I Was Discarded for My Sister, Now I Am Luna

Mira's POV "I need a few more minutes. Wait outside." Derek said it through his closed bedroom door, voice low, the words coming through the wood like something squeezed. I told myself it was nerves. I was nervous too. I stood in the hallway of the Alpha family lodge holding a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. Cedar soap. A little gift. The kind of thing that says I was thinking about you today. Tonight was Claiming Night. Once each year, when the autumn moon swelled to its peak, werewolves above nineteen could recognize their fated mate. The bond pulled at you from somewhere deep inside, a thread tied to your sternum. Fated mates recognized each other across rooms, across distances, by something that had nothing to do with choice. Derek and I had made a choice instead. My wolf had never spoken. It had never shifted, never surfaced, never given me even the whisper that every other wolf in the pack described. I had been called wolfless since I was fifteen, a word Nadia's circle sharpened into something that cut. With no wolf, there could be no fated bond. So Derek and I had decided. We would claim each other tonight before fate could take either of us somewhere else. I had worn my best dress. My dark auburn hair loose. I had thought about this night for weeks. I heard the sound through the door. Not loud. A low, breathless murmur, and under it, a name said in a voice I recognized, saying a name that was not mine. What was happening? I opened the door. Derek stood in the center of the room with his shirt on the floor. Nadia's arms circled his neck. Her blonde hair loose across his shoulders. She saw me first, and she did not let go. She turned her face into the curve of his neck and breathed him in, slowly and deliberately, her eyes on mine the entire time while she straddled him, with her mouth a little ajar. My step-sister. Derek turned. Two seconds of guilt. Then it organized itself out of his face. "She is my fated mate," he said. "It happened tonight. I could not stop it." I knew what that meant. Everyone in every pack knew what that meant. The fated bond was biological and absolute. A chosen mate could protect you from it, but only if the claiming was already done. Tonight was supposed to be that. His hands were still at her hips. "You promised me," I said. He looked at the floor. Nadia lifted her head. "He has his fated mate now. You cannot hold him to a promise nature already broke." She had been calling me wolfless since we were twelve. She had turned friends into strangers and rooms into gauntlets. Derek had always told me not to let her get to me. Now he had her hand. I set the cedar soap on the hallway floor. I walked out. I did not decide to go to the forest. My feet made the decision while the pain took up every space where thinking usually lived. I crossed the grounds, passed the gate, and the darkness of the tree line swallowed me and I kept walking. I walked through the trees the way I had walked through them since I was thirteen, following the path my feet had memorized long before I understood what it was I kept running from. I found Crystal Lake. It sat between three enormous oaks, the water still and dark, the moon sitting in it like something dropped from a great height. I sat on the flat stone at the edge and pulled my knees up and breathed. In. Out. The night settled around me. Then something began. A warmth in my chest, low and spreading, unlike anything grief had ever felt like. It moved outward through my body until my skin felt tight and the cold of the stone stopped being cold. I pressed both hands flat against my sternum. What is this? The warmth became heat. Real, physical, building heat that settled low in my belly and tightened there. A need so sudden and so complete that I shifted on the stone and made a small, involuntary sound. And then the scent arrived. It hit me on the wind like a wave hits a shoreline. Pine resin and a coming storm and underneath both of those, something warm and dark and specific that went straight into my lungs and dissolved every thought I had. A sound escaped my throat before I could stop it. My body wanted that scent in a way that had nothing reasonable in it. I breathed in again, chasing it, and the heat in me doubled. The mating heat. It had to be. I had heard about it my whole life. The way a mate's scent hit you like a physical thing. The way your body responded before your brain could catch up. The wet heat that gathered between your thighs and the craving that left no room for any other thought. But I had no wolf. I was supposed to have no wolf. I was sitting at the edge of a lake in the dark with my pulse pounding in low, specific places and my whole body oriented toward a scent I could not locate, and nothing I had ever been told about myself was making sense anymore. Movement to my left. Three men came out of the tree line. Heavy boots, rough clothing, leather belts with things hanging from them I could not look at long. Their eyes caught the moonlight in a way that meant their wolves were close to the surface. Rogue wolves. "Look at this." The one in front smiled. White teeth in shadow. "Girl all by herself." "I was just leaving," I said. "Were you?" He tilted his head. "You don't smell like you're leaving." The other two spread out. They were cutting off the path back to the tree line. The lake was behind me. I had the flat stone and the water and nowhere to go. Then that scent wafted across my nostrils again, much stronger. "Back away from her." The voice came from the trees behind them. One sentence. Quiet. Absolute. The three men turned. I watched what happened to their faces. Confidence does not usually leave people all at once. It fades piece by piece. But watching these three turn toward the shadow at the tree line was like watching a flame go out. Every bit of their certainty left at the same moment, replaced by something that looked, on all three of them at the same time, exactly like fear. The leader opened his mouth. Closed it. "Move," the voice said. They moved. All three. Quickly. Not with any attempt at saving face. They went into the trees and were gone. I stood alone in the clearing with the storm-and-pine scent growing stronger every second and my whole body turned toward it and the heat between my thighs was something I could no longer pretend was not there. The stranger stepped out of the trees. He walked toward me and with each step the scent hit me harder, fuller, more complete, and the heat in me surged in response the way a flame surges when you open a window. A sound came out of me. Small and helpless and entirely honest. He went still. I could not see his face in the dark. Only the line of his jaw. The broad set of his shoulders. The grey flash of his eyes when the moonlight touched them at an angle. He looked at me and something in the careful control of his expression came apart at the edges. "You need to leave," he said. The words were deliberate, selected from behind something that was pulling at him hard. "Right now." The scent of him was everywhere. Pine and storm and the specific dark warmth underneath that my body recognized as mine even though I had never met him. "I cannot," I said. My voice came out low, breathless, honest in a way I had no control over. His jaw tightened. "I am in heat." His eyes did not leave mine. "You are in heat. You can smell me the same way I can smell you. And if you stay here—" "I know," I said. His hands came up and stopped in the air between us. "Go," he said one more time. Rough. Something breaking at the edges of that word. "Before I cannot ask you to." I looked at the dark space where his face was. I did not move.