Luna Priestess

Rhys

Rhys's POV

I knew something had happened the second she came out of that room.

She had that look on her face, the one she gets when she’s trying to arrange herself back into a normal person after something’s knocked her sideways. Steady steps. Chin up.

Eyes just a little too wide. I’ve known Lyra since she was six years old and crying in a corner because nobody at the Temple would talk to her, and I’ve spent fourteen years learning every version of her face there is.

That wasn’t a version I liked.

“Everything go alright?” I asked, falling into step beside her.

“Fine. Blessing’s done.”

“Lyra.”

“It’s done, Rhys.”

I let it go. I’ve learned when to push and when it just makes things worse, and her whole body was wound tight enough that pushing felt like a bad idea.

So I walked her back to the guest wing and didn’t say anything else, and the whole time I was thinking about the smell that had rolled off her when she stepped out of that hallway.

I’ve known Lyra’s scent my whole life. Salt and dried herbs and that particular soap the Temple uses, faint under all of it, something clean and plain that never changed, no matter how many years passed.

It had changed.

I didn’t say anything about that either. Some things you notice and don’t say out loud, because saying them makes them real, and I wasn’t ready for this one to be real yet.

We grew up two doors down from each other, if you can call a shared dormitory with thin curtains between the cots “doors.” I was eight when she arrived.

Some Elder had found her outside the Temple gates as a baby, no name, no note, nothing but a scrap of cloth with a crescent moon stitched into it, and by the time she was six, she’d been passed between enough distracted caretakers that she’d learned not to expect much from anyone.

I gave her half my dinner roll the first night because she was crying too hard to eat her own.

That was it. That was the whole beginning. I didn’t have some grand plan about it. I just didn’t like the sound she was making.

She stopped crying like that eventually. Grew a mouth on her sharp enough to make grown Elders flinch.

Grew into someone who drew things she shouldn’t have been able to see and got called Gifted for it, while I trained with a sword and got called Ordinary, and somehow none of that ever put any distance between us.

If anything, it did the opposite. She was the only person in that Temple who never once treated me like I was less because I wasn’t the one with the Sight.

I don’t remember deciding I loved her. It wasn’t a decision. It was just always there, quiet, patient, the way a wall is there whether you look at it or not.

I never said anything. What was I supposed to say? She was training to become a Priestess who couldn’t so much as hold a man’s hand without breaking her Vow.

Loving her out loud would have been like handing her one more thing to carry that she never asked for.

So I didn’t. I just stayed close. Made myself useful. Told myself that was enough.

It had been enough, right up until an Alpha walked into a summit hall and her whole world tilted sideways in front of five packs.

That evening, I found her sitting out on the balcony off the guest wing, knees pulled up to her chest, staring at the valley as if it owed her an explanation.

“You’re doing the thing again,” I said, dropping down next to her.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you go somewhere else and don’t tell me where.”

She almost smiled. Almost. “You always say that.”

“Because you always do it.”

We sat there a while, quiet, the way we used to sit on the dormitory roof back home when neither of us could sleep.

I kept waiting for her to say something about Kaius’s room, about whatever had happened behind that door, and she kept not saying it, and eventually I stopped waiting and just said what I’d been sitting on for three days.

“You smelled different when you came out of there.”

Her head turned toward me, fast. “What?”

“Your scent. It’s been changing all week. I didn’t want to say anything, because I wasn’t sure, and because saying it out loud felt like...” I stopped. Started over.

“It smells like him now. A little. Underneath everything else.”

She went very still. “Rhys.”

“I’m not trying to scare you. I just...I need you to know I’ve noticed. Because if I’ve noticed, other wolves in that pack house have noticed too, and they’re not going to keep quiet about it the way I would.”

“I know.” Her voice had gone small. “I know, I just don’t know what to do about it.”

I looked at her sitting there, arms wrapped around her knees, looking more lost than I’d seen her since we were kids, and every careful, patient, fourteen-year-old wall I’d built around the thing I felt for her cracked straight down the middle.

“Lyra,” I said, before I could stop myself. “There’s something I should’ve told you a long time ago.”

She looked at me, waiting, and for one second, I actually thought I was going to say it.

Actually thought fourteen years of staying quiet was finally going to end on some balcony in Ashen territory while the whole world was falling apart around both of us.

“What?” she asked.

And then a horn sounded, somewhere down in the valley, three short blasts that meant a Council rider had arrived, and her whole body snapped upright like she’d been shocked.

“That’s a Temple horn,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

She was up and moving before I’d even finished standing, already halfway back through the door, and whatever I’d been about to say died in my throat, the way it always did, the way it probably always would.

I sat there a second longer, alone on the balcony, and told myself the same thing I’d told myself for fourteen years.

There’d be another moment.

I just hoped, watching her disappear down the hallway toward whatever new disaster was riding up that valley, that I wasn’t running out of them.