The Sacred Luna

Chapter 3

(Sanya's POV)

Three days.

That's how long they keep me in here. Three days behind a locked door with a window that doesn't open far enough to climb through — I checked — and a mattress with the slit still in the lining where the money used to be.

Garrett took my phone the first morning. Walked in without knocking, held out his hand, said nothing. I said nothing back. He found it under my pillow, which was the obvious place, which was the only place, because I'd spent the night holding it against my chest like it could do something for me.

It couldn't. I'd tried calling Aaron eleven times before they locked the door. Eleven calls. Every one straight to dead air. No ring. No voicemail. Just the flat, hollow tone of a number that doesn't exist anymore.

Derek took my laptop the second morning. I'd been trying to get onto the pack network, trying to reach Aaron's mother, trying to reach anyone from Nightshade Pack who might tell me something. Anything. Whether he's alive. Whether the smoke I saw was his house.

Derek didn't explain. He just unplugged it, tucked it under his arm, and walked out. The lock clicked behind him like a period at the end of a sentence.

So now it's the third day and I have nothing. No phone. No laptop. No way to reach the outside world. The room has a bed, a dresser, a mirror I've stopped looking into, and a window that shows me the same patch of sky I've been staring at for seventy-two hours.

I eat what they bring me. Rice. Bread. Water. I don't taste any of it.

I sleep in pieces — two hours, then awake, then one hour, then awake. Every time I close my eyes I see the smoke. Every time I open them I see the door. After a while the smoke and the door start to feel like the same thing.

The silence is the worst part.

Not the silence of the room — I can handle that, I've been alone before. The silence from him. The total, complete, unbroken absence of Aaron Knight from every corner of my life. No call. No message. No word through a friend or a stranger or a scribbled note slipped under a fence post. Nothing. Three days of nothing.

And that's the thing about silence. It doesn't argue. It doesn't make a case. It just sits there, and the longer it sits, the heavier it gets, until the weight of it starts pressing on the places where your certainty used to be.

He wrapped the coconut. He cut his fingers shaving it.

But he didn't come.

He said a sweet start. He said it with that voice.

But he didn't come.

He walked me to the edge of his mother's yard and said don't be late and laughed when I told him about the braid, and his laugh was the warmest sound I've ever heard a person make.

But he didn't come.

I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and count the cracks. There are fourteen. I've named some of them. The long one over the door is Derek. The one that branches into three near the light fixture is everything I thought I knew about Aaron Knight.

By the second night, something shifts.

Not a decision. Not a thought I can point to and say there, that's where it changed. More like a settling. The way mud settles at the bottom of water that's been stirred — slowly, particle by particle, until the water looks clear even though the mud is still there.

My brothers' words find their footing.

He was never serious about you.

I turn the words over the way I'd turn a stone in my hand. I test the weight. The shape. The edges.

Aaron is not here. He has not come. He has not tried to reach me in three days. I am locked in a room in my brothers' house, and the man who promised me a new life has not sent so much as a single word through the cracks.

If a man loves you — truly, completely, the way Aaron said he loved me — does he disappear?

I don't know anymore.

That's the honest truth. Two days ago I would have bet my life on Aaron Knight. I would have walked into a fire for him. I would have said, with absolute certainty, that the man who serves me the first cup of tea is not a man who walks away.

But he walked away. Or he didn't walk away. Or something happened. Or nothing happened. I don't know. And not knowing is eating me from the inside out, and the silence keeps feeding it, and my brothers' words are sitting in the gap where the truth should be, and I hate them for it, and I hate that I can't prove them wrong.

He lied. He never wanted you.

Maybe.

The thought makes me sick. Physically sick — my stomach turns, and I roll onto my side and press my face into the pillow and breathe until it passes. Because maybe is the cruelest word in any language. Not yes, not no. Maybe. The door that won't close and won't open. The answer that isn't one.

On the morning of the third day, Garrett unlocks the door.

He's wearing the face he wears when he's about to say something he's rehearsed. I know that face. I've seen it before every report card meeting, every pack elder dinner, every conversation where my brothers have decided in advance what the outcome will be and simply need me to arrive at it on schedule.

"Get dressed," he says. "We need to talk."

I get dressed. Not because he told me to. Because I've been wearing the same clothes for three days and the smell of my own defeat is starting to bother me.

The kitchen table is set like a negotiation. Derek on one side, Garrett on the other, a chair left for me in the middle. There's coffee. Fresh bread. A plate of fruit arranged the way our mother used to arrange it — halved oranges, sliced mango, the green grapes she always put at the edge because she knew I'd eat them first.

The fruit display is a weapon. They know exactly what they're doing. They're reminding me of our parents, of the family we used to be, of the home that existed before it was just the three of us and the silence between.

I sit down. I don't touch the grapes.

"There's been an arrangement," Derek says.

He doesn't build to it. He doesn't soften it or dress it up. He places the sentence on the table between us like a document that's already been signed, and I understand — from the way he says it, from the past tense of been — that my input was never part of the process.

"Alpha Tyron Stone of the Blood Moon Pack has agreed to take you as his Luna."