The Luna He Couldn’t Shed

Chapter 3 — What He Signed

Nobody stepped forward.

Forty priests in pristine silver robes, and not a single one of them so much as shifted their sleeve to check it.

The Bone Chancellor set his cup down, slow and careful. He let out a small, indulgent laugh, as if Ansel had just made a joke that wasn’t quite funny enough to land. “Alpha Morvane,” the old man said, his voice dripping with faux-warmth. “You’ll have to forgive an old man’s confusion. Are you accusing my sacred order of lurking outside your own wife’s chambers?”

“I’m asking a question.”

“Then let me answer it for you.” The Chancellor spread his hands, his silver robes falling open perfectly at the wrists. No tear. No missing fabric. “None of my priests were anywhere near the east wing last night. I can vouch for every man in this hall personally.”

Ansel’s winter-blue eyes darkened. “Can you vouch for every man not in this hall?”

That landed like a physical blow. A collective ripple of unease went through the priests at the high table. Quick, guilty glances passed sideways. The Chancellor’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind his bone- pale eyes went dead silent.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Ansel said. He turned his massive back on the high table as if they no longer mattered, as if he’d already extracted the exact psychological confession he came for. He hadn’t formally accused anyone. He’d simply made forty powerful men realize that someone in their own order might not be accounted for. By breakfast, that seed of doubt would have done more damage than any accusation ever could.

Ansel walked out of the grand hall without looking back at me. I understood somehow, that this was an invitation.

*****

His private study smelled just like him, winter frost and pine lingering in the cold air. Towering stacks of old pack ledgers leaned against the stone walls, some of them threatening to topple.

Ansel closed the door behind him. He didn’t sit. He stood across from me, arms crossed, sleeves still pushed up from the hall. His forearms bore old battle scars.

He looked at me the exact way he had scrutinized those priests ten minutes ago, like he was deciding how much of the truth he was going to let me hide.

“That display in the hall,” he said, his deep baritone cutting through the silence. “The red dress. All of it. I want to know what game you’re playing, Maeva.”

“No game. I’m done sitting quietly while someone decides my life is theirs to end.” I held his stare. “Someone was right outside my room last night. You saw the robe. This wasn’t the first time.”

His jaw tightened. “The first time being what, exactly?”

I stopped. My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t tell him about the garden, the way I’d died with his name on my lips. Or how I’d opened my eyes a year earlier. I reached for the only excuse I had instead.

“I have a feeling about this.”

“A feeling.” He sounded unconvinced. “I don't doubt the robe, Maeva but we can't know the intention of whoever was lurking. You’re taking one torn scrap and a bad dream and making them into something they’re not.”

“It’s not a dream, Ansel.”

“Then what is it?”

I said nothing. The truth would get me locked in the dungeon cells for madness instead of grief. I needed to be free to move, not watched like a prisoner.

He studied me for a long, heavy moment.

“You’re in your shedding year,” he said at last. “The countdown does things to a Luna's mind. I’ve seen it before. Fear that isn’t tethered to anything real.”

“I’m not losing my mind.”

“I didn’t say you were losing it. I said it’s warping your perception.”

“I’d rather be wrong safely instead of right too late.” I held his gaze. “Give me access to the archives. Let me choose my own guard. This castle is full of secrets, Ansel, and I’m going to uncover every one of them before it’s too late. With or without your help.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I don’t go quietly on my Sevening. I’ll make sure the whole continent hears it. Every wolf in that hall, from the lowest rank to the highest, will watch you drag your own wife from her throne while I scream that women have been dying in this castle for years and you let it happen.”

I looked him straight in the eye.

“It doesn’t even have to be true. By the time anyone starts asking questions, the damage will already be done.”

Silence settled between us.

“So choose, Ansel. Because I’m not bluffing.”

Ansel stared at me, his fists clenching so hard his knuckles turned white. For a second, I thought he was going to roar, to lock me away in the dungeons.

Instead, he stepped around the desk slowly. “Fine. If that's how you want it, so be it” He stopped close enough that I had to tilt my head back just to keep looking at him. “If it lets you sleep well at night.”

“How generous.” I immediately stood up, refusing to be ridiculed. Standing put our bodies a mere foot apart. He didn’t step back to fix the distance.

Something changed in his expression. His eyes locked on me with sudden intensity. He didn’t answer. He stepped closer instead, and I backed up until the bookshelf pressed against my spine.

Before I could catch my breath, his palms landed on the bookshelf, one on either side of my head. I had nowhere to go. It wasn’t the way he’d trapped me that rattled me. It was the look in his eyes, calm and certain, as though this had always been on his mind. Heat crept up my neck before I could hide it.

His pupils widened until the blue was almost gone. His jaw clenched. His next breath came slower, rougher, like he was forcing his lungs to remember their job. In seven years in marriage, I’d never once seen him lose himself like this. Until now.

“You don’t believe a word I’ve told you,” I rasped, my heart hammering against my ribs, “and you still can’t stop looking at my mouth.”

“No. I don't,” he agreed, his voice low, and raw. He didn’t move away instead he leaned in a bit, close enough that I felt the heat of his words against my skin. “Yes. I can’t.”

Every part of me yearned to close that last remaining inch. To tip my face up and take what he was clearly fighting not to give, like he has always done in this marriage. I held entirely still instead. Giving him that pleasure now would mean giving him a surrender he hadn’t earned yet.

“Careful, Alpha,” I whispered, mocking him with a sharp smile. “Wouldn’t want me thinking you actually want me.”

His eyes darkened. Hunger flashed across his face before he buried it again. The look that followed wasn’t for me. It was for himself, furious that he’d let me see even that much.

He pushed off the shelf in one motion, putting the width of the heavy desk back between us like distance was a weapon he still had left.“Draw up the terms,” he ordered, his voice significantly rougher than before. “Write down whatever you think you need.” He refused to look at me while he spoke. “And Maeva. When the Sevening comes, whatever this is, imagined or not, I expect you to go quietly. No scandal in front of the packs.”

“You’ll have your quiet ending.” I reached out and snatched a spare sheet of parchment from his desk, my pulse still too loud to trust my own voice. “Sign the promise of the terms, and I’ll draft the formal contract properly tonight.”

He grabbed the pen. He signed a blank promise to agree to whatever clauses I wrote, right there, in one hard, violent stroke, without reading a single word of it.

I turned toward the door, contract in hand, already composing the smug report I was going to give Tilly about breaking his composure. I never got to give it. Because right then, half-buried under a stack of unsigned letters on his desk, I saw it. Just for a second, before his sleeve smoothly moved to cover it without him seeming to think about it at all.

A silver wax seal. Cracked down the middle. The exact same mark stamped into the Bone Chancellor’s robes.

I froze. I looked up. Ansel had gone completely still, watching me realize exactly what I was looking at.

“Maeva.” My husband’s voice went cold. The kind that expected to be obeyed. “Don’t.”