THE LUNA WHO MARRIED HER ENEMY

CHAPTER FIVE

RONAN'S POV

Sleep didn't come near me either.

I sat in my study my real study, not the one that still smelled faintly of my mother's rosewater after twenty years, the one I hadn't set foot in since I was nine until Elara forced her way inside, my father's old dagger still mounted above the mantel where it had hung untouched since his death, and I watched the fire collapse into embers, thinking about the way she had looked across that garden courtyard, bleeding for a child that wasn't hers, from a pack that had done nothing but sneer at her since the day she crossed my border.

I had built my entire understanding of Elara Draven before she ever set foot on my land. Her father's daughter.

A spy poured into a wedding gown.

A weapon her family had sent to hollow me out from inside my own walls, the same way, I had believed this for twenty years without once questioning it her father had hollowed out mine, the year he took my parents from me and left a nine-year-old boy to lead a pack too gutted by grief to lead itself.

I had spent two decades hating a ghost. And then the Goddess dropped that ghost's shadow directly into my house, and instead of a weapon, I found a woman who threw herself at a starving rogue's teeth for a boy she owed nothing.

It didn't fit. And I have never known what to do with anything that refuses to fit.

My wolf had known before I did. The instant her hand touched mine at the altar, something old and absolute reared up in my chest and snarled mine, and I despised it on contact, because wanting her felt like spitting on every promise I'd made my dead mother's memory that no Draven would ever get close enough to hurt me the way they'd hurt her.

I did not know, that night by the dying coals, that my mother's memory was not what I believed it to be. I did not know that the woman whose study I'd barred Elara from entering had left behind a warning meant for me, not against me.

I only knew my new wife had unearthed something in that room, and that Kieran had come to me an hour earlier with a folded letter and a face arranged into careful concern, telling me exactly what I already feared that she'd been hiding something, that she couldn't be trusted, that perhaps, Alpha, this marriage is precisely the trap her father built it to be.

I should have gone to her first. I should have asked, gently, the way she'd asked me, why. I tell myself that now, though at the time none of it felt like a choice. It felt like instinct, the same instinct that had kept my pack breathing for twenty years by trusting almost no one, and Elara Draven had never once been let inside that circle.

I sent for her before dawn.

She walked into the war room still guarding her injured shoulder, chin lifted, eyes already shuttered in a way that told me she knew exactly why I'd summoned her. Behind her, the map of both territories still lay spread across the long table, marked with two decades of red pins tracking every skirmish along the border, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that there should have been a pin for this too. Kieran stood near that table, the letter pinched between his fingers, and when he held it out to me, I made the second mistake of my marriage in as many days.

I didn't ask her to explain first. I read my mother's words myself, Trust no Alpha, unmistakably her hand, the paper torn and blood-stained at the corner in a way that turned my stomach and I looked up at my wife with twenty years of grief and suspicion boiling up my throat at once.

"Where did you get this."

Not a question.

An accusation wearing one.

"I found it in your mother's study. I was going to tell you…"

"You were going to tell me," I repeated, and heard my own voice turn cold, cruel, the voice I keep for enemies, not the one I'd used the night before adjusting her bandage while something cracked open in my chest for the first time in twenty years.

"After hiding it three days. After sneaking into a room I explicitly forbade you from entering."

"I didn't know what it meant! I still don't! I only know your mother wrote it, and she's dead, and so is my uncle, and my cousin, and half the wolves in both our packs, and none of us know why!"

"Enough."

The word came out louder than I intended, sharp enough to make her flinch, and something in me flinched with her, though I buried it fast under the fury I understood far better than whatever softer thing was clawing up beside it.

"This letter does not leave this room. You will not speak of it to anyone. And you," I turned to Kieran, "will restrict her movements further, effective immediately. Her room, and nowhere else, until I decide what to do about this."

"Ronan…"

"That is Alpha, to you." I said it to wound her, and it landed exactly as intended, her face going pale and rigid in a way that should have satisfied the part of me still convinced she was my enemy.

It didn't satisfy me. It felt like taking something fragile and irreplaceable and hurling it against stone because I was too afraid to find out what it might have become if I hadn't.

Two guards came to walk her out. She didn't fight them. She didn't look back at me either, which somehow cut deeper than any accusation her family had ever taught her to throw at mine.

After the door closed behind her, Kieran folded the letter carefully and tucked it back inside his jacket.

"You did the right thing, Alpha," he said. "Better to contain this now than let it spread."

I didn't answer.

I was staring at the empty space where Elara had stood, thinking about the way her wolf had howled the second my hand closed over hers at the altar, thinking about the word my own wolf had snarled the instant I caught the scent of her blood in that courtyard mine, mine, mine and wondering, for the first time since this marriage began, whether the enemy I'd spent twenty years bracing to fight might not be the woman I'd just locked away in her own room.

It was nearly midnight when a runner found me in the war room, breath tearing, the kind of terrified that only comes from something already gone wrong.

"Alpha," he said. "It's the Luna. The guard posted outside her door, he's unconscious. And her room is empty."

I was moving before he finished the sentence, my chest suddenly, violently hollow in a way I had no time to examine, because somewhere in this fortress, on the coldest night of the year, my wife, my mate, whether I was ready to claim it or not had vanished, and I had no way of knowing whether she'd run from me, or whether someone had made certain she couldn't run at all.