I Was His Luna Until He Forgot Me

THE LUNA WHO WAS HATED

CHAPTER ONE

THE LUNA WHO WAS HATED

ELARA VAYNE

They said I killed him.

Elder Soren's words dropped into the pack square like a stone into still water, and nobody moved to catch them. My wrists were bound in spelled chains that hummed against my skin like I was a slave...

My feet were bare on frost-cracked stone. Nobody had given me shoes. I didn't think that was an accident.

"Elara Vayne." Soren's voice carried easily, the voice of a man who had given speeches like this before. "You stand accused of the murder of Alpha King Kael Draven. The man who found you. The man who made you Luna against everyone's better judgment." He let the silence stretch. "Do you deny it?"

I didn't answer. There was nothing I could say that this crowd would let land.

"Hybrid," someone behind me muttered, like a curse. Another voice, louder: "Monster wearing a Luna's mark."

I'd heard those words my whole life, whispered behind my back. Today nobody bothered hiding them.

"She's not one of us," a woman shouted. "She never was."

"Witch blood and wolf blood together, that's cursed by law," another voice added. "She poisoned him slow. We all watched it happen."

"He gave you everything," a third voice called out, "and you gave him nothing back but a grave nobody can find."

I wanted to answer that one. I didn't, because there was no answer that wouldn't sound like an excuse to people who had already decided.

Soren raised a hand and the crowd quieted at once. "We have confirmed your nature," he said. "A forbidden hybrid. Your existence breaks the treaty that has kept peace for three centuries. Kael went into the Blackveil Swamp on your behalf and never came back. The power that killed him came from what you are."

"I didn't kill Kael," I said, and my voice held steadier than I expected.

"The evidence disagrees."

"What evidence? He went in on his own. I begged him not to. We argued for three hours and half this pack heard it." I looked at the guards posted along the square. "Ask anyone who stood in that corridor that night. Ask them what they heard."

Soren didn't look at the guards. Nobody else did either.

"Convenient," he said, "that the only witnesses to your innocence are people loyal enough to lie for you."

"They're not lying. You just don't want to ask them."

"You sent him," Soren said. "Whatever your intentions. That's enough."

It was already decided. This was just the paperwork.

I thought about the last time I'd tried to stop him from leaving. The night before, in our chambers, he had already been in his travel cloak.

"Don't do this," I had told him. "Whatever it is, send someone else."

"There's no one else I trust with it."

"Then trust me. Take me with you."

"No." He had said it so fast it sounded rehearsed. "You stay here. That's not a request."

"You've never once told me I couldn't come somewhere with you. Not in sixteen years."

"This is different."

"Then tell me how it's different. Tell me what's so important, you'd rather lie to my face than let me help you."

He had crossed the room and taken my hands instead of answering. "I'll be back before you've finished being angry at me."

He hadn't lied about the anger. Just about everything else.

I thought about the other day too…the first one. Nine years old, hiding behind that collapsed barn, certain nobody was looking for me.

He'd crouched down without a word and looked at me for a long moment.

"Are you hungry?" he'd asked. Just that.

I hadn't answered. I didn't trust my voice not to shake.

"That's alright," he'd said. "You don't have to talk yet." He'd held out a hand. "But you're not staying behind this barn tonight. Come on."

I had followed him because I didn't have anywhere else to go, and because nobody had ever asked me a question that simple before.

At sundown they brought the ritual circle. Shamans I'd never seen drew symbols in ash and salt for hours while the chains on my wrists grew heavier, pressing into the wild part of me like fingers searching for a seam.

I let it reach.

Without Kael, what was I holding onto? He had been the only reason this place ever felt like home. If they wanted to erase me, maybe there was nothing left worth fighting for.

I closed my eyes.

The ritual built into a shriek, cracking the frozen stones in a ring around my feet. I felt myself pulled loose from my own body, slow and then sudden.

Then it stopped. Not slowly… like something enormous had reached in and closed a fist around it.

I opened my eyes.

The pack square was gone. The shamans, the crowd, the frost, the pale winter sky, all of it gone.

I was kneeling on black marble in a room I'd never seen. Iron sconces burned with pale blue flame that gave off no smoke. The air smelled of cold and old blood, and underneath that, something sweet and faintly rotten.

A figure stood at the far end of the room with his back to me. Tall. Dark-haired. A black coat to his knees. Shoulders I would know anywhere on earth.

He turned around.

It was Kael. Same jaw. Same shoulders. Same hands I'd held in the dark a hundred nights.

But his eyes were wrong. Not the warm amber I'd memorized for sixteen years. Deep red. Cold. Empty of recognition.

He looked at me like I was a stranger.