THE LUNA WHO MARRIED HER ENEMY

CHAPTER THREE

Morning in Ashwood territory came in gray and cold, and I woke to a guard changing shift just outside my door

not down the hall. Outside my actual bedroom, close enough that I heard the leather creak on his boots when he shifted his weight.

I got up and tried the handle anyway, just to see.

It opened.

That surprised me.

I stepped into the hallway and found a young wolf guard snapping to attention, spine so straight he might have been bracing for a blow.

"Ma'am," he said. "I'm to escort you if you need anything."

"I need to walk somewhere that isn't this hallway."

He looked genuinely pained by the request.

"I can take you to the garden courtyard. Alpha's orders nowhere else without him present."

I wanted to argue, but I could see in the boy's face that arguing would only make his day worse without changing mine. So I let him walk me to a small courtyard garden, boxed in on all four sides by walls twice my height, with exactly one gate, beside which he planted himself like a fence post for the entire visit.

I sat on a cold stone bench with moss growing thick in its cracks and a single dead sparrow lying stiff beneath the hedge where no one had thought to move it, and I thought about my father, my mother, Mira, the valley I probably wouldn't see again for a long time, and I let myself cry for exactly as long as it took the guard to look away, out of what I assumed was pity.

Then I stopped, because crying wasn't going to earn me anything either.

Over the following days, I learned the shape of my new life the way you learn the shape of a bruise carefully, and only because it aches every time you forget it's there.

I was allowed the east wing, the garden courtyard, and the dining hall for meals I mostly ate alone, my spoon scraping the same chipped bowl every morning because the kitchen staff never bothered giving me a different one. I was not allowed the training grounds, the war room, the archive, or anywhere near what I now understood was the actual heart of Ashwood a pack that had spent twenty years bracing for a fight that never fully ended.

Ronan did not visit me. He did not speak to me at meals unless his Beta or an elder was present and appearances demanded it. When our eyes did meet, across a hall or through a half-open doorway, something flickered behind his I want to say it looked like hunger, though at the time I told myself it was hatred, because hatred was simpler to name.

The pack was worse than he was. I caught the whispers even when they thought I couldn't. Murderer's daughter. Draven blood in the Luna's seat. Someone whispered. I moved through corridors and felt whole conversations die the second I stepped into them, felt eyes drag along my back until I turned a corner.

On the fourth night, sleep refused me again, and I made a choice I now know was reckless but at the time felt like the only thing keeping me from unraveling. I waited until the guard outside my door slumped against the wall, chin dropping wolves get tired too, even loyal ones and I slipped past him into the dark.

I didn't have a plan beyond wanting, once, to walk through this house without anyone cataloguing it.

The east wing gave way to a narrower corridor I hadn't found yet, lined with old portraits under a film of smoke damage, faces I didn't know, every one of them fixed with Ronan's same gray eyes staring out across different decades. At the corridor's end sat a door, pulled almost shut, dust furred thick along the top hinge like nobody had touched it in years.

I should have turned back. I know that now.

I pushed it open instead.

It was a study, small and cold, exactly as its last occupant had left it. A woman's moth-eaten shawl still hung over the back of a chair. Books stood in undisturbed rows, their spines cracked from being read, not shelved for show, and a dried sprig of lavender had been pressed flat between two of them so long ago it had gone the color of straw.

On the desk, half-buried under gray dust, sat a wooden box carved with the Ashwood crest, and beneath it, a symbol I didn't recognize two wolves facing each other, foreheads pressed together, not fighting. A mirror instead of an enemy.

My fingers had just closed on the box when I heard the footsteps.

Fast.

Furious.

Bearing straight down the corridor toward me.

I didn't even manage to shut the door before Ronan filled the frame, chest heaving, eyes gone black at the center in a way that sent every instinct in my body screaming at me to bolt.

"Get away from there," he said, and this wasn't the flat, controlled voice from the wedding. It cracked. It shook.

"I didn't touch anything, I was only…"

"That is my mother's study."

He crossed the room in three strides and seized my wrist, wrenching my hand off the box like I'd been reaching for a blade instead of a carved chest.

"No one comes in here. No one."

"I didn't know," I said, and I meant it, but I could already see in his face that meaning it changed nothing.

"You knew exactly what you were doing," he said, low and dangerous, his grip tightening until my wrist throbbed. "Sneaking through my house at night, digging for something to use against me. Isn't that what your father sent you here to do?"

"My father didn't send me anywhere. You dragged me here, remember? One day's notice, no choice given at all!"

Something in his eyes wavered a hairline c***k in all that fury. Then it sealed shut again, faster than it had opened.

"You will stay in the east wing," he said, letting go of my wrist like the contact disgusted him. "You will not come to this corridor again. If you do, I will have you confined to your room with a guard posted inside it, not outside. Do you understand me?"

I understood him perfectly.

I understood I had married a man who would sooner cage me than explain a single word of himself, and that whatever slept inside that box, whatever secret his dead mother had hidden behind two wolves touching foreheads instead of tearing throats, he would burn this whole fortress to the ground before he let me near it again.

"I understand," I said.

He turned and walked out without another word, and I stood alone in the cold study for one more second, staring at the carved box I hadn't managed to open, my wrist still throbbing where his fingers had dug in.

That was when I noticed it. A single sheet of paper had slid out from under the box in the struggle and lay half-hidden beneath the desk.

I crouched and snatched it up before I'd even decided to, pulse hammering, certain he'd turn around and catch me still there.

The handwriting was faded, water-stained, hard to make out in the dim light. But three words near the bottom of the page had been underlined so hard the pen had gouged straight through the paper.

Trust no Alpha.

I didn't understand what it meant yet. I only understood, crouched there in the cold with a dead woman's warning shaking in my hands, that I had married into something far more dangerous than a war between two families.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor again, closer this time, and I had no way out except the door Ronan had just walked through.