THE LUNA THEY’L NEVER LOVE

PHEEONA If I didn't have s*x soon, I was going to die. I knew it sounded crazy. But this was my reality. The bucket full of vomit was cold against my palms, the rim biting into my fingers as another wave of nausea rolled through me and I heaved into it for the third time that morning. My stomach had nothing left to give, it hadn't for three days now. But my body couldn’t stop doing it anyway, wringing itself out like it had a point to make, like it wanted to be absolutely certain I understood how serious things had gotten. I understood. Goddess, I understood. "Easy." Anyssa's hand found the back of my neck, gathering my hair away from my face with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this for weeks. Because she had been. "Breathe through it." "I'm trying," I managed, even my voice came out wrong, thin and threadbare. I sat back on my heels and wiped my mouth with the cloth she pressed into my hand. The morning light coming through my bedroom windows was doing me no favors. Everything felt too bright, too loud, too much. The silk of my nightgown against my skin felt like sandpaper. The smell of the breakfast tray someone had brought in and then quietly removed felt like an assault. My own bedroom felt like it was pressing in on me from all sides. This was what the thirty-first day of my heat looked like. I had been counting. "You need to get back into bed," Anyssa said, already moving to help me up. She was trying to keep her voice neutral, but she was failing. I could hear everything she wasn't saying underneath it, all the worry she had been swallowing for weeks to keep from making things worse. "I'm fine on the floor," I told her. "You're on the floor because you can't stand up on your own." Getting from the floor to the edge of the bed took longer than it should have. My legs were barely cooperating, and there was a heaviness in my body that had nothing to do with muscle. It lived deeper than that. In my bones, maybe. In whatever part of me the bond had decided to make its home when I had spent eleven months refusing to answer the door whenever my mates came knocking. Thinking about it made my head hurt, but now that I couldn’t escape that godessdamned mate bond and what it was doing to my body, thinking of them was all I could do these days. We were in the middle of war when they showed up at our kingdom, ready to attack and conquer our kingdom like they’d done most of the werewolf room. The Torvain cousins were never to be messed with. They were ruthless Lycans feared through out werewolf existence because of everything they had managed to accomplish. Once upon a time, our world lived in peace, as a united nation existing as one. That was until the Torvain family decided conquering territory was more important than peace. They wrecked havoc throughout the realm trying to bring wolves to heel and be ruled under their legacy. And over decades, they succeeded brutally. You didn't fight the Torvains. You were absorbed by them, or you were destroyed by them, and either way you stopped existing as anything separate. It caused such a shift in the realm that there were only four kingdoms left. Shadowcrest. The Bloodied Peaks. My home, Lunaris. And then theirs, the largest and most formidable territory of all, Ashenbane. Ashenbane was ruled by those three monsters, Crowen, Nashyn and Vizellan. They were kings. The most feared men in the known realm, and… they were my mates. Eleven months ago, they arrived at Lunaris with an army at their backs and with the full intent of taking Lunaris as theirs, wanting to make our kindgom another blanketed territory swallowed into Ashenbane. But the moment they’d seen me watching them from my bedroom terrace… everything changed. For me and them. The mate bond pulsed between us so thickly that I almost threw myself off the balcony from the force of it. And the most bizarre thing had happened after. The Torvain’s called off the war. They put a stop to their attack. Just like that. I wasn’t grateful for it, because I felt ambushed. The mate bond wasn't something you chose. That was the part that still sat wrong with me, even now, even with my body falling apart around me one day at a time. You didn't get to decide. The goddess decided for you. And now, three men I had never met, three men whose hands were stained with the blood of every kingdom they had ever taken, wanted me to be theirs and I was supposed to open my arms and call them mine because something ancient and cosmic had decided we were meant to be? Never. I had refused to see them when they came to the palace. I had refused their gifts in the days after. I had refused their letters, their envoys, their increasingly elaborate attempts at courtship that I had mostly learned about secondhand because I couldn't bring myself to look at whatever they had sent. For months, they tried to court me. And I never once budged. I never once showed my face, or met with them. I never returned their messages, or thanked them for their abundant gifts. They never forced their way to me, and till today, I had no clue why. But they vehemently chased after me, courted me, made efforts to woo me for the span of eleven whole months. But thirty days ago, they stopped completely. It had now been thirty one days since I had heard from my mates… and just as ironically, my grace period was now up. It had been a year, and my body was going into heat. I had always known what this sickness was, even when I pretended I didn't. A female wolf had one year after meeting her mates before her body started making decisions she couldn’t control. That was what history said, what my mother had told me when I was young. One year after a mate bond formed, the bond would stop being patient. It would stop waiting. It would take matters into its own hands to bring the mated couple together. My year was up. And for the last thirty-one days, I’d been waking up feeling worse than the day before,pushing through it, telling my father and my brother and best friend Anyssa that I was managing, that it wasn't that bad, that I just needed water and rest and a little more time. It’s been thirty-one days of lying through my teeth while my body quietly staged a revolt against every decision I had made in the past twelve months. I thought the time limit was a rumor. A lie to get mates to complete their bonds early. And even it wasn’t, I was certain I was strong enough to fight off the sickness. I had thought I could outlast it. I was an alpha princess. I had grown up watching my father command a kingdom with nothing but his presence and his word. I had sparred with warriors twice my size during training and won. I had a wolf inside me that had never once backed down from anything it deemed worth fighting. Apparently, the mate bond was not impressed by any of that. It weakened me, badly. I was sick, intolerant, with a fever that burned to the touch and I was getting worse and worse by the day. "Drink this." Anyssa pushed a cup into my hands the moment I was settled against the headboard. Something warm, something that smelled herbed and faintly medicinal. I drank it without asking what it was because arguing required energy I did not have. The healer had been coming every morning for the last three weeks. She was kind and careful and she never said what she was actually thinking, which I appreciated. Because we all knew the only answer to curing this sickness was succumbing to the bond with those devils that I’d pushed away for so long. There was no herb or tincture or carefully prepared remedy was going to touch this. The only thing that could fix what was wrong with me was the one thing I had been refusing for almost a year. My mates. All three of them.