Luna Priestess

Ember Moon

The full moon rose the next night, and the whole pack house changed with it.

I felt it before I saw it. A weight in the air, thick and electric, like the world had been holding its breath all week and finally let it out. By sundown, the halls had mostly been emptied.

Doors were shut. What voices I could hear were low, urgent, not meant for anyone else’s ears.

“Stay in your room tonight,” Rhys told me, standing in my doorway with his sword already strapped on, like he expected trouble.

“I mean it, Lyra. Whatever you’re feeling right now, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and I don’t want you wandering this pack house while every wolf in it is out of their mind.”

“I wasn’t planning on wandering.”

“I know. I’m still telling you.” He hesitated at the door, jaw tight. “I’ll be right outside. If you need anything.”

“You should rest too. You’ll feel it as much as anyone.”

Something flickered across his face, there and gone. “I’ll manage.”

He shut the door behind him, and I was alone.

I didn’t sleep.

I tried, lying flat on my back staring at the ceiling, but the heat that had been building under my skin all week had turned into something I couldn’t ignore anymore, restless and insistent, my whole body aware of every sound in the pack house as if it belonged to me somehow.

Somewhere down the hall, I heard low laughter. A door opening and closing. The particular quiet that means two people have found each other and don’t want to be interrupted.

I pressed my palms against my eyes and tried to think about anything else. The Council and Maren’s warning. The execution she’d told me about, the Priestess whose name I still didn’t know.

Anything that wasn’t the ache low in my stomach that had a very specific shape now, a shape with gold eyes and a jaw sharp enough to cut glass.

It didn’t work.

The knock came just after midnight.

I knew it was him before I opened the door. I don’t know how. Some sense I didn’t have a week ago, sharpened now into something I couldn’t turn off, the same way I’d known Rhys’s footsteps on that balcony.

I opened the door anyway.

Kaius stood there in the dark hallway, and he didn’t look like the Alpha I’d met at the border.

His shirt was open, his hair a mess like he’d been dragging his hands through it for hours, and his eyes, when they found mine, had gone almost fully gold, the human part of him barely holding on.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, voice barely above a whisper.

“I know.”

“You should go back to your room.”

“I know that too.” His hands were braced on either side of the doorframe, not touching me, holding himself back with what looked like everything he had.

“I told myself I could stay away tonight. I’ve stayed away from worse things for longer.”

“Kaius...”

“I said your name eleven times in the last hour, Lyra.” His voice cracked on it, rough and low, nothing like the controlled Alpha from the border rite.

“Just your name. Like it was the only word I had left.”

Every instinct I’d been trained on for nineteen years was screaming at me to shut the door, and every single cell in my body wanted the opposite so badly it physically hurt.

“You’re not yourself right now,” I said. “This is the Moon talking. Not you.”

“Maybe.” His eyes didn’t leave mine. “Or maybe the Moon just took away whatever was stopping me from saying it out loud.”

I gripped the edge of the door so hard the wood bit into my palm. “If you come in here...”

“I’m not going to touch you unless you tell me to.” His voice had gone rougher, hoarse with the effort of holding still.

“I swear it, Lyra. I just...I couldn’t stay in that room by myself another minute. I needed to see you. Even if that’s all this is. Even if you send me away right now.”

I should have sent him away.

I stood there instead, hand on the door, heart slamming against my ribs, caught between nineteen years of training and something in my chest that had been building since the second I’d looked up and found his eyes across that summit hall.

“Kaius.” His name came out of me like it had been waiting there the whole time. “If you stay...”

Down the hall, a door I recognised banged open, and Rhys’s voice cut through the dark, sharp with alarm.

“Lyra?”

Kaius’s whole body went rigid. For one second, gold eyes locked on mine, something raw and desperate passing between us that had nothing to do with the Moon at all.

Then he stepped back from the door, hands falling to his sides, putting distance between us so fast it was like he’d been burned.

“Go back inside,” he said, low, urgent. “Lock the door.”

“Kaius...”

“Please.” His voice broke on the word. “Before I do something neither of us can take back.”

He was already turning, already walking, fast, away from me down the dark hallway, and I stood frozen in my doorway with my heart still racing and Rhys’s footsteps closing in from the other direction, and I understood, standing there in the cold, exactly how close I’d just come to finding out what would have happened if that door hadn’t banged open when it did.