Luna Priestess

Too Close

The message came just after breakfast, carried by one of Kaius’s Betas, a quiet wolf named Soren who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else delivering it.

“Alpha Draven requests a private blessing,” he said. “His personal chambers. Pack tradition, before the Ember Moon. He asks that you come alone.”

“Alone,” Rhys repeated, from beside me, in a voice flat enough to cut glass.

“Those are his words, not mine.” Soren had the decency to look uncomfortable about it. “I just carry the messages.”

Rhys turned to me the second Soren left. “Absolutely not.”

“It’s tradition, Rhys. Every Alpha’s chambers get blessed before the Ember Moon. I’ve done this a hundred times for other packs.”

“You haven’t done it for this pack. For this Alpha. Not after everything that’s happened this week.”

“Which is exactly why I have to. If I refuse, it looks like I’m hiding something. If I bring you along, it looks like I don’t trust myself alone with him, which is somehow worse.”

I was already reaching for my ceremonial pouch, the little bag of salt and dried herbs every blessing required, mostly so I wouldn’t have to look at him while I said it.

“It’s ten minutes of words I’ve said a hundred times. I’ll be fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I never sound fine. Ask literally, anyone.”

He didn’t laugh. He usually laughs at that.

“Just be careful,” he said instead, and something about how quiet he said it made my chest hurt in a way I didn’t have time to think about.

Kaius’s chambers were on the top floor, at the end of a hallway that felt colder than the rest of the pack house, or maybe that was just me.

I knocked once. He opened the door himself, which surprised me...I’d half expected a servant, or a Beta, anyone standing between us as a buffer.

There was no buffer. Just him, in the doorway, dark shirt half open at the collar like he’d been in the middle of something before I arrived, and the whole hallway suddenly felt smaller than it had a second ago.

“Priestess.” He stepped back to let me in. “Thank you for coming alone.”

“It’s tradition.”

“It is.” Something in his tone said he knew exactly why I’d said it that way, and wasn’t going to call me on it. “Come in.”

His room was plainer than I expected for an Alpha about to be crowned Supreme.

A bed, a desk covered in papers, a window that looked out over the whole valley, catching the last of the morning light. No trophies. No proof of power anywhere except the man standing in the middle of it.

I set my pouch down on the desk and started the ritual the way I always did...salt in each corner, a line of it across the threshold, the old words rising up out of memory without me having to think about them.

Let this ground be shielded. Let this roof stand against harm. Let the wolf who claims it be worthy of the claim.

It should have taken ten minutes. It should have felt like nothing, the way it always had, words I’d said so many times they barely meant anything anymore.

It didn’t feel like anything. Every step of it, I could feel him watching me from across the room, and every step of it, the heat that had been building under my skin since the Ember Moon started crawling closer got worse, not better.

I got to the last line, the one where I was supposed to press my palm flat against the wall above the bed and speak the final blessing, and my hand was shaking by the time I lifted it.

“You don’t have to finish it,” Kaius said, quietly, from right behind me. I hadn’t heard him cross the room. “If it’s too much.”

“It’s not too much. I’ve done this a hundred times.”

“Not like this, you haven’t.”

I turned around, and he was closer than I expected, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him like a physical thing.

“You should step back,” I said.

“Probably.”

He didn’t move.

Neither did I.

“Kaius.” His name came out rougher than I meant it to. “This isn’t...I can’t...”

“I know.” His voice had gone low, rough in a way that did something to my whole body I wasn’t prepared for. “I know exactly what you can’t do, Priestess. I’ve thought about nothing else since the border.”

“Then why did you ask me here alone?”

“Because I told myself I could handle it.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “I was wrong.”

The air between us had gone thick, charged, the kind of quiet that feels louder than noise. I could smell him...cedar and something warmer underneath it, something that made the heat in my stomach twist into something sharper.

And under that, worse, I realised he was breathing me in too, slow and deliberate, like he was trying to place something he couldn’t quite name.

“You smell different,” he said finally.

“What?”

“Since the border. I told myself I imagined it. I didn’t.” His eyes hadn’t left mine.

“Priestesses don’t have a scent, Lyra. Not really. Just incense, salt and whatever soap the Temple uses. I’ve stood next to a dozen of you over the years and never smelled anything but that.”

“And now?”

He leaned in, just slightly, just enough that I felt the words more than heard them.

“Now you smell like Ember Moon,” he said.

“Like every unmated wolf in my pack right now, except worse, because underneath it, you smell like mine, and I have spent four years making very sure I would never let myself smell that on anyone again.”

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Every rule I’d been raised on was screaming at me to step back, to finish the blessing, to walk out that door and never come back to this room alone, and every single cell in my body was doing the exact opposite, leaning toward him like a plant leaning toward light.

“I need to go,” I whispered, and didn’t move an inch.

“You do,” he agreed, and didn’t move either.

Somewhere down the hallway, a door slammed, loud enough to make us both flinch apart, and by the time I’d put three full steps of distance between us, my heart was hammering so hard I was sure he could hear it.

“That’s Rhys,” I said, though I had no idea how I knew that. Some instinct, maybe. Some new, unwelcome sense I hadn’t had a week ago.

Kaius’s jaw tightened. “Then you should go.”

I grabbed my pouch off the desk, hands still shaking, and made it almost to the door before his voice stopped me.

“Lyra.”

I turned back. He hadn’t moved from where I’d left him, standing in the middle of that too-plain room with the morning light behind him, looking at me like a man trying very hard to remember why he shouldn’t cross the room and finish what neither of us had started.

“Whatever this is,” he said. “It isn’t going away on its own. Not before the full moon. I don’t think either of us can pretend it will.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

I left before I had to find one.