✨ *THE LAST OATH OF THE MOON* ✨*

Chapter 2: The Alpha Who Broke His Oath

Chapter 2: The Alpha Who Broke His Oath

The gold eyes blinked.

Eira's entire body locked. She knew she should be afraid. Every story her mother ever told her about the Moon Pack ended with blood. Wolves take disobedient Keeper girls and eat their hearts to steal their light.

But she couldn't move. The cold had seeped too deep. Her bloody feet had gone numb. The Moonstone in her palm was barely warm now.

The shadow moved closer, and it became a man.

No — not a man. A man would have made noise. A man would have left footprints in the snow. This creature left nothing.

He was tall. Impossibly tall. His black hair was long, past his shoulders, tangled like he had never cut it. His face was all sharp angles, covered in dark stubble, with a long, silver scar that ran from his temple to his jaw. He wore only black pants and a shirt torn open at the chest, despite the killing cold. His skin was pale, but his chest was covered in more scars, old and silver, like claw marks.

And his eyes. God, his eyes. Molten gold, glowing faintly in the dark forest. Not human.

Kael.

The name came to her, not from memory, but from the Moonstone. It pulsed once, weak but insistent. Kael.

Kael had not spoken to another living soul in fifty years.

Fifty years since he buried his own pack with his bare hands in this same frozen river. Fifty years since he broke his oath to protect the Keepers because he was too late. He had heard the previous Keeper — Eira's grandmother — scream for him across this same riverbank while he was hunting three valleys away. By the time he arrived, the warlocks had already taken her heart.

He had watched the light leave the moon that day. And he swore he would never answer another Keeper's call again.

He had told himself his heart had died with them. He lived as a ghost in this cursed forest. Let the moon bleed. Let the world end. He deserved it.

He had been meditating for three days without food or water when the wind changed.

The scent hit him like a blade to the chest.

First, Moonstone. Pure, bright, alive. Impossible. He thought it was gone forever.

And under it — blood. Human blood. Young. Terrified. Female. Keeper blood. And snow. And tears.

The ancient law he had spent fifty years trying to bury, trying to drown in silence, cracked to life inside his bones, burning through his veins like silver poison, like it had when he was twenty and newly Alpha.

PROTECT.

He followed it to the river. And he found her.

Small. Human. Barely more than a child, maybe seventeen, bleeding in the snow in a torn nightdress that left her legs bare to the winter. Her lips were blue. Her grey eyes, wide with terror, were locked on his. Her dark hair was crusted with ice. Her feet were a mess of blood and snow.

The stone at her throat, the stone he thought he would never see again, flared once, bright as starlight, just for him. It recognized him.

It chose.

For the first time in three hundred years, since the first Alpha made the first oath to the first Keeper, the Moonstone chose an Alpha again.

And it chose him. The broken one. The oath-breaker.

Eira tried to crawl back, her hands slipping on the black ice. "P-please... don't... don't eat me..."

Kael's eyebrows pulled together. Eat her? Is that what they told Keeper children now?

He could kill her now. It would be a mercy. End the oath before it started again. End the pain. The moon was dying anyway. The girl would die in an hour from the cold if he left her. No one would know.

Instead, his knees hit the snow in front of her. The snow did not make a sound under his weight.

He reached out. His hand was large, scarred, his nails thick and black, almost claws. He expected her to flinch.

She did. But she didn't let go of the Moonstone.

"Warlocks," he said. His voice was terrible. Rough, like rocks grinding together after fifty years of disuse. Low and hoarse. "Three miles back. Hounds."

Eira's eyes widened. "You... you can talk..."

"Quiet." He didn't mean to be cruel. But his heart was hammering too loud. The oath was awake and it was screaming at him to touch her, to warm her, to take her somewhere safe. "They follow blood. Your blood."

He looked at her feet. The bloody footprints leading straight to her. The warlocks would follow them in minutes.

He had two choices. Leave her and let fate take her, like last time. Or...

Kael growled, a low sound that vibrated in his chest.

He scooped her up in one movement. One arm under her knees, the other around her back. She weighed nothing. She was ice cold, except for where the Moonstone touched her skin, which was burning hot.

She gasped, her small hands flying to his shoulders, clutching his torn shirt. "What are you doing! Put me down!"

"Hold on to me, little Keeper," he muttered, his golden eyes scanning the dark trees where he could already smell the black smoke coming. "If you fall in this river, you die for real."

He stepped onto the black ice. The ice groaned, but it held him. It knew its Alpha.

Eira buried her face in his chest without thinking. He smelled like pine and snow and something safe, something she hadn't smelled since her mother's hut. He was impossibly warm, like a furnace.

Kael moved. He was not fast like a human. He was fast like a myth. The world blurred. One second they were in the middle of the exposed river, under the bleeding moon, the next they were inside the deepest part of the forest, where the ancient trees grew so close together not even moonlight could enter. The forest went dead silent. Even the wind stopped.

He stopped behind a massive oak. He crouched, still holding her, and covered her mouth gently with one large hand.

"Shh. Look."

Through the trees, on the other side of the river where she had collapsed, three figures in bone-white masks emerged from the snowstorm. The warlocks. Black smoke poured from their hands, sniffing the snow where her blood had stained it. One of them knelt, touched her bloody footprint, and brought it to his mask to taste.

Eira's whole body shook. Kael's hand over her mouth was the only thing keeping her from sobbing.

The lead warlock stood up. He turned his masked face directly toward the dark forest where Kael was hiding with her. He couldn't see them — the Moon Pack's forest hid its Alpha from dark magic — but he felt something. He tilted his head.

Kael's arm tightened around her until it almost hurt. A low, possessive growl, almost silent, left his throat. It was not a word meant for Eira. It was a warning to them.

Mine.

For a long, terrible minute, no one moved.

Then the lead warlock made a sharp gesture. The black smoke receded. They turned and walked back into the trees, disappearing as if they had never been there.

They were not giving up. They were going around. They were hunting smarter now.

Only when their scent was completely gone, washed away by the snow, did Kael breathe again. He looked down.

Eira had passed out in his arms, her grey eyes closed, her face tucked against his chest, her small hand still clutching the Moonstone.

For the first time in fifty years, Kael felt something other than guilt.

Fear. Not for himself.

For her.

He pressed his forehead briefly against her icy one, an ancient, instinctive gesture of an Alpha to his pack.

"You're mine to protect now," he whispered to the unconscious girl, his voice breaking. "Even if it kills me. Again."

Then he stood and carried her deeper into the forbidden forest, toward the cabin no one had entered in fifty years, while above them, the bleeding moon pulsed, and the howl of a warlock hound echoed again, much closer this time.