Cast Out by My Mate, Crowned by the Moon

Chapter 2 – Beyond the Stone

By the time the first grey light crept over the trees, my muscles were locked from the cold and from the way I’d lain all night, curled against the border stone like trash someone had dropped and forgotten.

They hadn’t forgotten.

“On your feet, Fenriss.”

The guard’s boot jabbed into my hip. I rolled onto my back and blinked into the washed-out sky. The full moon had bled down to a tired, pale disc. My head pounded in time with my pulse.

“Give her a minute,” another voice muttered. Galen. Of course they’d send him. A kindness, or just another knife, I wasn’t sure.

I tried to push up and my arms shook. Rope burns flared at my wrists. The cheap blanket they’d dumped beside me sometime in the night had soaked through with dew.

“Stand,” the first guard snapped, his tone sharper now. “Order of the Alpha.”

Order of the Alpha.

My wolf flinched at the word out of old habit, then fell still again. She hadn’t made a sound since the bond snapped. The silence inside me was worse than the cold.

I planted my palms in the frost-hardened dirt and forced myself upright.

The border stone loomed behind me, waist-high and ancient, its surface worn smooth by centuries of paws and palms. Runes coiled over it in faded arcs, marking the invisible line where Blackclaw land ended and the neutral wilds began.

Home, and nothing.

Galen stepped closer, his eyes red-rimmed, jaw shadowed with stubble. He held a small bundle—cloth, a skin of water, a knife that had seen better days.

“I can carry that myself,” I said, before he could offer it like a pity-gift.

“It’s not a gift,” he muttered. “It’s… regulation. We don’t throw wolves out with nothing.”

A bitter laugh scraped my throat. “How generous.”

He winced, shoulders hunching. “Liora—”

“Don’t.” My voice sliced the narrow space between us. “Don’t say my name like we’re still on the same side of this stone.”

The other guard shifted his weight, impatient, but kept his mouth shut. Smart.

Galen shoved the bundle toward me. “Food for two days. Water. Knife. There’s a creek a few miles north. Stay near it until you’re… until you find somewhere else.”

Somewhere else. As if packs just sprouted out of the ground like mushrooms, welcoming exiles with open arms.

“Is that your advice as Beta,” I asked, taking the bundle with numb fingers, “or as the friend who watched them tear my bond out and said nothing?”

His throat worked. For a second, I thought he might actually answer. Instead he said, hoarsely, “I have a mate and a sister in that circle, Lia. I can’t risk them.”

There it was. The truth no one had dared say last night.

“You can’t risk them,” I repeated, heat pricking behind my eyes. “But you could risk me.”

He flinched again.

“Time’s up,” the other guard snapped. “Alpha said sunrise.”

The rim of the sun was just kissing the treetops, painting the stone in thin gold.

The rules were clear. Once I stepped beyond it, I was rogue. No rights. No protection. No way back.

My gaze slid past Galen, searching the trees for a flash of dark hair, a broad-shouldered form. For Varyn, just… watching. Just there.

He wasn’t.

Of course he wasn’t.

“What happens if I don’t move?” I asked quietly.

The guard’s mouth twisted. “Then I drag you over and throw you, and if you come crawling back I break your legs and leave you for the crows. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”

It was almost funny, how calmly he said it. As if I were a dog that had bitten a child and now had to be put down far from the house.

Galen scrubbed a hand over his face. “Just go, Lia. Please.”

I swallowed the ache the old nickname stirred and turned to face the stone.

Up close, I could see the faint groove carved along its top, worn by generations of paws that had crossed as cubs, as warriors, as scouts. I’d crossed it a thousand times on patrol, slipping through the trees with Varyn at my side, his shoulder brushing mine.

My fingers brushed the stone. Cold seeped into my skin. The pack bond was already gone, but some part of me—habit, memory—still whispered that on this side, I was his, and on the other, I was nothing.

I was so tired of being someone else’s anything.

My heart hammered so hard I could taste it. My wolf stayed silent, huddled deep.

“One step,” I told her in my head. “Just one. We can do one.”

My foot lifted and hovered over the unseen line.

Behind me, the forest of my childhood held its breath.

I stepped.

The world didn’t explode. No lightning from the sky. No voice from the trees. Just a strange, sickening lurch as a pressure I hadn’t even known I still felt peeled away from my skin.

The air changed. The scents of pine and pack and smoke thinned. The hum of many wolves’ presence—always there, like background music—cut off so suddenly I swayed.

“Keep walking,” the guard called, his voice muffled, distant.

I didn’t look back.

Branches whipped at my arms as I pushed into the trees, away from the stone, from the clearing, from the life that had ended sometime between last night’s full moon and this morning’s weak dawn.

My legs shook. My lungs burned. My wolf remained a tight, aching knot in my chest, not answering when I reached for her.

Fine.

If she wouldn’t carry me, I’d carry her.

When the last traces of pack scent finally faded and the forest became just forest—raw, indifferent, empty—I stopped, resting one hand against a trunk to steady myself.

The silence roared.

“Well,” I rasped to the trees, to the sky, to the pale strip of moon still clinging to the horizon. “Here we are. Traitor’s daughter. Broken Luna. Alone.”

For a long, breathless moment, nothing answered.

Then, far off in the distance, from somewhere beyond any border I knew, a wolf howled—low and strange and wild.

Not Blackclaw.

Not mine.

But not silence.

I straightened, tightened my grip on the useless little knife, and started walking toward the sound.