The Sacred Luna

Chapter 4

(Sanya's POV)

I stare at him.

"Blood Moon is one of the most powerful packs in Manhattan. The alliance will restore the family's reputation. It will secure your position. It's what Mom and Dad would have wanted."

"Mom and Dad would have wanted me to choose."

The words come out before I can stop them. They sit in the air for a second — sharp, true, useless — and then Derek shakes his head.

"Mom and Dad wanted you safe. They wanted you provided for. They wanted you married to someone who could give you a future." He pauses. "Aaron Knight couldn't give you a future. He couldn't even show up."

The blow lands exactly where he aimed it.

I look at the oranges. I look at the grapes. I look at the empty chair where my mother used to sit, and for a second — just one second — I can hear her voice. Not the words. Just the sound. The particular warmth of it, the way she said my name like it was something precious she was holding carefully in both hands.

She would not have wanted this. I know that the way I know my own face in a mirror.

But she's not here. And neither is he. And my brothers are sitting across from me with a deal already done and a chair already set, and the silence of three days is pressing down on me like a hand on my chest, and I'm tired. I'm so tired that the fight has gone out of my legs and my arms and my voice, and the only thing I have left that's still standing is the thing in the center of my chest that refuses to bend.

"I don't love him," I say. "I've never met him. I don't even know what he looks like."

"You'll meet him at the ceremony."

"This isn't what I want."

"What you wanted left you standing at a tree in the dark for two hours." Garrett's voice is flat. Not cruel. Worse than cruel — certain. The certainty of a man who thinks the case is closed. "This is what's real, Sanya. This is what's in front of you."

I look at the table. The bread. The fruit. The coffee going cold. Everything arranged for my agreement, everything positioned for my surrender.

And I think about my mother.

Not the grief of her. Not the missing. Just the way she carried herself through every room she ever walked into — straight-backed, clear-eyed, with her chin level to the floor no matter what was happening around her. My mother endured things I'll never fully know. My father was a good man, but the pack world is not kind to women, and kindness from one man does not erase the cruelty of a system. She endured it. She carried it. And she did it without once losing the thing that made her her — the dignity. The refusal to be made less.

She taught me that. Not in words. In the way she stood.

I pick up a grape. I eat it. The sweetness is sharp and sudden and real, and it's the first thing I've tasted in three days.

"Fine," I say.

Derek looks at Garrett. Garrett looks at me.

"Fine?" Garrett repeats.

"I'll marry him."

The relief on their faces is instant — quick, badly hidden, gone in a second but I caught it, and I'll remember it. The relief of men who have gotten what they wanted and are already thinking about the next thing.

"You're making the right decision," Derek says.

I'm not. I know I'm not. There is nothing right about marrying a stranger to protect a reputation I didn't damage, to satisfy brothers who locked me in a room for three days, to replace a man I loved with a man I've never seen.

But I'm not doing it for them.

I'm doing it because the only alternative is to walk out of this house with nothing. No money — they took what was in the mattress. No phone. No contacts. No pack willing to take in a wolfless woman with no family backing and no connections. In this world, a woman alone is a woman erased. She doesn't exist. She has no protection, no standing, no voice. She's a body that can be claimed by whoever finds her first.

I won't be that.

If this is my life now — if the road I chose was a dead end and the man I chose was a lie and the future I planned was smoke — then I will live this life with my chin up. I will walk into this marriage the way my mother walked into every room: back straight, eyes open, dignity intact.

Not because I believe in it.

Because I refuse to let the world take from me the only thing it hasn't already taken.

"When?" I ask.

"The ceremony is being arranged," Derek says. "It'll be soon."

"How soon?"

"Soon."

I push back from the table. The chair scrapes the floor, and the sound is ugly and final, and I let it be.

I go to my room. The door is unlocked now — no need to lock it anymore, I've agreed, I've surrendered, I've done the thing they needed me to do. The bed is unmade. The slit in the mattress is still there, empty now. The window shows me the same patch of sky.

I sit on the edge of the bed.

I pick up the only thing I managed to keep — the cloth. The cloth the coconut was wrapped in. I pulled it from the bag before Garrett took it, before everything was taken, and I've kept it folded inside my pillowcase for three days. It still smells faintly of coconut. Faintly of Aaron's hands.

I press it to my face.

I don't cry. There's nothing left in me to cry with. The tears were used up somewhere on the first night, somewhere between the eleventh phone call and the first crack in the ceiling, and what's left is dry and quiet and hard.

I fold the cloth. I put it back in the pillowcase.

Then I stand up, and I go to the mirror I haven't looked into for three days, and I look at my own face.

I look terrible. That's the truth. My eyes are swollen. My skin is dull. My hair is matted from three days of not caring. I look like a woman who has been broken.

But my chin is level. My back is straight.

And I'm still breathing.