Marked by the Moon

Chapter 3: Something Wrong

Come closer.

I didn't move.

Not because I was being careful, not because I was calculating the right response or arranging my face into something acceptable. I didn't move because my body had stopped belonging entirely to me, split down the middle between the part that knew exactly what survival required and the part that was pulling, slow and insistent and wrong, toward the man standing two feet away.

My wolf was not asking anymore.

She was leaning.

"I said come closer."

His voice was the same. Low, even, the kind of voice that had never needed volume to carry weight. But something in it had shifted in the three seconds since he'd first spoken, something I couldn't name, only feel, a thread of tension pulled almost to breaking.

I took one step forward.

One step, I told myself. That's all. You're complying. That's what compliance looks like.

My wolf took the step with me and then kept going, pressing forward inside my chest like she intended to walk straight through my ribs, and I stopped her with everything I had and stood there, one foot slightly ahead of the other, breathing through my nose while my pulse hammered in my throat.

His eyes dropped to my feet. Then back up.

He'd noticed the stop.

"You're fighting something," he said.

"No, sir."

"Don't do that."

A pause. Outside, the wind moved against the window. Somewhere far below, the sound of the kitchen yard, ordinary and unreachable.

"Don't do what, sir?"

"Answer before you've thought about what I actually asked." He tilted his head slightly, just a degree, the way a wolf does when it's processing a scent it can't categorize. "I didn't ask if you were afraid. I asked what you're fighting."

My wolf, I thought. I'm fighting my wolf, who apparently lost her mind the moment she sensed you, and I cannot explain that, and if you understood what it meant you would have me removed from this palace in pieces.

"I don't understand the question," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. Not unkindly. That was almost worse.

"Do you always disobey your instincts?" he asked.

The word landed somewhere behind my sternum and stayed there.

Disobey. As if he knew there were instincts to disobey. As if he could see the shape of what I was holding back without being able to see the thing itself.

"I follow protocol, sir," I said. "Whatever I feel is secondary."

"That's not an answer either."

"It's the only one I have."

He moved.

Not toward me, sideways, a slow circuit of the room that kept him always in my periphery, never directly in front of me, and I stood very still and tracked him without turning my head because turning my head would have meant admitting I was tracking him.

My wolf tracked him anyway. She turned with him like a compass needle, that low insistent pull rotating as he moved, and I gripped the seam of my uniform and reminded myself of every reason this could not be what it felt like.

He was the Alpha King.

I was an omega conscript with a name I couldn't say out loud.

Whatever this was, it was not that.

"How long have you been suppressing your shift?" he asked.

My blood went cold.

"Sir?"

"Your wolf." He stopped at the window again, hands behind his back, looking out. "Most wolves who suppress for extended periods develop a particular tension. Here." He touched two fingers briefly to the side of his own jaw, the muscle there. "And here." The back of his neck.

I said nothing.

"You have it," he said. "Both places."

Careful. "Some omegas have weak connections to their wolves, sir. It's not uncommon."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't." A pause. "But the tension I'm describing comes from active suppression. Not weakness. Strength applied in the wrong direction."

The room felt smaller than it had sixty seconds ago.

My wolf pressed outward, and this time, for just a fraction of a second, I didn't stop her.

It wasn't intentional. A lapse, the way a hand shakes when you've been gripping something too tightly for too long. One unguarded moment, one thread of her slipping past the wall I'd built around her, reaching toward the room, toward him, and then I pulled her back and sealed every c***k shut and stood there with sweat cold at the base of my spine.

The Alpha King went completely still.

He turned from the window slowly. And he looked at me with an expression I had no framework for, not suspicion, not alarm, something quieter and more dangerous than either. The look of a man who has just heard a sound he thought he recognized and is now very carefully deciding whether he was right.

"What," he said, "was that."

"I don't know what you mean, sir."

He crossed the room.

Not in the four measured steps from before. In two, and he stopped close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, that dense, particular heat that alpha wolves ran at, and my wolf surged so hard toward it that my left foot moved forward without my permission.

One half-step. Involuntary. Unmistakable.

I stopped breathing.

He looked down at my foot. Then up at my face.

Something shifted in him. Not his expression, that stayed exactly where it was. Something beneath it, something moving in his eyes like a current under ice, slow and enormous and impossible to see clearly.

"You're not what you said you were," he said quietly.

"I'm Lyra Ashfen, sir. A conscript. An omega from a pack that defaulted on tribute. That's everything."

"No." The word was soft. Almost gentle. "That's what you were told to say."

The silence that followed had a shape to it. A weight.

He doesn't know, I told myself. He feels something, but he doesn't know. You can still contain this. You can still walk out of this room and be invisible and survive this year and go home and none of it has to mean anything.

My wolf looked at me with the contempt that only a very old creature can manage.

The Alpha King stepped back. He returned to his desk. He picked up the piece of paper he'd set down earlier and held it for a moment without looking at it.

"You will not return to the kitchens," he said.

The floor felt uncertain beneath me.

"Sir."

"You'll be reassigned. Upper corridor staff. Starting tomorrow." He set the paper down and finally looked at it, signaling, in the precise language of powerful people, that the conversation was over. "You'll report to Sera Vynn at dawn."

I didn't move.

"That will be all, Ashfen."

I walked to the door. I opened it. I stepped into the corridor where the guard still stood, not looking at me, and I pulled the door shut behind me with the careful click of someone who has just survived something they don't yet have a name for.

My wolf settled against my ribs, warm and terrible.

For the first time in nineteen years, she was not afraid.



That frightened me more than anything else in that room.