THE LUNA THEY BURIED ALIVE

The scent hit her three miles out, and Selene almost turned the car around. Pine and wet stone, and underneath it something that had nothing to do with the forest — Blackthorn territory, unmistakable. She used to call this place home. Now the word just meant somewhere that had tried to kill her. She kept both hands on the wheel until her knuckles went pale and breathed through her mouth until the worst of it passed. Dara's voice cracked through the dashboard speaker. "You still with me?" "I'm fine." "You went quiet for eleven seconds. I counted." "I was driving." She took the last curve before the checkpoint faster than she meant to, gravel spitting under the tires. "I can drive and be fine at the same time." "Ren." Dara only used the name when she wanted to be taken seriously. "If you need to pull over—" "I don't." A pause, the kind Dara left when she'd decided not to push further. "Escort's waiting at the gate. Two low-rank wolves, nothing to worry about. Kaelan's not meeting you there himself." She hadn't expected him to. Alphas didn't greet delegations in person — that would be beneath the formality Blackthorn wrapped around itself like armor, the same formality that had once needed a full council vote to decide whether her life was worth keeping. She didn't say any of that. "Noted. I'll call after the first session." "Selene." "Ren," she corrected, sharper than she meant to. Dara let the silence answer for her and hung up. The gate came into view a minute later, iron and old stone dressed up with cameras that hadn't existed three years ago. Two guards stepped out as she slowed the car, and she watched their faces for any flicker — any widening of the eyes that meant the herbs on her wrists that morning hadn't worked. Nothing. Just two bored young wolves checking papers. "Alpha Castellan," the taller one said, reading off her documents. "Welcome to Blackthorn territory." *Castellan.* Three years old, that name, and it still didn't sit right in her chest. She'd built a whole life around it — a pack, a reputation, a body count of political rivals who'd underestimated the wolf everyone assumed had crawled out of nowhere — and some mornings she still woke expecting to hear *Ashford* instead. "Thank you," she said, and drove through. The compound hadn't changed, and that was the worst part — not that it had grown strange to her, but that it hadn't. The same gravel drive curving toward the main hall. The same rusted hinge on the training-yard gate nobody had ever fixed. She'd walked this ground for six years as Luna. She could have found her old rooms blind. She didn't look at them as she passed. The negotiation hall was new — glass and pale wood, the kind of room built to look transparent while everyone inside lied to each other with excellent posture. A young woman met her at the door with a tablet and a brisk smile. "Alpha Castellan. Alpha Voss is already inside." Selene had rehearsed this moment more times than she wanted to admit, pacing her study at two in the morning, running through every version of walking back into a room with Kaelan Voss in it. None of them had prepared her for how ordinary it would feel to push through a glass door and see him standing at the head of a long table, arms crossed, reading something on a tablet like the last three years hadn't happened at all. He looked up. She'd forgotten how tall he was — a strange thing to forget, given how many nights she used to fall asleep against his chest, but memory sanded down specifics until only the ache was left. His hair was shorter now. There was a new line at the corner of his mouth, the kind that came from clenching your jaw too often for too many years. "Alpha Castellan." Even, controlled, giving nothing away. "Thank you for making the trip." "Alpha Voss. I understand you have concerns about the terms my second submitted." "Several." He nodded toward the chair across from him. She almost sat in the seat that used to be hers, at his right hand, before she caught herself and took the one directly opposite instead. "Ashfall's requesting hunting rights along the eastern ridge. That land's been disputed longer than either of our packs has existed." "It's also underused by Blackthorn and critical to Ashfall's food security going into winter." She set her folder down, unhurried. "I'm not asking for charity, Alpha Voss. I'm asking for an arrangement that reflects how the land actually gets used, instead of how it's drawn on a hundred-year-old map." Something shifted behind his eyes. Not quite surprise. Close to it. "You're direct." "I don't have patience for anything else." He almost smiled — she watched him catch it and put it away, the same way he used to when they were negotiating something far less formal than treaties, back when a raised eyebrow across a room was its own private language. Her chest tightened before she could stop it. "Ashfall's a young pack," he said. "Three years old, and already sitting across from me instead of sending an emissary. That's unusual." "I don't send people to speak for me when I can speak for myself." "No," he said slowly, turning the sentence over like he was looking for something underneath it. "I don't imagine you do." Neither of them said anything for a moment. The silence had weight — the specific quiet she remembered from arguments that came right before one of them decided whether to keep pushing or let it go. She held his gaze instead of looking away first. Whatever else the last three years had taken from her, she'd learned not to look away first. He broke it. "We'll reconvene tomorrow, nine o'clock. I'll have Marcus pull the survey records so we're arguing from the same facts." "Fine." He stood, and so did she, and as he passed her on the way to the door, she caught him inhale — quick, almost involuntary, the way a wolf breathed in without meaning to when a scent snagged on something buried. He stopped walking. "Alpha Castellan." His back was still to her. "Have we met before tonight?" The question landed somewhere under her ribs and stayed there. She kept her voice level, the way she'd trained herself to for three years. "I don't see how we could have." He turned around. Whatever he'd caught in that breath was still working behind his eyes, some thread he hadn't pulled all the way loose yet, and for one unbearable second she thought he might close the distance between them and simply *know*. "No," he said finally. "I suppose not." He left. Selene stood alone in the glass-walled room, listening to his footsteps fade down the corridor, and only then let herself exhale. Behind her, the door didn't stay shut. She heard it open again, softer this time, unhurried — and when she turned, it wasn't Kaelan standing in the frame. It was Marcus. "Alpha Castellan," he said, and something in the careful way he said it told her he already knew exactly who he was talking to. "We should talk.”