THE LUNA WHO MARRIED HER ENEMY

CHAPTER FOUR

ELARA'S POV

I shoved the paper into my sleeve and stepped into the corridor just as a second set of footsteps rounded the corner not Ronan's. Kieran's.

The Beta stopped when he saw me, his eyes flicking to the open study door behind me, then back to my face, weighing something I couldn't follow.

"You shouldn't be here," he said, but there was none of Ronan's fury in it. Almost gentle, which somehow frightened me more.

"I know. I'm going back now."

"Elara."

He used my name like he'd been saving a reason to.

"A word of advice. This house buries its secrets for a purpose. Digging them up doesn't always bring peace. Sometimes it just tells you who's already dead."

I had no answer for that, so I gave him none, and he stepped aside to let me pass. I made it back to my room before dawn, the letter still hidden in my sleeve, and sleep never found me again that night.

For two days, I told no one what I'd found. I turned the words over and over Trust no Alpha until they stopped sounding like a warning and started sounding like an indictment. Written by whom, to whom, about whom, I had no way to know.

But it had been hidden in Ronan's mother's study, and Ronan's mother had died twenty years ago, in the same stretch of violence that took my uncle and my cousin and turned two packs into enemies for a generation.

On the third morning, everything changed.

I was in the garden courtyard, my usual cage with a view, when a child's scream tore over the wall high, terrified followed by snarling that had nothing to do with a training exercise. My guard hesitated, split between his orders to keep me boxed in and the instinct that something had gone badly wrong.

I didn't wait for him to decide.

I scaled the low garden wall before he could grab me, dropped into the yard beyond, and found a scene that seized my chest. A pup, no older than six, had strayed too close to a gap in the perimeter fence, and a rogue wolf ribs showing, eyes wild with hunger, had slipped through and pinned him against the stone.

Nobody else was close enough. I didn't think. I shifted and drove myself between them.

The rogue moved faster than I'd braced for, and its jaws raked my shoulder, tearing skin and muscle in a white flare of pain that buckled my knees.

I heard the pup shrieking behind me, heard shouts finally breaking from the watchtowers, heard my own wolf snarling with a ferocity I didn't know I owned for a child that wasn't mine, from a pack that despised me.

The rogue bolted the instant reinforcements closed in, and I dropped against the stone wall, blood soaking hot through my shoulder, the edges of my vision graying out like a lamp running low on oil.

The last thing I remember clearly is Ronan's voice, closer than I expected, split wide open.

"Elara." My name, not an insult, not an accusation. Just my name, torn loose from him with something that sounded almost like fear. "Someone get the healer. Now."

I woke hours later in a bed that wasn't mine, in a room I didn't recognize, a jar of crushed yarrow and something bitter and green steeping on the nightstand, my shoulder bandaged and throbbing under a poultice that smelled of pine sap. Ronan sat in a chair beside me, elbows braced on his knees, watching me with an expression I had never once seen on him.

"You could have died," he said, before I'd even found my voice.

"He would have died. The pup. If I hadn't…"

"I know what you did." He dragged a hand over his jaw, and for the first time since I'd crossed his border, he looked worn down instead of cold. A man instead of a wall. "The mother is low rank, no influence in this pack. You owed that child nothing. You're not even…"

"I'm not even Ashwood," I finished for him. "I know. I did it anyway."

He said nothing for a long moment, studying me like a puzzle whose pieces had stopped matching the picture he'd already built.

"Why?" he finally asked.

"Because he was a child," I said. "It didn't matter to me whose blood he had. Does that surprise you?"

"Yes," he said, plainly, honestly, like the admission cost him something real.

"It does."

He reached toward me, and for a moment I thought he might take my hand the way he had at the altar, but instead his fingers went to the edge of my bandage, tucking it back where it had slipped, careful, almost tender against my skin.

My whole body went still under that touch, my heart doing something reckless and unwelcome behind my ribs.

"You should rest," he said, rising too fast, like he'd caught himself somewhere he hadn't given himself permission to be. "I'll have someone bring food."

He was nearly at the door when I spoke, before I could stop myself.

"Ronan." It was the first time I'd said his name without venom in it. He turned. "What happened to your parents? Really happened. Not the story everyone repeats."

A door slammed shut behind his eyes.

"That is not your business," he said, and the ice was back, thicker than before, as if he were punishing himself as much as me for whatever we'd just let happen. "Rest. I'll send someone to check the wound."

He left, and I lay there with a torn shoulder and a stolen letter still folded into the ruined sleeve of my nightgown, and I understood two things with total clarity.

The first was that Ronan Ashwood was not the monster the stories had built. Something in him had split open today, for one unguarded minute, and what waited underneath looked almost human, almost gentle, almost like a man I could have loved under any other circumstances.

The second was that whatever had happened to his parents twenty years ago, whatever this letter was trying to warn someone about, he would bury the truth alive before he let it touch him.

A soft knock came at the door, and I assumed it was the healer returning as promised.

It wasn't.

It was Kieran, standing in the doorway with a folded sheet of paper pinched between two fingers and an expression that iced my spine before he said a single word.

"I believe you dropped this," he said quietly, holding up my mother-in-law's letter, the one I had hidden and thought no one had seen. "In the garden. During all the excitement."

The floor seemed to tilt under me.

"That's mine," I said, too fast, too raw, and I watched him smile like I'd just confirmed exactly what he'd suspected.

"Is it?" He tilted his head. "Because it carries the late Luna's handwriting, and I find it remarkable that the Alpha's new bride was carrying it around three days after sneaking into a room she was expressly forbidden to enter." He tucked the letter inside his jacket before I could lunge for it, my shoulder screaming as I tried to sit up. "I think the Alpha will find this very interesting too. Don't you agree, Luna?"

He walked out before I could answer, my only proof of a secret someone had died to bury tucked into his pocket, and left me stranded in a bed I couldn't fully rise from, certain, in the marrow of my bones, that whatever came next would be far worse than anything I'd survived so far.