THE ALPHA’S DEADLY LUNA

Chapter 4: What the Moon Reveals

Aurelia POV

By tonight, Kade would either see the truth or see nothing at all, and I still hadn't decided which one terrified me more.

The day passed like a held breath. Della dressed me in silence, her hands trembling slightly as she laced my gown, and I understood she'd heard the rumors already, that the new Luna was cursed, or broken, or worse. I said nothing to correct her. Better she believe the lie than stumble onto the truth by accident.

By evening, guards lined the east hall outside my rooms, more than the night before. A heavy lock now sat on my door, the kind meant to hold something in, not simply keep intruders out. I ran my fingers over the cold metal once and found it exactly as sturdy as it looked. It wouldn't have held me for a second, if I'd wanted out. The point of it was never to contain me. The point was to make Kade believe he had, and some petty, tired part of me almost admired the effort.

A key turned in the lock an hour after moonrise should have begun. Kade stepped inside alone, arms crossed, watching me with the patience of a man who intended to get exactly what he came for.

"You didn't shift," he said.

"I told you. It's not that simple for me."

"Show me what is simple, then." He crossed the room and lowered himself into the chair across from mine, close enough that I could feel the low thrum of his own wolf pressing against the air between us. "I've watched wolves fight the pull their whole lives. I've never seen one simply sit still through it."

"What do you want me to say?"

"The truth. Just once." His eyes held mine steadily. "Why doesn't the moon call you the way it calls everyone else?"

I wrapped my arms around myself, and for once I didn't have to fake the shiver. "Because my mother's blood gave me something different. Most wolves feel the moon like a tide, pulling their second form forward whether they want it or not. Mine doesn't work that way. I have to let her out. She doesn't come for me."

"That's not weakness," he said slowly, working through it. "That's control."

"It's whatever my father decided to call it, depending on the day. Some days, a gift. Most days, a shame he didn't want anyone to see." I wrapped my arms tighter around myself. "He used to look at me like I was something he'd built and then wasn't sure he trusted himself to have made it."

"Why hide something like that."

"Because a wolf who chooses when to shift isn't harmless," I said quietly. "And harmless was the only thing that kept me safe growing up in a pack that had already lost a war. Harmless doesn't get sold off in a treaty. Harmless doesn't get noticed at all."

Kade sat back slowly, something moving across his face that I couldn't name. Not anger. Not yet suspicion again either. Something closer to a man revising an opinion he hadn't realized he'd already formed, quietly and against his own better judgment.

"Trained by whom," he asked, gentler than I expected.

"Garrick. Others. My father, once I was old enough to understand what he wanted from me, though I don't think I ever really did."

"Trained for what?"

I hesitated on that one, because it was the last door standing between us, and I wasn't ready to know what happened after I opened it. My voice, when it came, was smaller than I meant it to be. "I don't fully know. I've spent eleven years learning how to defend myself and never once been told why anyone thought I'd need to defend myself against something worse than an ordinary war."

Something in his expression softened, just slightly, just enough that I noticed. "You're afraid of your own father's reasons."

"Every day of my life."

"I'm not going to hurt you for telling me the truth," he said, quietly, like the words cost him something to say out loud. "Whatever you expected from tonight, it wasn't going to be that."

I searched his face for the trap in it and didn't find one, which frightened me more than if I had. "Why not? I just told you my own father couldn't fully explain what he made me into. Most men in your position would call that dangerous."

"Most men in my position married a stranger for peace and got a hostage in a wedding dress. I didn't expect honesty at all." His mouth curved, just barely, the first almost-smile I'd seen from him since the ceremony. "I find I'd rather have a dangerous wife who tells me the truth than a harmless one who lies to my face every night for the rest of our lives."

"You say that now."

"I say a great many things I intend to keep," he said, and something about the way he held my eyes when he said it made me believe, foolishly, that he meant it.

He didn't push further, and something about the restraint felt like its own kind of gift. For a long moment we simply sat there, a girl who didn't know what she'd been made into and a man who'd married her without knowing either, and the silence between us felt less like a standoff and more like two people quietly deciding to trust each other by inches.

Before either of us could say anything else, the door burst open without a knock, one of Kade's guards half stumbling into the room, face pale in the low light.

"Alpha. You need to see this. Now."

Kade rose immediately, some old instinct in him snapping to attention. "What is it."

The guard's eyes flicked to me, uncertain whether I was meant to hear what came next, then back to Kade.

"The east gate," he said. "There's an army at the border. And they're flying your bride's family banner."