THE LUNA WHO MARRIED HER ENEMY

CHAPTER TWO

Elara's POV

They did not let me bring much. A trunk of clothes, my mother's old shawl, and nothing else that felt like home.

The ride to Ashwood territory ate the whole day, and nobody spoke to me.

The soldiers who came for me kept their eyes forward, their jaws set, escorting the enemy's daughter like a duty they resented as much as I resented being escorted.

When we forded the river marking the border, the air itself changed thinner, colder, laced with pine resin and woodsmoke that didn't belong to any hearth I knew, like the land had already decided which pack it answered to.

The Ashwood stronghold rose out of the cliffside in tiers of gray stone, its iron gates streaked rust-orange down the seams where rain had run for a hundred years, the family crest hammered into the metal so many times over the generations that the wolf's snarling face had worn nearly smooth.

Torches burned along the wall in brackets shaped like snarling wolf heads, resin popping and hissing in the wet air. Watchtowers stood at every corner, manned even in the downpour. It did not look like a home. It looked like a fortress built by people who had never once let themselves stop expecting a war.

They marched me straight to a room to be dressed. No one asked if I wanted food, or rest, or a single moment to breathe. A row of silent women pinned me into a gown the color of dried blood, dragged a boar-bristle brush through my hair until it lay flat and obedient, and steered me toward the doors of the great hall like cargo arriving on schedule.

That was when I saw him for the first time.

Ronan Ashwood stood at the far end of the hall, and even from that distance I understood why people dropped their voices when they said his name. He was built like every hard year of the war had been chiseled straight into his shoulders.

His dark hair was cropped close, a soldier's cut, nothing wasted. His eyes were gray, the color of a sky deciding whether to break apart or hold.

He was not looking at me the way a man looks at his bride. He was looking at me the way a man looks at an enemy he has been ordered not to kill.

I crossed the hall toward him because I had no other option, and every step felt like locking a cage from the inside.

The ceremony didn't last long.

The pack elder spoke about the Moon Goddess and peace and unity, and I barely absorbed a word of it, too busy holding myself still. When the vows came, Ronan's voice stayed flat and controlled, stripped of anything that sounded like a man claiming a wife.

"I accept this bond," he said, "for the survival of my pack."

Not for me. Not even a pretense that it was for me.

"I accept this bond," I said back, "to end this war."

Not for him either. At least we matched in our honesty.

Then his hand closed around mine to seal the vow, and something happened I was not braced for.

Heat shot up my arm and burrowed straight into my sternum, and my wolf silent and cowering all day surged forward with a recognition I didn't understand and didn't want.

I gasped before I could stop it.

Ronan's jaw locked, his eyes flashing with something dark and startled, as if he'd felt the same jolt and despised himself for it.

He dropped my hand like it had scalded him.

"Mate," someone in the crowd breathed, and the word cracked through the hall and left a silence behind it, sharp as a snapped bone.

I watched Ronan's face shut like a fist closing. Whatever had just passed between us, he was already bricking it over, and I understood, in that instant, that he would hate me for it. He would hate me for the one thing neither of us had chosen.

The feast afterward was worse than the ceremony. I sat beside my new husband at a table crowded with wolves who watched me the way you'd watch a blade left too close to the edge of a table, and Ronan did not speak a single word to me the entire meal. Not one. He drank. He leaned toward his Beta, a lean, watchful man named Kieran who kept cutting glances at me I couldn't decode.

He laughed at something someone said down the table, and the laugh never once turned my direction.

Somewhere down the table, a fiddler kept sawing out the same wedding reel over and over, like nobody had told him which song to stop on, and every time the melody looped back to the start I felt it land in my chest like a small, mocking bell.

When the feast ended, a servant led me to a bedroom in the east wing my new room, apparently, separate from his and told me the Alpha would not be joining me tonight.

I told myself I was relieved.

I lay awake in a strange bed inside a fortress full of strangers who wanted me gone, replaying the way my wolf had howled the second his hand touched mine, replaying the way he'd looked at me right after, like I was an error the Goddess had made and he meant to correct it personally.

Near midnight, voices carried through my door. Low. Urgent. I knew Ronan's voice instantly, pulled tight with something that sounded almost like grief.

"She is not to leave this wing without an escort," he was saying. "Not the gardens, not the training grounds, nowhere. Am I clear?"

"Alpha, she's your wife now," Kieran answered. "The pack will talk if you cage her."

"Let them talk." A pause, longer than it needed to be. "I will not lose control of this the way my parents lost control of theirs. She stays watched. Always."

I lay rigid, my pulse slamming in my throat, and understood the whole shape of my new life in one breath. I had not married a husband. I had married a warden.

And whatever was buried inside the words the way my parents lost control, some cold certainty in my gut told me it was going to matter more than either of us knew.

The door outside creaked. Footsteps receded down the corridor. And I was left alone in a house that had already decided I was its prisoner before I'd so much as unpacked my trunk.