WHEN THE MOON REMEMBERS

CHAPTER 3

LIRA'S POV

They announced the alliance two years later, on a night that comes back to me in fragments, like pieces of a dream that won’t stay together in my hands.

I was thirteen. Darius was fifteen. Old enough to know promises between bloodlines mattered, but still young enough to think it was all sort of thrilling, not the kind of heavy that crushes you if it breaks.

Our fathers stood together in front of both packs under torchlight, hands gripped tight, their voices carrying in the air thick with woodsmoke and the bittersweet scent of trampled autumn leaves.

“The Ashworth line and the Stormfang line will be bound,” my father said, his voice even, though I watched his fingers clench just a little harder around Darius’s father’s hand. Nobody else seemed to notice. “Two bloodlines, one future. Let the moon witness this vow.”

Everyone howled together, that deep sound you feel more than hear. It shook through the stone floor and into my chest, until I felt it rise up in my own throat too. Darius and I stood next to each other in silver robes, stiff and feeling too grown-up for our age. When he reached for my hand, I let him take it.

His palm was warm. Steady, steadier than I expected from someone who, deep down, I knew was just as nervous as me.

“Scared?” he whispered, leaning close so only I caught his voice through the roar.

“No,” I lied.

“Me neither,” he lied back. We both felt the lie, but it made everything a shade lighter, like we shared a secret just for us.

After the speeches and the swearing and the toasts, the adults danced and argued and drank deep around the fire. Darius found me near the trees, same as that first year, as if both of us knew where we’d be.

“We’re really doing this,” he said, eyes on the moon, like it might toss him an answer if he stared long enough.

“Looks like it.”

“I don’t even know you. Not really.” He glanced over, careful in a way that almost read like an apology. “Crazy, right? Promised to a stranger?”

“I think that’s what the years before the actual bonding are for,” I told him. “So you can know each other before it’s official.”

A small smile flickered over his face, shoulders easing, like those were exactly the words he needed. “Then let’s start. Ask me anything.”

So I did. I asked how it felt when his wolf first came through, and he said it was like fire in his veins, like waking up in a body that finally made sense. I asked if he was afraid of becoming Alpha, and he admitted, softly, with his head down, that he was terrified of letting his father’s pack down, afraid of falling short when it was his turn. I told him about my mother, who was gone when I was small. How my father wouldn’t speak her name, like it still hurt, years later.

We talked until the fires were nothing but embers, until parents started calling kids out of the cold.

Over the next two years, that treeline became ours. Every Gathering Moon, every festival, every excuse for pack business didn’t matter, we always found our way back. I watched him stretch taller, voice roughening, his laugh losing its caution, as if trusting his own happiness. He watched me grow sharper, braver, more myself, not just the shy girl who side-eyed ceremony and kept her mouth shut.

By fifteen, I loved him in that simple, invincible way, before the world teaches you how easy it is for promises to fracture in the hands of people you thought would never let go.

One night, sitting together under a swollen moon, I felt it for the first time: something off.

A shadow moved at the edge of the trees. Not a wolf. A man’s outline—still, watching, and was gone almost the second I caught it, so quick I nearly convinced myself it was just the moon on the branches.

“Did you see that?” I asked Darius, voice low.

He scanned the darkness, instantly alert, every muscle tight. “See what?”

“Someone watching us.”

He stood up, all future Alpha, seventeen and suddenly, I noticed the strength he carried under his easy smile. “Wait here.”

He searched the treeline. Nothing. No scent, no tracks, nothing solid enough to prove I hadn’t imagined it.

“Probably just a servant,” he said when he came back, though his eyes stayed unsettled, longer than his words suggested. “Or a guard, doing rounds.”

I let it drop, not because I believed him, but because I wanted to. The moon was bright, he was safe beside me, and I didn’t know yet what it looked like when a lie waited years before stepping into the light.

Now, I think about that shadow a lot, especially on long nights in this fortress, where I came to destroy the man I once trusted above all.

I wonder how many years that shadow watched us, long before I understood, long before it tore everything out from under me, in front of the whole pack, under a moon that should have seen our future, not our ruin.