His Sacrificial Luna

Poppy Three hundred and sixty-five days of this. Three hundred and sixty-five sunrises where he’s turned away from me in our bed, three hundred and sixty-five nights where his touch felt like a chore. A year of loveless mating. I am his Luna in title only—a hollow crown on a head he refuses to see. He forgot. The one day I carved in my soul with desperate, hopeful hands. Our anniversary. I saw him in the garage, hair sweat-matted and wild from the Void Circuit, smelling of gasoline and victory. Still devastating. Still the man whose shadow I’ve loved since I was eighteen, watching him transform into a beautiful, terrifying beast on the track, my heart a frantic bird against my ribs. “Xerxes.” I forced my lips into a smile, a brittle thing, as I approached. I offered the water bottle, my knuckles white around it. “I’m sorry I missed your race. I was preparing—” “I don’t need you to.” His voice was a winter wind, cutting through my sentence without a glance. “I win with or without your eyes on me.” He took the bottle, his fingers careful not to brush mine. The dismissal wasn’t casual; it was precise, a surgeon’s incision. He moved to leave. I faked a cough, a pathetic, scrambling sound, and fell into step beside him. “I made dinner. It’s… it’s our anniversary. Remember?” The last word was a whisper. I held up my hand, the stupid, glittering ring he’d shoved onto my finger the day our fates were chain-linked. He stopped. Finally, he looked at me. His eyes, the colour of a storm-locked sea, held not a flicker of warmth, only a deep, settling contempt. “I’m not hungry. What makes you think I would ever taste anything you’ve touched, Poppy?” The cruelty was so calm it stole my breath. “Well, I just thought—” “Jade is dying.” The words were a hammer blow. He said them not with grief, but with accusation, his gaze sharpening with a pain that had nothing to do with me. “Your sister. The true Luna, with the real blood of power in her veins, is rotting away in her bed.” I knew. Of course I knew. My beautiful, radiant sister, born to lead, being eaten alive by a sickness I could theoretically absorb… if I weren’t a coward. The Pack Doctor’s warning echoed in my skull: A healing of this magnitude… ‘The consequence could be a transfer, Poppy. You could take it into yourself. We don’t know what it would do to you.’ “Why are you telling me this now—” My back slammed into the cold stone wall, the air punching from my lungs. A groan escaped me, more shock than pain. His forearm pressed against my collarbone, pinning me. “You think I’d care about your dinner? About your feelings?” His breath was hot on my face, laced with fury. “One year, Poppy. Three hundred and sixty-five days of your simpering, your desperate looks, your hollow presence beside me. And you have given me nothing. No reason. No shred of a quality that would make this pack believe you deserve to stand where she should be. You. Don’t. f*****g. Deserve. It.” Tears, hot and shameful, welled and spilled over. He watched them track through the dust on my cheeks with utter revulsion. “I’m trying—” I choked out. “No.” His voice dropped to a lethal whisper. “You are not. It sickens me. It sickens me that my body is bound to yours. That I have to lie down with you, that I have to pretend for this pack when every instinct screams that she is my other half. It has always been her.” His jaw was a hard line, his body trembling with restrained violence. He pushed away from me as if I were contaminated. “And stop your crying. It disgusts me—this weakness. Those mere words can shatter you.” A sob ripped from my throat. “I could save her if I knew what would happen! Do you think I don’t care? That I don’t love her too?” His control snapped. His hand shot out, seized the crystal vase of moonflowers I’d picked that morning. For a suspended second, he held it—a beautiful, fragile thing—and then he hurled it against the hearth. The explosion was catastrophic. Shards like daggers sprayed across the floor, water drenching the stones, petals scattering like torn flesh. “YOU ARE SELFISH!” he roared, the sound vibrating in the marrow of my bones. “You cling to your safety while she withers! You covet my attention, this title, this life that should have been hers! You are so desperate that you would let your own sister die to keep a man who can’t stand the sight of you. I wish to the gods it were you in that bed. I wish it were you dying instead of her.” He raked his fingers through his hair, his chest heaving. The flash of raw, agonized love for her in his eyes was the most brutal wound of all. Without another word, he turned and left. The sound of the door closing was final. I slid down the wall, collapsing amidst the wreckage. My hand landed on a shard of glass, a sharp bite of pain. I didn’t move it. I deserved it. He was right. I was a coward, frozen between the terror of losing myself and the horror of losing her. I didn’t want to watch her die. But my fear was a cage, and I was too weak to break its bars. The pact. My parents, his parents, a business deal to merge power and to prevent the pack from waiting too long for the real Luna. He got the wrong sister. The defective one. The one whose love was a dull, common penny to the gold coin of his devotion for Jade. “Crying like a useless little b***h?” I jerked, hastily swiping at my face. Viola, Xerxes’ sister, leaned in the doorway, swirling a glass of blood-dark wine. Her smile was a razor cut, running her fingers through her dark hair. “I’m cleaning up,” I whispered, my voice raw, reaching for the glass. A slice opened on my thumb. I welcomed it. “You should listen to him, Pop.” Her voice was a serpent’s glide. “You’ve made the Beast of the Void Circuit even harder. Colder. Every day you hesitate, you pour poison into him. Don’t wait for your sister to die.” She took a slow sip, her eyes gleaming over the rim. “Or you might find yourself dying in his grip. And next time, he won’t let go.” “Stop it!” I lurched to my feet, bloody hand fisted. “Just stop!” She merely grimaced, all pityless elegance. “You may be a healer, darling. But your power is a timid, meagre thing next to his. You are incapable of matching him. The only way he will ever look at you is if you save her. So either find your courage,” she licked a drop of wine from her lip, “or live with the truth. This pack tolerates you. They watch you, and they wait. For her. They have never wanted you.” She left me there, standing in the ruins of the flowers, my blood mixing with the water on the floor, utterly and completely alone. The truth, cold and sharp as every piece of broken crystal, settled in. He didn’t just not love me. He hated me. How can he not? I’m the most popular known Healer in our world, and yet I couldn’t even save my sister out of fear? And in that moment, with the sting of glass and the salt of tears in my wounds, I hated myself too.