FORSAKEN LUNA RISING QUEEN

Chapter 2:The Frost at the border

The fog sat on the border stones like a held breath.

I stood at the edge of the line, a full pace behind the last warrior, and watched my own breath crawl out white and vanish. Frost had crusted the grass. My knuckles split open again the second I made a fist, and I let them sting. It gave me something to think about besides the thirty wolves ahead of me, all standing too straight.

Nobody spoke. Boots shifted on frozen ground. Someone’s jaw clicked, over and over, a tooth grinding against a tooth. Garrick, the beta, kept rolling his shoulders like his skin didn’t fit.

They were afraid. Thirty Bloodmoon warriors, and every one of them smelled of sour sweat under the cedar soap.

Caleb stood at the front with his back to me.

Show pack unity, he’d said at dawn, not looking up from his boots. As if I were a banner he needed to carry.

I’d carried it. Eight miles through the dark, behind the warriors, behind the wagon. Behind Tatiana.

She’d come in a fur-lined cloak, with Leo bundled against her chest, pale and trembling and perfect. I couldn’t stay behind, she’d whispered, not with the pack in danger. Caleb had been moving before she finished the sentence.

He was moving now. Two strides back from the line, his hand closing around her upper arm, steering her behind the shield of warriors. His other hand cupped the back of Leo’s head.

“Stay here,” he said, low. “Whatever happens, you don’t leave my sight.”

“Caleb.” Tatiana’s voice cracked at exactly the right place. “I’m frightened.”

“I’ve got you.”

He did. Both of them. Completely.

The bond in my chest gave a thin, humiliating pull, like a thread catching on a nail, and I waited for him to feel it. His head didn’t turn. His shoulders didn’t change. He adjusted the corner of her cloak against the wind, and my fingers curled so hard the frozen scabs split.

Fine. Fine.

I fixed my eyes on the fog and kept them there.

Then the birds stopped.

I hadn’t noticed them until they were gone, a whole chorus of morning sparrows cut off mid-note. The silence dropped over the clearing like a lid. The air went cold, not frost-cold but wrong-cold, the kind that comes up out of the ground. My breath hitched. Garrick made a sound in his throat.

A weight settled on my shoulders.

It pressed down through my collarbones, my spine, the backs of my knees. My wolf flattened inside me and bared her teeth, and for one wild second I thought my legs would fold. Around me, warriors dropped their gazes. A young one near the end went gray and swallowed hard, his fingers digging into his thighs.

Pine drifted through the fog. Cold iron. Ash.

Last night’s scent. Stronger now. Closer.

Shapes moved in the white. Twenty of them, maybe, walking in silence, step for step, with a discipline that made Bloodmoon look like a pack of pups. And in front of them, one shadow that didn’t walk like the others.

He walked like the ground owed him.

The fog tore open.

He stopped at the stones, an arm’s length from Caleb, and the whole clearing stopped with him. Black coat. No weapon. Bare hands, scarred across the knuckles.

His eyes found Caleb first. Flat. Bored.

Then they moved, past the warriors, past the cloaked woman and her child, past every wolf who had made sure I stood last.

They landed on me.

Something low and ruinous turned over inside my ribs.

“Alpha Caleb,” said Malakai, never looking away. “You brought your Luna.”

His voice was quiet. It carried like a blade drawn across stone.

“Tell me,” he said. “Why is she standing in the cold?”

Caleb moved before I could breathe.

Two strides to the left, shoulders squared, his body sliding between me and that gaze like a door slamming. The bond jerked in my chest. Not toward me. At me. A flare of heat and possession that had nothing to do with love.

“This is Bloodmoon land,” Caleb said. His voice came out lower than usual, rougher, the Alpha command layered over it so thick I felt it scrape my skin. “You don’t speak to my mate. You speak to me. We’re here about the northern line. The creek markers. The three hundred acres your hunters keep crossing.”

Malakai didn’t answer.

He didn’t blink, either. He just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, and the silence stretched until Caleb’s jaw worked and a vein jumped in his neck. Someone behind him shifted. A boot scraped.

I watched Caleb push harder. His aura spilled out, heavy and loud, and I’d once thought it could crush a mountain. Next to what stood across the stones, it was a dog barking at a locked gate.

“I said look at me.”

Malakai looked at him. Barely.

Then he stepped forward.

One stride. The toe of his boot crossed the border stone, and the sound the warriors made was half gasp, half growl, a ragged noise that died the instant it started. Nobody lunged. Nobody drew. The weight in the air thickened until my ribs ached with it, and I saw Garrick’s knees tremble.

Second stride. Third.

Caleb didn’t stop him. His mouth opened, and nothing came out.

Malakai walked straight through him, through the gap Caleb had left when his feet forgot how to hold their ground, and the pack parted like something afraid to be touched. Frost crunched under his boots. Pine and cold iron rolled over me, and under it the ash, the burnt-down bone smell that made my wolf press against the inside of my skin and whine.

He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back.

Up close his eyes weren’t black. They were the darkest gold I’d ever seen, ringed with something nearly red, and they were not looking at my face. They were looking at my hands.

I tried to hide them. Too late. Split knuckles, swollen red, a thin line of blood running down one wrist from the cold. Lye burns crawling up to my forearms.

Something in his face went still. Dangerous, quiet stillness. The kind that comes right before a throat gets opened.

“Who did this?” he said.

Soft. Meant for me alone. Not a whisper, but it went into me like one.

I swallowed. “It’s nothing.”

“Don’t.” His eyes lifted. Held mine. “Don’t lie to me about your own blood.”

Behind him, Caleb finally found his voice. “Malakai—”

“You scrub their floors,” Malakai said, ignoring him, ignoring all of them. “You stand last. You’re hungry, and the cold’s in your bones.” Each word was a nail. “A Luna doesn’t live like that. Only a servant does.”

My throat closed. Heat stung my eyes, and I locked them open, refusing it.

He reached into his coat. A black leather glove came out, and he pulled it on, finger by finger, never breaking my gaze.

Something in my chest cracked.

Not my heart. The bond. A thin, bright shriek of pain ran down the thread connecting me to Caleb, and I gasped, hand flying to my sternum. Behind me, Caleb choked on a sound. Tatiana said his name, high and frightened.

Malakai held out his hand, palm up, gloved fingers steady in the cold air.

“Step across the line, Elena.”

I hadn’t told him my name.