The alpha king's rejected Luna

Chapter 2:

Miranda walked until the pain in her feet outweighed the pain in her chest, and then she kept walking anyway, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the sound of the pack's laughter carrying across the clearing.

She had no plan when she left the treeline that night, nothing beyond the animal instinct to put distance between herself and everyone who had watched Garrick drag her through the dirt. She'd gathered what little she could carry before dawn, a change of clothes, the small amount of money she'd saved from selling herbs at the pack market, a cloak too thin for the nights that grew colder the further south she traveled. She left the torn white dress behind in a ditch two miles from the border, unable to bear the weight of it against her skin a moment longer.

Three days of walking brought her past the edge of Ashwood territory and into lands she'd never set foot in, unclaimed stretches of forest and farmland that belonged to no single pack, the kind of neutral ground where wolves without a home sometimes drifted when they had nowhere else left to go. She slept in a hollowed tree the first night, in an abandoned barn the second, and by the third night, exhaustion and hunger had worn her down to something she barely recognized, a woman who flinched at every sound in the dark and pressed her hand constantly to her stomach as though she could shield the small, fragile life growing there through sheer force of will alone.

The morning of the fourth day, she smelled woodsmoke on the wind, and something in her, some last reserve of will she hadn't known she still possessed, pushed her legs forward toward it instead of away.

The town revealed itself slowly through the trees, a scattering of low buildings and narrow streets built along a river, the kind of settlement that existed in the space between pack territories, home to wolves who had left their packs by choice or, like her, by force. She stood at the edge of the treeline for a long moment before she made herself walk into it, painfully aware of how she must look, hollow-eyed and travel-worn, her clothes stained with three days of dirt and forest floor.

No one stopped her. No one even looked at her twice, which she understood, after a moment, was its own strange mercy. In a town built from cast-offs and runaways, a single exhausted woman drew no particular attention.

She found a well near the center of town and drank until her stomach ached, then sat on its low stone wall and tried to think, for the first time in days, about what came next. She had enough money for perhaps two nights in whatever passed for an inn here, maybe three if she was careful. After that, she had no plan at all beyond the vague, desperate hope that a town like this might have work for someone willing to do anything, work that didn't ask too many questions about where she'd come from or why she'd left.

She was still turning that over, still trying to force her exhausted mind into something resembling a strategy, when a young girl approached the well, no older than ten, with a bucket nearly as big as she was.

"You're new," the girl said, without preamble, the blunt curiosity of a child too young to have learned caution yet. "Everyone's new here eventually, but you look newer than most. You look like you slept outside."

"I did." Miranda managed something close to a smile, the muscles of her face rusty from disuse. "A few nights, actually."

"You should go to the healer's house. Mistress Odalys takes people in sometimes, if they're willing to work for the bed." The girl filled her bucket, studying Miranda with the same frank assessment adults tried and failed to disguise. "You don't smell like you're from around here. You smell like Ashwood."

Miranda's stomach dropped. "Does that matter, here?"

"Not really. Half this town used to belong to somewhere else." The girl hefted her bucket and started to turn away, then paused, glancing back with sudden, unguarded sympathy that looked strange on a face so young. "You look sad. Rejected-sad. I've seen that look before. It gets better. Not fast, but it does."

She was gone before Miranda could find any words to answer that, leaving her sitting alone at the well with tears she hadn't expected pricking at her eyes over the casual kindness of a stranger's child.

She found the healer's house an hour later, following the girl's directions through streets that grew narrower and more crowded the closer she got to the center of town, and stood outside its door for a long moment gathering the courage to knock. Whatever pride she had left felt like the last thing she owned outright, and asking for charity, even charity in exchange for labor, felt like surrendering some final piece of the woman she'd been before that night beneath the blood moon.

She knocked anyway. She had learned, in three days of walking, that pride didn't fill an empty stomach or keep a child safe inside her.

No one answered.

She knocked again, and when the silence stretched on, some old instinct, honed by years of pack life, made her step back and glance up at the building, searching for some sign that anyone was home at all. That was when she caught the scent, sudden and sharp on the afternoon air, something wild and powerful threading through the ordinary smells of woodsmoke and river water, a presence so commanding that every instinct in her body went instantly, involuntarily still.

She turned, and found herself looking directly into the eyes of a man she had never seen before in her life, tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair, eyes the deep amber-gold of a wolf far more dominant than any she'd encountered outside Ashwood's own royal line. He stood perhaps ten feet away, having approached without a single sound she'd registered, watching her with an intensity that made the exhaustion in her bones momentarily forgotten.

And beneath the wariness, beneath three days of grief and fear and hunger, something inside Miranda's chest gave a single, unmistakable pull toward him, a warmth blooming low and sudden and utterly unbidden, the same sensation she had felt once before beneath a different moon, with a different man who had ultimately cast her aside.

The stranger's eyes widened slightly, as though he had felt it too.

"You," he said, low and disbelieving, taking one slow step closer. "I felt you the moment you crossed into this town. I didn't think it was possible to feel a bond form from that far away."

Miranda's breath caught in her throat.

"Who are you," she whispered.

"Ezra," he said. "King of the Thornfield Pack." His gaze didn't waver from hers, something fierce and possessive already kindling behind the gold of his eyes. "And unless every instinct in my body is lying to me, you're my mate."