The Luna He Rejected Is The Millennium Wolf

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE TRADE AND THE THRONE

Sienna's POV

Pain first. A throb low in my stomach that climbed into my chest every time I pulled in air. Moss under my cheek. Cold. I didn't know how long I'd been lying there, or how far we'd come from the pack house.

I tried to call out. What came out of my throat wasn't a scream. A rasp, raw, and something in the shadows beside me flinched at the sound of it.

"The lightning actually listened to you." Ragged. Barely a voice at all.

Cedar. Copper. I turned my head and my neck fought the movement.

Damien was in the dirt. Blood dark and running from his nose, pooling in the shells of his ears, soaking into the ground under him. I'd watched Alphas fill a room without trying. This one was bleeding into the mud.

I dragged myself toward him, inch by inch, dirt under my nails. Each time I moved, cedar hit me again, and somewhere in that I noticed the thread that had tied me to Lucas just wasn't there anymore. I put my forehead down against the ground for a second and breathed through it.

"Sienna. Stop moving."

Nothing commanding left in his voice at all. One hand pressed flat to his own chest, knuckles white, fighting for every breath. I looked down at my hands. Reached up and touched my hair. Longer. Past my shoulders, in a way it hadn't been an hour ago.

"Who are you supposed to be?" Lower than my own voice should have gone.

Damien didn't answer. Too busy dying.

I lunged and caught him before he went sideways. My fingers found it fast, a hole in his sternum with something buried in it, black, not stone, humming, cold under my palm. It tasted like ozone in the back of my throat.

"You actually did it." Quiet. I was watching his face when I said it. "You threw yourself in front of it."

He burned against my hands. I got his head onto my lap and my fingers found his jaw on their own. His lungs wheezed in whatever quiet was left between us.

"Don't tell them." A spray of dark blood hit the moss. "If they know what you are, they'll use you."

Save him.

Cold through my marrow, urgent, thin. Tether. If he goes, we both go.

"He died for me?"

I didn't have time to sit with the question. The bond locked into place before I'd finished asking it, fire down my spine, every joint seizing at once. I gritted my teeth against it and waited for it to pass.

Cursed. Break it, lose the wolf. Human. Always.

My hands were shaking. I thought about what that meant, no shifting again, no Juvien's voice in my head, just me and whatever came after, and I made myself stop thinking about it before I lost the nerve.

"Fine." My jaw was tight enough to hurt. "Take it. Take the wolf."

I picked up the shard from where it had fallen and dragged it across my palm. The cut went deep enough that I felt it in my teeth. I pressed my palm to his mouth.

He swallowed. For a second nothing happened, and I thought I'd been too late.

Then the ground let go of my feet.

Light wrapped around both of us, slow at first, then all at once. I kept my eyes on his face while it built. When his eyes opened, the hazel was gone. Green now, and bright enough that it hurt to look straight at.

I felt it before I saw it, a burn low on my forearm, and I looked down to watch a mark take shape in my own skin. White, shaped like a wolf, hot enough that I hissed through my teeth. It settled in like it had always been there. The wolf I'd just given away, stamped into me instead of running through me.

Then the light went out, and we dropped into the ferns.

I held his head until the ground stopped moving under me. My whole body ached like I'd fallen from somewhere high up, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all. Damien looked at me, jaw slack, eyes too wide, something in them that hadn't decided between awe and alarm. I looked down. The hole in his chest was gone. A thin silver scar sat where it had been instead.

"You're a nightmare," he said.

"I'm your Luna, Damien." Not a question. A line drawn in the dirt.

"Mine." His fingers found my hair and stayed there. "I'll kill anyone who looks at you."

I got him upright. His weight nearly took us both back down. Whatever had been running on adrenaline burned off fast and left something heavy in its place. We stood there while the clearing went quiet around us.

"The clock is ticking, Damien." A voice from somewhere in the trees, cold.

His head turned toward it before I'd even placed the sound.

A black wolf waited in the clearing ahead, head lowered. I got Damien onto its back and climbed up behind him, my arms locked around his ribs while the ride carried us through the dark.

When the trees broke, the air changed. The smell hit first, iron and old blood, colder than the forest had been. Blood Moon Pack land. Wolves lined the ground on both sides, silent, and I kept my fingers in Damien's hair and held on while the pack house came up out of the mist.

The black wolf lowered itself at the entrance and we slid down onto marble, cold shooting up through my bare feet.

"The Alpha is broken," someone said, low, from the crowd.

"And he brought home a stray."

I got my shoulder under Damien's arm and walked him toward the doors, his eyes moving over the crowd with something in them that hadn't gone out yet.

Lilies. Perfume, sharp and wrong against the blood still on both of us.

"Look what the cat dragged in."

Heels on stone, quick, deliberate. A woman stopped in front of me, chin up.

"You actually think you're staying?" Her eyes went over me slow. "This pack has a standard. You smell like a wet dog and a grave."

I didn't move. A maid rushed forward and pulled Damien out of my grip, and he growled low enough I felt it in my own ribs before his strength finally gave out under him. I let them take him. Watched the doors shut behind him.

"So. Are you the new prize? Or just the one he bought?"

Kael was already at the base of the staircase when I looked over, arms crossed, watching me like something about to be worth less than it used to be.

"I'm the one he chose," I said.

Kael didn't growl. He smiled, slow, and reached out and moved a strand of hair off my shoulder. Light. Unhurried. Like he had every right to.

"Bold claim for a human in a cage." Quiet. "Damien always did have a taste for broken things."

"His mother is a memory," the woman added, and her hand shot out and grabbed my chin, tilting it up hard. "And you're a human with dirt under her nails."

She pulled at my arm, trying to drag me toward the center of the room. I let her grip tighten first. Then I wrenched my arm back hard enough to send her stumbling into one of the guards. The hall went quiet. Kael straightened off the banister, his eyes sharpening.

"Father!" she shrieked. "She's a thief. She attacked me!"

A chair scraped stone behind them, and the King rose from his seat, his shadow going long across the floor. Kael watched him and didn't move. Nobody else in the hall said a word.

"Dungeon," the King said. "Lock her down until Damien wakes up to explain this mess."

I looked at the woman. Her face flushed, pleased with herself. My pulse didn't move. Nothing in me wanted to run from any of this.

The laugh came up out of my throat before I decided to let it. I didn't stop it.

Her face came apart. She stepped back. Kael's smile was gone, and whatever was behind his eyes now was doing math.

The dungeon door groaned open and two hands shoved me through it into the dark, the floor cold and wet under my feet. The door slammed. I sat there in the black, listening to myself breathe.

Then the air changed. Heavier. The same low pressure from the woods, close again. I looked down at my arm.

The white wolf mark was pulsing, keeping time with a heartbeat. Not mine.

Outside the grate, footsteps stopped.

A voice came through the iron, low. "She isn't supposed to survive the bond."

The footsteps moved off again, unhurried, like whoever it was had already decided what came next.

They started this. I'd be the one to finish it.