THE LUNA WHO DIED TWICE

CHAPTER 3: What He Didn't Say

The door opened before she reached it.

Kade filled the frame the way he always did, not trying to be imposing, simply built that way, dark hair still perfectly in place despite the last twenty minutes, tie loosened just enough to look like the concession it was. His eyes found hers immediately and stopped.

"Your eyes." His voice came out rougher than she'd ever heard it. "What happened to your eyes?" So he could see it too. Not a trick of the lamp.

"I could ask you something similar," Lyra said, and was almost proud of how level it came out. "What happened at the ceremony?"

Something flickered across his face, not quite guilt, not quite anger. Something caught between the two, the way a man looks when he's been living inside a decision for exactly forty minutes and still hasn't decided whether he agrees with it.

"Can I come in?"

"You're the Alpha. You don't need permission."

"I'm asking anyway."

That, more than anything he'd done tonight, surprised her enough to step back from the door. He came in slowly, the way he might approach something he wasn't sure was safe to touch, and stopped a careful few feet away, closer than strangers stood, farther than a husband should.

"I don't know how to explain what happened tonight," he said. "I've never… I didn't expect." He stopped himself, jaw working. "The bond isn't something you choose. You know that."

"I know how bonds work, Kade. I've had three years to learn how ours doesn't." He flinched. Actually flinched, like she'd struck him, and for one unguarded second she saw something in his face that looked almost like the man from the library, the one who'd laughed at her book, who'd stayed until three in the morning without once checking his phone.

"That's not fair," he said quietly.

"Isn't it?"

"I never lied to you about what this was." "No," she agreed. "You never did. You never had to. I lied to myself well enough for both of us."

He didn't have an answer for that. She watched him search for one anyway, watched the muscle in his jaw work, watched him take one step closer like he might actually reach for her, and for one strange, suspended moment, the cold in her wrist pulsed once, hard, like something under her skin recognized the movement and didn't trust it.

"Lyra." Her name, low, almost careful. "Whatever happens with Seraphina, I don't want you to think tonight meant nothing, three years meant something. You meant…" The window behind him shattered.

Not glass falling, glass exploding inward, a spray of it catching lamplight as something moved through the wreckage too fast to be human. Kade turned first, body already dropping into a fighting stance before his mind had finished processing the sound, and Lyra caught one impossible glimpse of what had come through the window before instinct threw her backwards against the vanity and not a rogue.

Something bigger. Something was wrong with it, fur the color of old bruises, eyes with no gold at all, only black, and a growl unlike anything she'd ever heard from a wolf. It looked directly at her, not at Kade, but at her.

And the mark on her wrist, ice-cold for the last twenty minutes, suddenly ran hot enough to burn.