Claiming His Luna

Bones in the Valley

The scream cut off before they reached the valley floor, and that was almost worse than if it had kept going.

Kade hit the tree line first, Elena a stride behind him, both slowing without needing to discuss it. He dropped into a crouch behind a fallen log; she mirrored him on the other side, close enough that he felt the tension coiled through her whole body, close enough that some traitor part of him registered her nearness even now, even with his heart slamming against his ribs.

"There," she breathed.

Thirty yards out, in a clearing thick with the same wrong-shaped tracks, something was crouched over what used to be a deer — too tall for wolf, too long in the limb, its silhouette built from parts that didn't belong together, like whoever had made it had never actually seen a wolf, or a bear, or anything real at all.

"That's not what took Emory. Is it?"

"I don't know." Three years as Alpha, and he'd never once faced something he couldn't name.

The creature's head snapped up — not toward them, toward the ridge behind. It unfolded to a height that screamed wrong through every instinct Kade had, then loped into the dark without noticing them at all.

Neither of them moved for a long moment.

"We need to see what it left behind," Elena said finally, straightening on legs that weren't quite steady yet. The clearing told a story neither of them wanted to read. Bones, some months old. A scrap of fabric on a bramble that made Elena go pale.

"Ashford cloth. We dye it with fireweed root — nobody else uses that shade."

Kade crouched beside her and felt his own chest tighten — a leather cord tangled beside it, unmistakably Thornwood-braided.

"It's not hunting one territory," he said slowly. "It's been working the whole valley. Both sides. Longer than a month."

"Longer than Emory." Elena's voice caught on the horror of it. "We stopped patrolling this valley a decade ago. Both of us. If it's been feeding here since then—"

She didn't finish. She didn't need to.

"Ten years of two packs too proud to speak," Kade said, forcing his breathing steady, forcing the Alpha part of him — the part that had learned three years ago not to let his people see him rattled — back over the part that wanted to be sick. "We didn't just fail to notice a predator. We built it a home and locked the door."

"My father's going to say Thornwood let something fester on our border."

"My council's going to say Ashford should've warned us the day they found the first bone." "They'll both be missing the point." Elena's voice hardened. "The silence is what let this happen. Every year we spent too proud to talk is a year this thing hunted both our people unchecked."

"We tell them," Kade said. "Both packs. Tonight."

"Kade — your council already suspects something's going on between us. If you walk in with proof Ashford's Beta helped you find—"

"Then they'll be angry. Good. They should be." He held her gaze. "I spent three years telling myself leading meant carrying the hard calls alone. That's not leadership. That's pride wearing leadership's coat."

Something in Elena's expression eased, like she'd been waiting for someone else to say it. "My pack's not going to make this easy."

"Neither's mine." A tired, real smile. "Guess we're finding out the hard way if either of us is cut out for this."

They were gathering evidence — fabric, cord, tracks sketched into bark — when Elena went still near a cluster of flat stones, staring at something in the thinning grass.

"Kade. Come look."

He crossed to her, and it took a moment to understand what he was seeing, because his mind kept trying to explain it away. Boot prints. Human-shaped, weeks old, pressed at the clearing's edge — facing toward the kill site, not away from it. Someone had stood here. Watched.

"That's not the creature," Elena said quietly.

"No." His pulse spiked for a reason that had nothing to do with the danger they'd just avoided. "Someone's been coming here. Recently."

Elena brushed moss from something half-buried, and both of them went still.

A signet ring, tarnished but legible — a wolf's head circled by thorns.

"That's a Thornwood elder's mark," she said slowly. "Isn't it?"

Kade's mouth went dry. He knew that crest — reserved for the small circle of council elders who predated even his father's leadership, wolves who'd served Thornwood so long their names were carved into the lodge's founding stones. He turned the ring over with careful fingers, and the understanding settling into his chest was worse than anything the creature had made him feel out here tonight.

"Someone in my own council's been coming to this valley," he said. "Recently enough to lose this here. Which means someone's known — or suspected — exactly what's living out here, and said nothing while it kept feeding on both our people."

"Or," Elena said carefully, watching his face, "someone's been feeding it. On purpose." The suggestion caught like a struck match, impossible to unsee once spoken. Kade thought of Herrick's strange grief in the council chamber, an old wolf who looked, every time the valley came up, like someone carrying a weight he'd never set down.

"I need to find out whose ring this is." He closed his fist around it. "Because if someone in my pack's been protecting whatever's out here instead of hunting it, that changes everything we thought we understood about why this border ever closed."

Elena straightened, her grief hardened now into something sharper. "Then it's not just a decade of pride. It's a decade of someone making sure neither pack found out the truth." She met his eyes. "What if this was never an accident of silence at all? What if somebody's been keeping it that way — on purpose — this whole time?"

Neither of them had an answer. They split at the border stone as the sky grayed toward dawn, each carrying the same impossible conversation back to a pack that wasn't ready to hear it — and Kade carrying, in his closed fist, a second secret neither pack knew existed yet.