The Luna He Rejected Is The Millennium Wolf

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE RING AND THE RUIN

Sienna's POV

My ribs still ached from the arena, but the pain became background noise the moment I saw him.

Damien wasn't just unconscious. Gray stone had crept outward from his fingertips toward his jaw, and the cold coming off his skin drove straight through my palms the instant I touched him. His wolf was in there somewhere. I could feel it, barely, broken into pieces too small to find.

"Damien." My voice barely made it past my own lips.

I sat beside him and watched the stone claim more of him with every minute that passed. His breathing came shallow and uneven, each rise of his chest smaller than the last. I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that my knees had gone stiff against the floor.

Then the wolf mark on my forearm caught fire.

White heat tore through the skin without warning. I grabbed my arm with both hands as a ring of pure light lifted away from the mark and hung in the stale air between us, pulsing in rhythm with something I couldn't tell was his heartbeat or mine.

The ring began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster, drawing something from the air around it. Light turned into pressure. I felt it in my back teeth before I heard anything at all. I threw my arm across my eyes, and the release came without sound, moving through my bones and the hollow space behind my eyes all at once.

When my vision cleared, two rings hung in the air between me and the bed, white gold and shimmering silver, ancient symbols cut into the metal of both. They drifted toward my upturned palms and settled into them, heavier than their size suggested.

White gold ran cool against my skin. Silver hummed faintly underneath it, warm. The bond between us, worn down to almost nothing, pulled toward him harder than anything else in me right then.

I slid the bands onto his stone fingers. White gold on his right hand. Silver on his left. My wolf was gone, but I still remembered my mother's voice from a bedtime story I hadn't thought about in years. Left for the heart, right for the oath. My hands moved before my mind had finished remembering the rest of it.

Nothing changed at first. The rings sat on his stone fingers and the room stayed still around us.

Then the stone began to respond.

No fractures yet. What came first was a softening, the surface losing its hardness, going dull. Hairline cracks spread faster than I could track them one by one, and underneath his ribs, where his wolf had been living in pieces, something started humming low.

The casing shattered outward all at once. Fine gray dust settled across the sheets, my hands, my face, every surface within arm's reach, dry and cold against my skin. I kept my eyes on his mouth and his chest and waited for the breath that would mean he had come back.

Silence followed, and it felt wrong. I had been bracing for something, and now that it had passed, my body hadn't caught up yet. I couldn't feel my own heartbeat. Only his.

One gray flake landed on my wrist and dissolved warm against my skin. I didn't move. I counted his breaths and held onto each one like it might be taken back from me.

His eyes stayed shut.

"Damien." I cupped his face. His cheek was smooth and warm now, every trace of stone gone. "Look at me. The curse is cured."

Nothing shifted in his face. Nothing moved.

I pressed my forehead against his and breathed him in, pine and something colder underneath it, his actual scent finally there without the rot that had covered it for days. My hands were still shaking. I hadn't let myself get this close to him before now, not really, and my chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the arena.

"Come back to me," I said quietly, my thumb tracing the line of his jaw. "You promised me a moonlit run. You promised you'd teach me to track by starlight. Don't make me learn alone."

No flutter of lashes. No change in the rhythm of his breathing.

I sat back a little and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder, the way you'd fuss over someone asleep in an ordinary bed in an ordinary house, not a man made of stone an hour ago. It didn't need doing. I did it anyway, because my hands needed something to hold onto that wasn't just waiting.

Dust from the broken casing had settled into the creases of the sheet. I brushed at it without thinking, one small patch at a time, and somewhere in the middle of that my mind went somewhere useless. I thought about the shard in the clearing, my palm splitting open, the wolf leaving me the way water leaves a cupped hand. I hadn't let myself ask what I'd get in exchange for it. Not really. I'd just done it.

What if it was for nothing. What if he stayed like this, warm now instead of cold, but still gone somewhere I couldn't follow.

I picked a piece of gray dust off his collarbone and rolled it between two fingers until it turned to nothing.

"You'd better wake up and tell me it was worth it," I said, mostly to myself.

His pulse moved slow and steady underneath the skin, present but far away, like he'd gone somewhere I couldn't follow yet.

"I'll find you," I whispered. "Wherever you are, I'll find the way back."

The silence held. Then it broke.

"You wretch. You dare lay your filthy hands on my mate?"

I kept my hand on his face, my forehead still against his, and didn't turn around. I was buying whatever seconds I had left.

Clara stood in the doorway, her midnight silk dragging against the floorboards as she moved into the room.

"You actually think you saved him?" Each word came out slow, spaced apart on purpose. "You are the curse, Sienna. Don't ever dream of becoming the Luna of this pack. You are nothing but a wet dog barking at a master who will never claim you."

I lifted my head and turned to face her.

"If you loved him," I said, "you'd be on your knees beside this bed. Not standing in my way."

Her smile died instantly. Something else had been waiting underneath it, and now it showed. She went still like a predator, her ears lengthening, her fingernails pulling into jagged claws. She took one step toward me, then another, slow and deliberate.

Her hand closed around my upper arm and tore through it in a line of heat, and before the pain registered she had slammed me into the stone wall. The back of my skull cracked against the masonry, a sound I felt more than heard. The world dropped away for a few seconds.

I slid down the wall. My vision came and went in patches, and my fingers went numb against the floor. She stood over me breathing fast and sharp, and underneath the wolf-scent and expensive perfume sat something else, a smell I had caught on Damien during his worst hours.

My fingers found the edge of the desk and traced along it until they closed around the neck of a heavy glass bottle, cool and solid in my palm.

Clara's breathing ran short and excited, her weight shifting forward. I had one swing. That was all I had.

"I don't need a wolf to break you, Clara," I murmured.

I raised the bottle as she bared her teeth.

A shadow fell across the doorway.

"Enough." Kael leaned against the frame, taking in the room.

Clara scrambled backward, the shift reversing, fur and claw pulling back into human skin. She moved to his side and pressed one hand to his waist, not affection, just something to hold onto.

"Kael," she said, quieter now. "She's a threat to Damien."

His gaze moved to the gashes on my arm and stayed there. Then he reached for Clara, gripped her jaw with fingers pressing into the hinge of bone, and kissed her with his eyes open, fixed on me over her shoulder. When he pulled back, his hand stayed at her throat.

"Sienna," he said, measured. "You aren't the Luna yet. Until Damien marks you, you are property, and you will be thrown into that arena every single day until there is nothing left of you worth burying."

I watched his thumb move against Clara's throat, an involuntary tremor passing through it, a twitch with no intention behind it. It was the same tremor I had seen in Damien's fingers in the hours before the stone took him.

I pushed myself up the wall, the bottle still in my hand, my legs shaking but holding.

"You want your guards to play with me?" I said. "Then let's begin. But that rot in your blood doesn't care who's Alpha, Kael. It'll finish you in thirty days either way."

The air went still.

"Thirty days," Clara murmured against his collar, her eyes finding mine with a slow smile. "New moon's in twenty-nine. He'll be stone before the treaty ink dries."

Kael's hand flew to his chest. For a second the Alpha, the heir, the calculating brother all disappeared from his face. What was left was a man running out of time. Then he composed himself again.

"What do you mean?" he mouthed, barely audible.

I let the bottle drop. It hit the floor with a dull thud and rolled once before it stopped.

"Damien," I whispered, leaning over him one last time and pressing my lips to his forehead. "Wait for me."

The guards pulled me backward and I let them, keeping my eyes on his face until the doorway cut him from my sight.

Cold air hit me outside. Guards pushed me between them through back alleys with no lamplight, cobblestone giving way to damp earth underfoot. In the distance, wolves called to each other across the dark.

The underground hall doors swung open, and the smell hit before I saw anything, unwashed bodies and fear pressed together, and underneath both of them the metallic edge of old blood. Girls stood in trembling rows. Some cried without sound. Others just stared straight ahead, blank.

A shove put me in the line and I barely registered the impact.

Air compressed without warning. Pressure pushed the breath from my lungs, and my nose started bleeding before I understood what was happening. Every wolf in the warehouse dropped its head at once, without deliberation or choice.

I looked at the girls, then at the wolves.

Without my wolf, I am inventory. And Damien is still asleep.

The dais at the far end of the hall stood empty. Then a man was simply standing there. I hadn't heard footsteps, and no door had opened. Torches dimmed and the temperature dropped, and every wolf in the room bowed without being told.

My arm burned where the mark sat, the same burn I remembered from being twelve years old and hiding under a table while my father argued with someone on the other end of a mindlink, someone he'd never say the name of afterward no matter how many times I asked.

"Duke," I gasped.

This wasn't a pack secret. It was something far bigger, and I had just walked straight into the middle of it.