TOO LATE, MY LUNA

Caden Hears a Rumor

The training yard had emptied out quickly after what happened.

Sena had called the session early without explanation, which was the kind of decision that required no explanation when everyone present had just watched a new wolf throw a seasoned warrior fifteen feet across the yard without laying a hand on him. The other wolves had filed out in a silence that felt different from the usual end of session quiet, more careful, more considered, the silence of people who had witnessed something they needed time to process before they could talk about it properly.

I had stayed behind and sat on the low stone wall at the edge of the yard and looked at my hands for a long time, turning them over and back, studying them like they belonged to someone I had only just met. They looked exactly the same as they always had. Same knuckles, same small scar across the back of my right hand from a training accident two years ago in Silverstone, same bitten-down nails from the habit I had never managed to break.

Nothing about them looked capable of what they had apparently just done.

Zane had left after saying those two words, which I was beginning to understand was exactly his style. He delivered the thing that needed to be said and then removed himself and let the words do their work without hovering over them. I was still sitting there trying to work out what do it again even meant as an instruction when I heard footsteps crossing the yard toward me and looked up to find the silver-eyed warrior standing a few feet away.

His name was Leo, I had learned that in my second week of training, and he was Zane's Beta, which explained the easy authority he carried without ever appearing to try for it. He looked at me now with an expression that was calm and direct and had something underneath it that I was learning to read as his version of concern, a slight tightening around the eyes that in anyone else might have been more visible.

"There is something you need to know," he said, sitting down on the wall beside me without asking permission, which was very much his style. "We received information this morning from a contact in the eastern trade routes. A traveling merchant passed through Silverstone territory two days ago with gossip from this part of the continent."

He paused for just a moment before continuing. "The merchant mentioned a new female in Nightfall. Young, unknown origin, causing talk among the pack. He described her as someone who had been seen in the training yard with eyes that went silver white under pressure."

I looked at him steadily and waited for the part that was going to matter, because I could already feel it coming.

"Caden of Silverstone was in a meeting when the merchant arrived," Leo said.

"Three other people were present. According to our contact, the conversation was routine until the merchant mentioned the silver eyes. At that point Caden went completely still in the middle of the meeting and did not speak again for almost a full minute." He held my gaze evenly. "Then he stood up and left his office without telling anyone where he was going or when he would be back."

I sat with that information and felt the complicated weight of it settle over me in layers. The silver eyes were not a common feature. They were not something that could belong to a dozen different wolves or be mistaken for something ordinary. In six years of living in Silverstone I had never met another wolf whose eyes did what mine did, and Caden knew that as well as I did, which meant that the moment the merchant described them Caden would have understood immediately and completely who the new female in Nightfall was.

He knew I was here.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth for a moment and looked out across the empty training yard, and I thought about what it meant that he had gone still and then left without explanation, and I tried to work out what I felt about it and found that the answer was more complicated than I had expected. I had spent the last two weeks telling myself that what Caden did or thought or felt was no longer any of my concern, that I was building something new in a new place with new people and the life I had left behind in Silverstone was exactly that, left behind. Hearing that he had gone still at the mention of silver eyes made that clean simple narrative significantly harder to maintain.

"Do you know where he went?" I asked Leo, keeping my voice steady.

"Not yet," Leo said. "Our contact lost track of him after he left the packhouse. He could have gone anywhere." He paused again in the way he did when he had something else to say that he was deciding how to frame. "He could have gone to find the merchant and ask more questions. He could have gone to the border to think. He could have decided to come here himself." He said the last option in exactly the same tone as the others, without any particular emphasis, which I appreciated because it meant I could react to it without feeling managed.

I thought about Caden at Nightfall's border.

I thought about him standing at that line where his territory ended and the Darkwood began, in the same cold early morning air that I had stood in when Rhys walked me to the Silverstone border three weeks ago. I thought about what it would feel like to know that the person you had rejected was on the other side of that line and had become something you did not have words for yet.

I was still thinking about it when I heard footsteps crossing the yard from the direction of the packhouse, and I looked up and Zane was walking toward us with his hands in his pockets and his expression giving away nothing, which had become a reliable signal that whatever he was about to say was going to require my full attention.

He stopped in front of us and looked at me for a moment and then said, in the same quiet even tone he always used regardless of what he was delivering, "One of my border wolves just reported in. There is a rider on the road from Silverstone, moving at pace, heading directly toward our southern border."

The training yard was very quiet around the three of us. I looked at Zane and he looked back at me and Leo sat beside me on the wall without moving, and I sat with the information and felt something tighten in my chest that was not the rejection bond for once but something else entirely, something that did not have a clean name yet but felt like the beginning of a conversation I had not decided whether I was ready to have.