Moon-bound to my enemy

Chapter 1

SERAPHINA'S POV

"You leave at dawn. Pack what you can carry."

That was all my father said. No explanation. No apology. He didn't even look up from the papers on his desk when he said it. I stood in the doorway of his study for a moment, waiting for something more, a reason, a reassurance, anything, but the silence that followed made it clear that nothing more was coming.

I left without a word.

That night I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the floor while the sounds of the pack carried on outside my window like nothing was happening. Wolves laughing. Children running. The ordinary noise of a world that had never quite included me. I had grown up in the Ironblood Pack watching life happen slightly to the left of where I was standing. Always adjacent. Never quite inside it.

My name is Seraphina Voss and I am an omega, which in this pack means I am the last consideration in every room I enter. It means my father looks through me when he looks at me. It means my sister Rhea has had every opportunity shaped and handed to her while I learned to build my own out of whatever was left over. I stopped being angry about it years ago. Anger takes energy and energy was something I learned to spend carefully.

But that night, with dawn coming and a destination I hadn't been told yet, I let myself feel it for a few hours. The unfairness of it. The specific cruelty of being sent somewhere as a symbol of goodwill by a man who had never once shown me any.

Lena found me before I finished packing.

She came through my door without knocking the way she always did and sat cross-legged on my bed and watched me fold clothes into a bag with the expression of someone trying very hard not to say what they were thinking. Lena had been my closest friend since we were children. She was warm in the way I had learned to only be in private, and she had a way of seeing through things that used to unsettle me until I realized it was one of the best things about her.

"He's sending you to Silvercrest," she said finally.

I didn't stop folding. "I know."

"Sera—"

"I know, Lena." I set a shirt down and looked at her. "There's nothing to say that changes it. So let's not."

She pressed her lips together and then nodded once. That was the thing about Lena. She pushed until she understood where the line was and then she respected it. She didn't try to fix things that couldn't be fixed. She just stayed, which was more than most people had ever done for me.

She came with me at dawn. I hadn't asked her to. She was simply there, bag packed, standing beside me in the grey morning light when the escort came. My father watched from the top of the steps as we were led out. He didn't say goodbye. Rhea stood beside him, beautiful and composed, and for just a second our eyes met. Something moved across her face that I couldn't quite name and then it was gone and she looked away first.

I didn't look back after that.

The journey to Silvercrest territory took most of the day. The escort — four of my father's wolves — rode in silence the entire time, which suited me fine. I spent the hours watching the landscape shift from the dense woodland of Ironblood territory into the broader, colder terrain of Silvercrest land. The trees thinned. The sky opened up. Everything felt wider here, more exposed, like the land itself didn't believe in hiding.

The Silvercrest estate came into view as the sun started to drop. It was larger than I had imagined, built from dark stone with a gravity to it that matched every story I had ever heard about the pack that lived inside it. The Silvercrest Pack was feared across every territory for good reason. Their Alpha had taken a war-torn pack after his father's death and turned it into something that even their enemies respected. You didn't say Caden Silvercrest's name lightly. You didn't say it at all if you could help it.

We were led through the main gates and into a wide courtyard where a group of Silvercrest wolves were waiting. High-ranking, all of them, from the way they held themselves. They looked at me the way people look at something they've been told to tolerate.

And then he walked out.

I felt him before I saw him clearly. That was the only way I could describe it afterward. A shift in the air. A pressure at the center of my chest that had no physical explanation. By the time my eyes found him he was already looking at me, standing at the top of the courtyard steps with the kind of stillness that didn't come from calm but from complete control, and the moment our eyes locked something happened that I was not prepared for.

It wasn't attraction. It wasn't fear. It was deeper than both and older than either and it moved through me like a current finding ground. Like something in my chest had been holding its breath for years and had just, without my permission, exhaled.

His expression didn't change. But something behind his eyes did.

The escort captain stepped forward and announced me formally. Seraphina Voss of the Ironblood Pack, offered in peace. A gesture of goodwill. A symbol.

I watched Caden's jaw tighten almost imperceptibly as the word symbol landed. His gaze moved from my face to the escort captain and back to me, and when he spoke his voice was low and even and carried across the courtyard without effort.

"Get her settled. We'll talk terms in the morning."

He turned and walked back inside without another word.

I stood in the fading light of the Silvercrest courtyard and told myself the feeling in my chest was just exhaustion. Just the strangeness of a new place. Just nerves.

I almost believed it.

Lena leaned close to my ear as we were led toward the entrance and said quietly, "He looked at you like he'd seen a ghost."

I didn't answer her. But I had seen it too. And I didn't know yet whether that was the beginning of something or the beginning of the end.

That night, alone in an unfamiliar room in the house of my family's enemy, I lay awake and listened to the silence and felt the strange pull in my chest like a compass needle that had just found north.

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and told myself it meant nothing.

But it didn't stop.