Iron Moon

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

RONAN

"You are not the heir, Ronan. You never were. And one day this pack is going to find that out."

Elias says it the same way he says everything, quiet and flat, like he is discussing the weather instead of the one truth that could end me. I do not answer him. I never do. I stand at my office window instead, looking down at the training yard where my warriors are running drills in the cold, and I let his words sit in my chest where they have sat for the last seven years.

"You could have told me this before I took the title," I say, finally.

"Would you have taken it if I had?"

He is right, and that is the worst part. I would have taken it anyway. Someone had to. My father was dead, my mother had been dead for years before that, and the real heir, my father's firstborn son from a mate no one talks about anymore, vanished before I was even old enough to understand what an heir was. Everyone in this pack believes I am that vanished son, grown up and come home. Only three people alive know I am not. Elias is one of them. Silas is another. The third is buried in the ground with my father, taking the truth of what really happened that year with him.

"Has there been any sign of him?" I ask. I always ask. Elias always says the same thing.

"No sign of Callan in seven years, Ronan. Wherever he went, he does not want to be found. You may simply have to accept that the pack will never know, and that you will carry his name until you die."

Carry his name. I have been carrying it since I was seventeen years old, since the day the council put a title on my head that was never mine to wear, because the alternative was leaving Frostbind leaderless in the middle of a war with three rival packs, and I would rather live a lie every single day than watch my people slaughtered because the truth was inconvenient.

My wolf, Fenrik, has never liked it either. He paces under my skin most days, restless with a secret he did not choose and cannot spend.

A knock interrupts before I can answer Elias, and Silas comes in without waiting, which tells me before he even speaks that something is wrong.

"Warriors caught scent of a car crossing our southern boundary an hour ago," he says. "No hostile intent. A family. The father gave his name at the checkpoint. Callum Sorren."

I go still. "Sorren. As in the Duskwood pack."

"As in Nora Sorren's husband," Silas says, and watching my face, adds, "your mother's cousin, if the old records are right. He is asking for sanctuary. Says his daughter is in danger from Alpha Draven."

Draven. I know the name the way I know every predator that circles Frostbind's borders looking for weakness. A man who lost his mate and has spent every year since trying to replace her with someone younger, someone who cannot say no to him. I have heard the stories from packs that share a border with Duskwood. None of them are good.

"Bring them in," I say. "Give them a house, food, whatever they need. If Draven has a problem with it, he can bring it to me himself."

Elias is watching me with an expression I do not like, the same expression he gets whenever family enters a conversation, because family is a subject that always circles back, eventually, to the son who is not really my father's son.

"You should be careful," Elias says. "A distant cousin's family arriving right as the council starts asking harder questions about your bloodline is not a coincidence I would enjoy explaining."

"They are not arriving to ask about my bloodline, Elias. They are arriving because a man is trying to force a girl into a bond she does not want." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. "I am not turning away a family in danger to protect a secret."

"Even if protecting that secret is the only thing standing between this pack and civil war?"

I do not answer that, because there is no good answer, and because Fenrik has gone strangely quiet inside me, listening in a way he has not listened to a conversation in years.

I decide to run the border myself that afternoon. I tell Silas it is to make sure Draven has not sent anyone tracking the family, and that is true, but it is not the whole truth. Something under my skin wants to see for myself. Fenrik wants it more than I do, pulling at the edges of my control the second we clear the tree line, faster than he has moved in months.

We catch the car scent before we see it, and then something else underneath it, something warm, something that hits me like a fist to the chest. Strawberries. Cedar. Something sweeter I do not have a name for yet.

Fenrik stops running so fast I nearly go down.

Mate.

One word, and my entire world tilts sideways.

I tell him he is wrong. I tell him it is impossible, that we have gone twenty-four years without a mate and I have made peace with that, that a mate means a mark, means council records, means a formal claiming ceremony that requires every Alpha to submit full lineage documentation to be witnessed by three neighboring packs. A mate means the one thing I have spent seven years avoiding at every cost: an official record with my name and my false bloodline stamped on it forever, in front of witnesses who have every reason to look too closely.

Mate, Fenrik says again, and this time there is no argument in it, only certainty, the kind of certainty that has never once been wrong in the history of our kind.

The car comes around the bend in the road below us. Through the trees I see it slow, and then a window rolls down, just slightly, and I catch a glimpse of dark hair and a face turned toward the forest like she can feel me watching even though there is no possible way she knows I am here.

My chest does something I do not have words for. Something that has not happened since before my father died, since before I learned that keeping a secret is the same thing as keeping everyone you love alive.

Get us out of here, I tell Fenrik, and for the first time in his life, my wolf refuses me outright.

No, he says. Not this. Not her.

The car keeps moving toward Frostbind. Toward my pack. Toward the house I already told Silas to prepare, toward a claiming ceremony I cannot survive and a girl I have not even spoken one word to yet.

Somewhere behind us, miles south, Alpha Draven is about to discover exactly where the family he wants back has run to.

And somewhere inside me, Fenrik is already breaking every rule I built to keep us both alive.

"We cannot," I say out loud, to no one, to the empty forest, to myself.

But I already know, standing there with her scent still caught in my throat, that I am going to fail at keeping that promise. I just do not know yet how much it is going to cost everyone I love when I do.