Claiming His Luna

The Border Stone

Three nights later, the moon hung full and bright directly overhead — close enough that every wolf in both packs would be feeling it in their blood, restless, wired, itching to run. Kade found himself standing at the old border stone a full hour early, and he didn't even try to pretend that was an accident.

Elena was already there. Arms crossed, hair down instead of pulled back the practical way it had been the first night. She looked like she'd put actual thought into how she looked tonight, and he hated how much he noticed that. Hated it in the way you hate a song you can't stop replaying.

"You're early," she said, a smile tugging at the edge of it.

"You're earlier."

"Couldn't sleep." She looked out over the valley, silver and black under the moon. "Kept thinking about those tracks. The ones that weren't paw prints. Weren't boot prints either."

He hadn't slept great either, and it wasn't only the tracks keeping him up — though those had earned their spot. The prints they'd found were wrong in a way that itched at his brain like a notification he couldn't dismiss. Too long for wolf. Too narrow for bear. Claws curved backward instead of forward, built for dragging, not chasing. Not wolf. Not anything either of them recognized, and between the two of them they'd spent their whole lives learning to ID literally everything that moved through these woods. Whatever left those prints wasn't on the list.

"Told my Beta to double the patrols on our side," Kade said, scanning the tree line below for movement. "Keep everyone off the ridge till we know more."

"Same on mine." She glanced at him, something calculating in her expression, like she was reading things off him he hadn't said out loud. "You didn't tell them why, though. That you'd been talking to me. Walking Thornwood land with an Ashford Beta at your side."

"No."

"Me neither." She exhaled, and it carried more than the sound alone should've. "My dad would call it treason. Talking to Thornwood at all, let alone walking your Alpha through our territory like—"

"Like we're not enemies?"

"We're supposed to be." She said it quietly, less like an argument and more like she was testing the words against what she actually felt and finding they didn't fit right anymore.

Kade closed the distance between them before he'd consciously decided to move, the way water finds the low point in a field without anyone telling it to. "Supposed to be isn't the same as are."

Elena didn't step back. This close, he could hear the change in her heartbeat, could feel the pull toward her sharpen into something he'd stopped being able to deny somewhere over the last three nights. Something that had nothing to do with border drama or missing pack-mates or weird claw prints, and everything to do with a kind of recognition older than either pack's messy history — the kind the elders talked about in stories meant to comfort kids before bed. The kind Kade had stopped believing in the day he took the Alpha mantle and learned the hard way that most comforting stories turn out to be exactly that. Just stories.

"This is a bad idea," Elena said softly, not moving away even as she said it.

"Probably."

"My pack's gonna call it betrayal if they find out."

"Mine'll call it worse." He reached up slowly, giving her every chance to stop him, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, letting his hand linger a beat longer than it needed to. "I don't really care what either pack decides to call it."

She tilted her face up toward his, and for one long second neither of them moved, the whole valley below gone dead quiet in a way that should've felt peaceful and instead felt like the world holding its breath, waiting to see what they'd do.

Then something screamed.

It ripped up from the valley — high, wrong, a sound that had no business existing in these woods. Elena's head snapped toward it before the echo even finished rolling off the ridge, every soft edge of her gone sharp and locked-in, Beta instincts slamming the door on whatever had been building between them a second earlier.

"Later," she said, already moving, already coiled for a fight neither of them had trained for.

"Later," Kade agreed, and ran the ridge beside her without a second's hesitation, matching her stride step for step down into the dark — an Alpha and a Beta going after the same unknown threat, for the first time in ten years of bad blood, standing on the exact same side of the line.