The Luna He Couldn’t Shed

Chapter 2 — What the Guards Found

“Let go of me.”My voice came out steadier than I felt, though my chest was heaving. “They’re getting away.”

Ansel didn’t let go. If anything, his grip tightened, bruising and unyielding.

“Whatever you saw, he growled, eyes locked on mine, “you’re not chasing it barefoot in your nightgown. Guards. Now.”

Two elite pack warriors were already pounding down the corridor before he even finished the command, their heavy boots loud on the stone. I realized this was the first time in seven years I’d heard him give an order and actually watched the castle bend to his will.

He let go of my arms only after the guards passed. I rubbed the aching spots where his fingers had been. The pain did not scare me. It told me exactly how hard he had restrained his raw Alpha strength so he would not hurt me.

“Explain,” Ansel commanded, stepping closer until his scent of winter frost filled my lungs. “Now would be a good time, Maeva.”

“I smelled it again.”

“You smelled something.”

“The same thing as before.” I forced myself to meet his suffocating stare, refusing to look away the way I once would have. “It followed me out of a dream.”

He did not believe me. I watched his jaw tighten as he decided not to call me out on the madness. His silence was somehow worse than open accusation.

The guards returned twelve minutes later tense and mostly empty handed. One of them held out a scrap of fabric pinched between two fingers. Silver cloth. It was torn clean at one edge, like it had caught on a sharp door latch and ripped free in a hurry.

“Snagged on the east stair,” the guard reported, bowing his head.“Whoever it was moved fast, Alpha. We lost their scent past the kitchens.”

Ansel took the scrap, turning it over once in his massive hand. A cuff seam still stitched along one edge. Silver cloth wasn’t rare. Every high priest in the Silver Synod wore it. Half the castle staff wore silver trim on feast days. It could mean absolutely everything, or it could mean nothing at all.

“Keep it,” Ansel told the guard, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. Then, he turned back to me. “You said you smelled it in a dream.”

“I did.”

“Try again, Maeva.”

I looked at him, shaking, and couldn’t find a single word. He didn’t speak either. The silence stretched between us. Warmth settled low in my chest, unwelcome and impossible to ignore. It didn’t care that I still didn’t trust him. It only wanted me closer. Wanted me to close the distance and bury my face against his chest.

“Get some sleep,” Ansel said finally. He walked out of my quarters without another word.

I didn’t sleep. I sat by the freezing window until the sky turned a bruised gray. A scrap of silver cloth could belong to a hundred people in this castle. But the scent didn’t. It was definitely the same person who killed me in the garden, except to them it hadn't happened yet.

Tilly found me still sitting there when she came in with the morning wash water. “You look like something even the cat wouldn’t drag in,” she said, setting the heavy basin down. “Rough night, Luna?”

“You could say that.”

“I heard the guards ran halfway across the castle at four in the morning. Cook’s convinced it was the Weeping Bride ghost. She’s very smug about it.”

“Tell Cook it wasn’t a ghost.”

“I’ll tell her nothing of the sort. She’ll be insufferable either way.” Tilly crossed to my wardrobe, throwing the heavy oak doors open. “Gray or gray? Oh, look at that, we have such a vibrant range of choices today.”

“Burn them.”

Tilly froze, turning around slowly. “Burn what, milady?”

“The gray. All of it. I want the red.”

Tilly’s eyebrows went up somewhere near her hairline. “The blood-red velvet? The one you got married in?”

“That one.”

“Luna, I love you, truly, but the Chancellor’s office sent a formal note last week specifically about the gray. Something about tradition, dignity, and the proper conduct of a discarded lady in her final year...”

“Tradition erased the women who wore that gray dress and smiled about it,” I snapped, my voice cutting through the room like a whip.

Tilly stared at me, completely stunned. Then, a slow, wicked grin spread across her face, the exact kind she got right before she did something she knew would get her whipped.

“I’ve hated those gray dresses since the day they arrived,” she admitted, already pulling the heavy red velvet free from the rack. “Looks like something you’d bury a spinster aunt in. I never said it out loud, obviously, because I value my head.”

“You just said it.”

“I said it to you. That’s different. You’re basically furniture that talks back.”

By the time she’d finished lacing me tightly into the corset, Tilly nonsense had crowded out everything else for a few minute. Almost.

“You’re going to feel it worse the closer we get,” Tilly said, pinning the last curl into place. “The bond, I mean. Every month that brings you closer to the Sevening, it gets louder instead of quieter. Feels like a cruel joke, if you ask me. Like it wants you to suffer on the way out.”

“Comforting.”

“I try.” She reached for another pin. “You know what they say happens if they don’t sever it in time, right?” Conversational as anything, like she was discussing the weather. “The wolf doesn’t let go quietly. It eats the man from the inside until he can’t tell his own mate from a stranger’s throat. Then the pack has to put him down like a dog before he does something the histories don’t forgive.” She smoothed the pin flat. “Cheerful business, this whole arrangement.”

“Very. Thank you for that.” I said sarcastically.

“Anytime, Luna.”

“If the elders ask why you’re not wearing the customary gray,” Tilly said, tucking one last silver pin into my pinned-up hair, “what should I tell them?”

I looked at my reflection in the mirror. The red dress made my skin look pale as bone, and my eyes were almost silver in the morning light.

“Tell them the Luna sends her thanks,” I whispered. “And her regrets.”

Tilly’s grin widened. “Oh, I’m using that. I’m embroidering that on a pillow.”

********

The Great Hall went dead silent the exact second I walked in. The low chatter of the morning assembly vanished all at once, like everyone had the same terrifying thought at the exact same time.

A dying-year Luna dressed in blood-red defiance.

My father half rose out of his seat at the far table, his face turning an ash-white color I’d only ever seen when he lost a massive gamble. Alpha Corvin Vargr was here for the winter councils, and for the heavy blood-debts my marriage still hadn't paid off.

Down at the high table, the Bone Chancellor sat wrapped in pristine silver robes. His staff of fused wolf vertebrae leaned casually against his shoulder. He watched me with the same soft, patient, grandfatherly face he always wore. I looked at those silver robes. My stomach turned over once, hard.

Was it him? It proved nothing. Every single priest in the Synod dressed exactly like that.

Three seats down from Ansel’s empty throne sat a girl with soft brown curls. She sat with the quiet restraint of someone raised by the veiled Moonwidows. Those women had been shed by their Alphas long ago and left to the shadows of the court. Cerys Ashvale. My chosen replacement.

She wasn’t looking at my face. She was staring at my scandalous red dress like it had personally threatened her life.

“Luna Maeva,” the Chancellor said, his voice carrying through the hushed hall.“The gray is customary for a Luna in her final months.”

“So was dying quietly,” I said, my voice echoing off the stone walls. “I’m trying something new.”

CRACK.

Someone’s wine glass shattered completely in their grip. My father made a strangled, terrified sound low in his throat.

That was when I felt it. Before the heavy doors even swung open, a violent wave of heat rolled up my spine, fast and sure.

Ansel walked into the hall. His Alpha aura immediately swept the room like a physical pressure, forcing weaker wolves to lower their heads. His eyes found me instantly.

Red dress. Sitting tall and bold. Not the trembling woman he’d left shaking in her room an hour ago.

He crossed the grand hall without stopping at his own throne. Instead, he marched directly to me, stopping so close I could feel the heat radiating from his chest. His scent enveloped me, and a low, involuntary pulse answered between my legs.

He spoke loud enough for the whole court to hear.

“A word came from the guards at the east stairs,” Ansel announced, his deep baritone vibrating through the rafters. “Someone lost a piece of their silver robe running from my wife’s bedchamber last night.”

He turned and slowly scanned the hall. His Alpha presence rolled through the room, heavy enough to make every silver-robed priest at the table stiffen with fear.

“I’d like to know,” Ansel growled, his claws visibly lengthening against his knuckles, “which one of you is missing a sleeve.”