TOO LATE, MY LUNA

Selene's True Face

I had been in Nightfall for five days when Zane came to find me with the kind of expression that told me whatever he was about to say was going to change something.

It was late afternoon and I had just come back from training, my muscles aching in the specific satisfying way they did after a session where I had actually pushed past my own limits instead of just maintaining them. I was sitting on the edge of my bed pulling off my boots when I heard the knock at my door, two short deliberate knocks that I was beginning to recognise as specifically his, and I told him to come in without thinking about it.

He walked in and stood near the door with his arms folded across his chest and looked at me for a moment without speaking, which was not unusual for him, but something about the quality of his silence this time felt different. It felt like he was deciding how to begin rather than simply being unhurried, and that distinction made me set my boot down and give him my full attention.

"I need to tell you something about the woman who was at the ceremony," he said. "The one Caden chose."

I felt my stomach tighten at those words but I kept my face steady and nodded for him to continue, because whatever he was about to say I needed to hear it clearly and I could not afford to let my emotions get in the way of that.

"Her name is Selene," I said, because saying her name out loud felt important somehow, like refusing to let her be reduced to a vague description. "She has been in Silverstone for two years. She trained with us, ate with us, lived inside the pack like any other member." I paused and looked at my hands for a moment. "She told me once over dinner that she hoped things worked out between Caden and me.

I thanked her for saying it."

Zane watched me say all of that without any change in his expression, and then he said, "She was not who she told you she was," and the simple directness of those words landed in my chest with a weight that I had not been prepared for even though some part of me had been circling around this conclusion for days.

I had been thinking about Selene constantly since the ceremony, turning the details over in my mind the way you turn a stone over looking for what is underneath it. The white dress was the thing I kept coming back to. She had come to the Blood Moon ceremony dressed in white, which meant she had known before she arrived that Caden was going to call her forward. Which meant Caden had told her in advance. Which meant the two of them had been planning this together for some time before the night it happened, while she was smiling at me across dinner tables and asking about my training techniques and telling me she hoped things worked out.

I had spent two years being kind to a woman who was counting down the days until she could watch me fall.

"What do you mean she was not who she told us she was?" I asked, keeping my voice even.

Zane unfolded his arms and pulled the stool from under the small table near the window and sat down on it, which told me this was going to be a longer conversation than a standing one. He looked at me steadily before he spoke, the way he always did when he was about to say something he wanted me to hear properly.

"One of my border wolves picked up information from a Silverstone source two days ago," he said. "A warrior named Garrett. He saw Selene leave Silverstone territory after dark and meet with a messenger carrying Iron Claw Pack insignia."

I stared at him. "Iron Claw," I said slowly, because I knew that name and what it meant. Lord Dax of the Iron Claw Pack was not someone spoken about casually in any territory I had ever been in. He was spoken about in the specific careful way that people speak about something genuinely dangerous.

"She handed the messenger a folded document," Zane said. "Garrett could not get close enough to see what was in it, but he recognised the insignia on the messenger's horse clearly. This was not the first time she had done it either. Garrett told my wolf that he had seen her slip out of Silverstone territory at night on at least two other occasions over the past year and had never understood why until now."

I sat very still on the edge of my bed and felt the full shape of what he was telling me take form in my mind slowly and completely. Selene had been meeting with Iron Claw Pack messengers in the dark.

She had been doing it for at least a year, possibly longer. She had been living inside Silverstone all that time, training beside us and eating with us and knowing exactly what she was doing and why, and none of us had seen it.

I thought about the ceremony again. The white dress. The calm smile on her face when Caden called her name. The way she had stepped forward without any surprise, without any of the shock or overwhelm that a person genuinely caught off guard by something wonderful would feel. She had stepped forward like someone walking onto a stage for a performance they had rehearsed many times.

"She planned it," I said quietly, and it was not really a question. "The rejection. She planned all of it."

Zane looked at me for a moment before he answered. "That is what the evidence suggests," he said carefully. "We do not have everything yet. But what Garrett saw is enough to tell us that Selene had a connection to Iron Claw Pack that she was hiding from everyone in Silverstone, including Caden."

I pressed both hands flat against my knees and looked at the floor for a moment, and I thought about six years of my life and one night that had destroyed them, and I thought about Caden standing at that altar with a face I did not recognise, and I thought about a woman in a white dress who had spent two years building something inside my pack that I had never seen coming.

The rejection bond pulsed through my chest the way it always did, low and persistent and mean, and I sat with it for a moment and let myself feel the full weight of what I had just learned. Then I looked back up at Zane and asked the question that was sitting at the front of everything else.

"Why?" I said. "Why would Iron Claw Pack care about who Caden chose as his Luna?"

Zane held my gaze steadily and something moved behind his dark eyes, something careful and considered, like a man deciding how much of a larger picture to reveal at one time. "That," he said quietly, "is exactly the right question. And I think the answer has something to do with you specifically, not Caden."

The room was very quiet around us. I looked at him and he looked back at me and I felt the ground shift slightly beneath everything I thought I understood about the last week of my life.