Luna’s Lost Bond

~Chapter Twelve~

The hand that grabbed her shoulder was faster than her scream.

Nyara spun, back slamming into the tree, breath tearing out of her in short, useless gasps. Moonlight cut across a face she recognized instantly, the same sharp jaw, the same ice in the eyes that Darian wore like armor.

Beta Saneal stood in a fighter's crouch, weight low, one hand still raised from the patrol stance he'd dropped the second he saw her. Recognition flickered across his face, then something colder replaced it. Suspicion.

"I knew I smelled someone familiar." His voice was flat, almost bored, but his eyes never left her. He tilted his head, and Nyara felt the exact moment his focus shifted inward, the faint distance in his gaze that meant he was somewhere else entirely. Mind-linking. Probably Darian.

Don't panic, her wolf murmured, low and urgent in the back of her skull. Whatever you do, don't panic.

Too late for that. Nyara pressed her palms flat against the bark behind her, willing her pulse to slow, and stared back at Saneal with everything she had left, which wasn't much beyond raw, pleading silence.

Saneal exhaled through his nose, sharp and irritated, and looked away from her just long enough to finish whatever he was saying to Darian in his head. When his eyes came back, some of the tension had drained out of his shoulders, replaced by pure exhaustion.

"Speak," he said. "Unless you'd rather explain to Alpha Darian what brought you into the woods again, so soon after the cemetery." His gaze dropped, deliberate, to the clothes she was wearing. Not hers. Found, borrowed, wrong in some way she couldn't name. "You'd better tell me why you're standing here in another wolf's clothing."

Nyara looked down and only then understood what he meant. Heat crawled up her throat. She couldn't tell him she'd shifted. Couldn't tell him about the black fur, the mismatched eyes, the wolf that wasn't supposed to exist inside a woman the whole pack had already decided was wolfless, worthless, forgettable. Elair had worn that name like a wound for as long as anyone could remember. Now it was Nyara's wound too, stitched into a body that wasn't hers, and she understood, finally, exactly why they'd called her nothing.

"I'm waiting," Saneal said, patient in a way that scraped worse than shouting would have.

Help me, she begged silently, uselessly, and her mouth moved before her mind caught up with it, some frantic, half-formed excuse about sleepwalking, about grief, about the cemetery still clinging to her feet.

Saneal blinked. Just blinked, and stared at her the way a man stares at a wall that has started speaking nonsense to him. Then he dragged a hand down his face, exhaled long and low, and looked at her like a problem he'd decided wasn't worth solving tonight.

"Just leave."

She didn't wait to be told twice. She murmured something like thanks and bolted, bare feet slapping the cold ground, and behind her Saneal stood motionless in the dark, watching the space where she'd disappeared, turning over in his mind how much she'd changed since the first day he'd seen her.

Light came before mercy did.

The door slammed open and sunlight poured in like an accusation, and Nyara flinched awake, arm thrown over her stinging eyes. She didn't need to see the shape in the doorway to know who it was. She could hear it in the silence that followed, thick with satisfaction.

"Rise and shine." Liora's voice curled through the room, sweet the way spoiled fruit was sweet, right before it turned. Two of her lackeys trailed behind her, arms crossed, already smirking.

Nyara sat up just as something metal came flying at her head. She didn't have time to duck. The iron bucket struck her temple with a hollow, ringing crack, and she gasped, hand flying to the spot where warmth immediately began sliding down the side of her face. A rag landed in her lap a second later.

Liora's smile widened at the sight of blood. "Oops."

One of the lackeys stepped forward, arms folded, chin lifted with the particular cruelty of someone who'd never had to earn anything in her life. "You'll work for your keep from now on. This pack isn't a charity. We don't feed dirty, unknown whores for free." Her eyes raked over Nyara, slow and deliberate. "And don't get any ideas about whoring yourself out to the Alpha, either."

Something old and furious clawed up Nyara's throat, a retort sharp enough to draw blood of its own, and for one heartbeat she almost let it loose.

Then she remembered where she was. A stranger, in a pack that fed its own first and its strays never. If she was thrown out, she'd be alone in a world that still had Elair's ghosts hunting her, and worse, she'd be leaving Eliot behind.

The thought of him hit her like a fist to the sternum, the flash of his small, frightened face from the dream-walk, his voice cracking around a question no child should ever have to ask his mother. What did you put in Mama's medicine?

She swallowed the fury whole. Picked up the bucket with hands that didn't shake, though everything inside her did. Walked past Liora without a single tear, and looked her dead in the eye on the way out the door.

Liora's smile faltered, just barely, surprise flickering across her face at the sight of something she hadn't expected. Fierceness, where she'd wanted collapse.

"Has she always been like that?" one of the lackeys whispered, startled.

Liora only shrugged, already bored again, already certain she'd won. "Doesn't matter. Get to work."

The dirt under Nyara's nails had turned black by midmorning, packed so deep into the cracks of her skin she doubted soap alone would ever get it out. Liora had made certain there were no tools waiting for her at the training grounds, only rows of stubborn, thorned weeds and two bare hands to pull them with. The other wolves passing by didn't look at her twice. She'd become furniture. Something to step around.

She didn't hear Anaya approach until the woman's shadow fell across her.

"Who told you to do this?"

Nyara kept her eyes on the ground, on the raw, torn skin of her fingers, and said nothing. She didn't have to. Anaya's jaw tightened, already knowing the answer, already turning toward the cluster of warriors loitering nearby with drills forgotten.

"You just stood there? All of you?" Her voice cracked like a whip across the training ground, and one by one the warriors dropped their eyes, shame coloring their faces a deep, ugly red. None of them answered. None of them needed to.

Anaya turned back to Nyara, and something in her expression shifted the moment she took in the full picture, dried blood crusted at her temple, dirt ground into her knuckles, the training clothes stained through at the knees. Whatever she saw there made the anger in her eyes soften into something gentler.

"Come with me."

She led her toward a small building set apart from the main pack grounds, where warriors changed and showered after drills, and pulled a folded spar uniform from her own locker, pressing it into Nyara's arms without a second thought.

"Get cleaned up. Then come find me." A pause, softer than before. "You don't have to keep doing whatever she tells you."

Nyara's throat tightened around words she couldn't quite manage. She hadn't expected kindness here, not from anyone, and the unfamiliar warmth of it nearly undid her more than Liora's cruelty had.

Clean, dry, and dressed in clothes that finally fit, Nyara stepped out of the changing house still fumbling to twist her damp hair into some semblance of a knot. She wasn't looking up. She wasn't looking anywhere but her own hands.

Which was exactly why she walked straight into what felt, for one disorienting second, like a solid wall of muscle and heat.

She stumbled back, a startled sound catching in her throat, hands flying up instinctively to catch herself, and looked up expecting an apology already forming on her lips.

The words died before they reached her tongue.

Alpha Darian stood in front of her, arms crossed, dark eyes unreadable in the way they always were, the way that made every wolf in the pack straighten a little when he walked past. He wasn't looking at her face.

He was looking at the side of her head, where damp hair had slipped loose from her half-finished knot and parted just enough to reveal the raw, swollen line of a cut still healing beneath it.

His jaw tightened. "Who did this to you?"