children to buy a few more years of quiet, and it didn't matter if those children came out the other side with anything left of themselves. That night, sleep never came near me. I kept turning the stranger I was supposed to marry over in my mind. I built him cruel. I built him cold. I gave him my dead uncle's blood on hands I had never seen, and I promised myself, lying rigid under a blanket gone damp with my own sweat, that whatever happened, the Ashwoods would not break me the way they had broken everyone else in my family. I did not know yet that hatred is easy to carry when the person you hate is only a story someone told you at a funeral. I did not know how much heavier it gets once that story grows a face, a voice, a way of looking at you that makes your chest ache even while your mind is screaming at you to run. I finally dropped off near dawn, and I woke to my father already standing in my doorway. "Elara." His voice was strange. Tight, like a rope pulled past its limit. "Get dressed. Something has changed." "Changed how?" He didn't answer right away, and the silence told me more than words would have. "The Ashwoods moved the wedding up," he said finally. "They want you there by tomorrow night. Alpha Ronan is sending an escort within the hour." My stomach folded in on itself. Three weeks had collapsed into one day, and nobody had asked if I was ready. Nobody had asked me anything at all. I went to the window and saw them already dark shapes cutting along the tree line at the edge of our territory, wolves moving in a formation too disciplined to be anything but Ashwood soldiers, come to collect what the Goddess had promised them. Come to collect me.