BLOOD MOON

Chapter 1

Haliya

A dull ache throbbed at the back of my head.

I stirred slowly, the world spinning as I tried to open my eyes. My body felt heavy, like it had been weighed down by fog. The scent of old wood, smoke, and dried herbs filled my nose. A sharp contrast to the fresh pine and dew of my home.

This wasn’t the Crescent Fang territory.

I blinked up at the ceiling. Wooden beams. Cracks in the walls. Dim light filtered in through a high, narrow window. Wherever I was, it was old and not built for comfort.

My hands trembled as I sat up.

My clothes were gone.

I gasped and looked down. A loose, worn-out shirt hung over my body, paired with equally rugged pajama pants. They were soft from age but smelled of dust and ash. Someone had changed me.

I panicked and scrambled to the side of the bed and checked my body. No bruises. No wounds. Nothing that screamed harm. But that didn’t make it any better.

Someone had touched me while I was unconscious.

I leapt off the bed, my bare feet hitting the cold wooden floor with a soft thud. The room was small just the bed, a table with a pitcher of water, and a crude wooden door bolted shut from the outside.

Locked in. Of course.

“Hello?” My voice cracked.

No answer.

I slammed my palm against the wall. “Let me out!”

Still nothing. I paced back and forth, chest heaving.

Where the hell am I?

I reached for the mind link, reaching desperately for my parents, for Cain, for anyone. But it was silent. Like screaming into an empty canyon.

No response.

My wolf stirred weakly inside me, but the bond wasn’t strong enough yet. She was just a whisper, a flicker of emotion. And right now, all I felt from her was worry. And rage.

Then—footsteps.

I froze.

Heavy, deliberate, and too calm for my liking. They stopped just outside the door. The bolt slid.

I backed up instantly, raising my fists even though I had no idea how I’d win a fight like this. Still, if he touched me again, I’d bite.

The door creaked open. And there he was. The man from the forest. The one who spoke to me through the mind link.

He stepped inside slowly, as if entering a room of glass. He wore dark clothes—fitted, clean, but somehow old-fashioned. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing veins and scars on his forearms. His eyes locked on mine with unsettling intensity.

“I was hoping you’d be awake by now,” he said, voice low and calm.

I didn’t respond. Just stared. My body trembled, but I refused to let it show on my face.

“Where am I?” I demanded. “What did you do to me?”

He tilted his head. “Nothing harmful. You fainted. I brought you here and dressed you in something more comfortable. Your ceremony dress was soaked in blood—not yours, in case you're wondering.”

“Don’t act like you did me a favor,” I spat.

A faint smirk touched his lips. “Fair enough.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Who are you?”

A long pause.

Then, “You may call me Kieran.”

Kieran.

I didn’t recognize the name. He wasn’t from any neighboring pack I knew. Not from the Crescent Fang. Not from the council. He was an outsider… maybe even a rogue.

But if he was a rogue, he was unlike any I’d ever met.

“You shouldn’t be able to talk to me through the mind link,” I said slowly. “That connection is only shared between—” I stopped myself.

Fated mates.

My stomach twisted.

He saw the realization flash through my eyes and stepped closer.

“It’s rare,” he said softly, “but not impossible. The bond exists, Haliya. Whether you’re ready to accept it or not.”

“No,” I snapped, backing away. “That bond should’ve been with someone from my pack. Someone chosen by the moon goddess not a stranger who ambushed us and hurt my people.”

Kieran’s eyes darkened. “I didn’t attack your pack.”

“You were there.”

“I was,” he admitted. “But I didn’t order the attack. I came for you.”

The words made my skin crawl.

“You what?”

“I’ve known your name for a long time. I’ve seen you in dreams… visions, even before you turned. I didn’t believe it at first. Thought the moon was playing tricks on me. But when I saw you, when I felt the bond begin to stir—” he trailed off, like he didn’t know how to explain it. “It confirmed everything.”

“You kidnapped me,” I said, voice cold. “That’s all I need to know.”

“I saved you,” he countered, expression unreadable. “You don’t know what’s coming, Haliya. What’s waiting for you if you return to that pack.”

My breath hitched. “What are you talking about?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into his coat pocket and tossed something onto the bed beside me.

It was a pendant: silver, carved with the Crescent Fang crest. But it was broken. Bent at the middle, as if someone had stepped on it.

My father’s pendant.

I grabbed it and stared at it in disbelief.

“No…”

“It was dropped in the forest. I found it near the eastern ridge.”

“Is he—”

“He’s alive,” Kieran said before I could finish. “But not safe. None of them are.”

Silence thickened between us.

He watched me, carefully. “I know you hate me right now. I’d expect nothing less. But I didn’t come into your life to be your enemy.”

“Then let me go,” I whispered.

His gaze didn’t waver. “I will. But not yet. You need to understand what’s happening first.”

Before I could say another word, he turned and stepped back toward the door.

“Rest,” he said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

I stared at the door long after it shut behind him, the sound of the bolt locking me in echoing louder than it should’ve. The silence that followed was too heavy for my thoughts to stay quiet.

I sat on the edge of the bed, fingers clutched tightly around my father’s broken pendant. It was scratched, bent… almost unrecognizable. But I knew that emblem. I had seen it around my father’s neck since I was a child. He never took it off not even in battle.

For him to drop it… or worse…

My throat tightened.

Is he still alive? Is Mama okay? Is Cain even breathing after what that man did?

The fear hit like a crashing wave. My heart raced as a million scenarios flooded my mind. I saw the blood again, the chaos at the celebration, and the sound of growls ripping through the night.

All of it played over and over like a broken reel.

My coming of age had turned into a nightmare. My parents were out there, possibly dying, and I was locked in some strange room with no clue where I was. And the man responsible, the one who took me, wasn’t just anyone.

Kieran.

Even his name felt dangerous. Like it didn’t belong to this time.

Everything about him was wrong.

His presence wasn’t just powerful. It was unnerving. His strength… the way he tossed Cain aside like he was nothing. Cain was Beta. He’d fought in dozens of battles. He wasn’t easily overpowered. And yet Kieran had done it with barely any effort.

I closed my eyes.

He’s not just a rogue. He can’t be.

I’d seen rogues before. Wild. Frenzied. Starved of pack connection and driven by survival instincts alone. But Kieran? He was calm. Controlled. Trained.

And then there was his aura.

It didn’t reek of filth or desperation like most rogues. No, his scent was clean but ancient wood, smoke, and something else I couldn’t place. Something that clung to my senses like a story untold.

Royalty.

That’s the word that kept echoing in my head. Not Alpha, not soldier. Royalty.

But that made no sense.

The wolf kingdoms had long been united under the Circle of Alphas. And there hadn’t been a bloodline of royal wolves since the fall of the High Clans generations ago.

So what was he?

Why did his eyes feel like they carried the weight of a hundred lifetimes?

I paced the room, my thoughts spinning.

And the bond—goddess, the bond. It wasn’t just imagined. The way my chest had burned when he touched me, when our eyes met… that wasn’t normal. That was primal. Fated.

But it couldn’t be.

He wasn’t supposed to be my mate. I always imagined someone from the pack. Someone who knew me. Who grew up beside me. Who my parents would approve of. Not some shadow of a man who appeared on the night I was supposed to rise.

“Why me?” I whispered, staring up at the pale light filtering through the wooden window.

What did he see in me?

Why was I important enough to be taken?

He said he saw me in dreams. That he’d known me before he ever met me. That made no sense unless... unless there was something I didn’t know about myself.

But I did know who I was.

Daughter of Alpha Anton and Luna Danaya of the Crescent Fang Pack.

A soon-to-be warrior. A newly awakened wolf.

That was all there was to me.

Wasn’t it?

I sat down again, trying to calm the storm inside me, but nothing helped. Not even the faint flicker of my wolf. She stirred again, not with words, but emotion. A sharp worry and an odd sense of curiosity.

You felt it too, I told her silently.

She didn’t reply. But the way she settled, just for a moment, made it clear she hadn’t rejected him either.

That scared me more than anything else.

What if he was my mate? What if the moon goddess had fated me to someone with blood on his hands? Someone who could look me in the eye and say, “You will be mine,” while holding me like a prisoner?

The question clawed at my insides.

I looked back at the broken pendant in my hand, my thumb rubbing over the cracked insignia.

Whatever his intentions were, whatever secrets Kieran was hiding, one thing was certain:

He knew more than he was saying.

And I needed answers.

If I was going to survive this. If I was going to protect my pack. I had to be smarter. Stronger. I had to stop being the girl ripped from her celebration and start becoming the wolf the Moon Goddess had chosen me to be.

Even if it meant playing along. Even if it meant getting close enough to Kieran to figure out who he really was. And what he truly wanted from me.