The Engagement Feast
1155 Words
Three days later.
---
The packhouse had never looked so beautiful. Lanterns dripped from the rafters like molten gold.
White flowers—Serena's demand—choked every table, their perfume so thick Elara could taste it. Three hundred wolves packed the great hall, laughing, drinking, raising toasts to a union that would secure the Red Moon Pack's future.
Elara carried a silver tray of wine goblets and tried not to look at the couple at the head table.
Kael sat rigid in his formal coat, Serena draped across his arm like a fur stole. His smile never reached his eyes.
Every few minutes, his gaze cut to the shadows at the edge of the hall—to the omega in the plain gray dress, serving wine to wolves who wouldn't meet her eyes.
Don't look at me, Elara begged silently. Please. They'll see.
"He looks like someone stepped on his tail," Finn whispered, hovering near the chandelier. "Also, Serena's dress makes her look like a melted candle. Should I tell her? I could whisper it in her ear. Ghosts are very good at whispering."
"Finn." Analise's voice carried the weight of a woman who'd raised two children and died for one of them. "Not now."
"Fine. But I'm mentally composing a poem. 'Ode to a Bouffant.' It's going to be devastating."
Elara bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. A fatal mistake.
Serena saw it.
---
The soup course arrived.
Elara approached the head table with a tureen of mushroom bisque—heavy, scalding, sloshing against the rim.
She kept her hands steady. Her breathing even. Behind her, Marcus narrated every potential threat in the room, but she'd stopped listening.
Kael was watching her again.
Serena was watching Kael watch her.
"Omega," Serena said sweetly as Elara reached for her bowl. "Closer. I can barely smell you from here."
Elara stepped forward. One step. Two.
Serena's elbow moved faster than anyone could track.
The tureen tipped. Scalding liquid flooded over Elara's hands—her fingers, her wrists, the thin skin between her knuckles. Steam rose. The smell of mushrooms and burned flesh filled the air.
Three hundred wolves went silent.
Elara didn't move. Didn't cry out. Didn't drop the tureen, which she held steady through sheer, stubborn will. The pain was immense—a red wall of it, screaming up her arms—but something else screamed louder.
Don't react. Don't fight. Survive.
Then Analise was there. Her mother's spirit pressed against Elara's burned hands, insubstantial as frost, and the pain dulled. Not gone. But bearable. Marcus added his weight. Even Finn pressed his small nose to her blistered knuckles, and the three of them held the agony at bay like a shield.
"Oh dear," Serena said, not sounding sorry at all. "How clumsy of me. Clean this up, won't you?" She gestured to the spilled soup spreading across the white tablecloth. "And get yourself out of my sight. You're ruining the mood."
Elara bowed her head. "Yes, ma'am."
She turned. She walked the length of the great hall with soup dripping from her ruined hands. Three hundred wolves watched. Three hundred wolves said nothing.
At the head table, Kael's goblet shattered in his grip.
---
The private study smelled of whiskey and old lies.
Kael poured himself a third glass. Beta Thom—Serena's father, a broad man with clever eyes and cleverer hands—watched him from the leather chair by the fire.
"You're going to drink yourself into a stupor before your own engagement night," Thom observed.
"That's the plan."
Thom laughed, but his eyes didn't. "I've heard a rumor. Something I think you should know."
Kael's hand paused over the decanter. "I pay you to handle rumors."
"This one concerns the omega. The moon-touched one." Thom leaned forward. "There's talk that the Red Moon heir survived the m******e. A girl with silver eyes and a cracked locket. The heir who was supposed to unite the scattered packs." He paused. "Your father found her wandering in the woods eleven years ago. Did he ever tell you where she came from?"
Kael's face revealed nothing. "She's nothing. A broken orphan. That's all."
"She has your eyes."
"Coincidence."
Thom studied him for a long moment. Then he smiled—a father's smile, warm and unconcerned. "Of course, Alpha. Forgive my curiosity. Now drink up. Your bride is waiting."
He left.
Kael stood alone in the firelight, the suppressant vial burning a hole in his pocket, and thought about silver eyes and cracked lockets and the way the omega had fought like a soldier possessed.
She's nothing, he'd said.
He'd never been a good liar.
---
Upstairs, Elara crept through Serena's chambers.
The locket sat in the top drawer of the vanity, right where Serena had promised. Elara's burned fingers fumbled with the clasp. The silver was warm—or maybe that was her own ruined skin.
She opened it.
Two pressed flowers. One bluebell. One clover. Her mother's last gift.
And beneath them, a hidden compartment she'd never noticed.
Inside: a folded square of parchment, ancient and soft as skin. A map. Red Moon ruins, marked in faded ink, with a single word scrawled at the bottom: HOME.
Analise materialized at her shoulder. Her ghost-wolf flickered, almost solid with urgency.
"You are not an omega," her mother said. "You are a princess. The last daughter of the Red Moon. And tomorrow, you will remind them."
Elara's throat closed. "How? How do I remind them of something I barely remember?"
"You run. You find the ruins. You claim what was stolen." Analise pressed her translucent forehead to Elara's. "But first—you must survive the rejection."
"The rejection?"
"Kael will break the bond. Publicly. To save face with Serena's family. You must let him." Her mother's voice cracked.
"If you accept the rejection willingly, the curse on our bloodline will hold. If you fight it—if you try to keep him—the curse breaks. And something worse than Serena will come for you."
Elara folded the map. She tucked the locket into her dress. She walked back to her tiny closet of a room and packed a small bag—bread, a waterskin, the clothes on her back.
She didn't plan to stay for the rejection. She'd be gone before dawn, before Kael could humiliate her, before Serena could finish what she'd started with the soup.
Marcus's spirit blocked the door.
"No," the old Beta said. "You must accept the rejection first. In front of the pack. In front of the ancestors." His dead eyes held hers. "It's the only way the curse will hold."
Elara stared at him. At the bag in her hand. At the map burning a hole in her heart.
"I hate this," she whispered.
"I know," Marcus said. "But you're a princess. And princesses don't run."
She sat on her cot and waited for dawn.
- Writer
