The Luna he threw away

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CHAPTER THREE

What the Wolfless Girl Did Next

Seraphina's POV

The mating ceremony was held three days later.

It was not a celebration.

There were no flowers, no music, no guests who looked genuinely happy to be there. The pack elders stood in a formal line in the estate's great hall, faces arranged into careful blankness.

Damien's inner circle…three men and a woman, none of whom had smiled at me once since I arrived, stood off to the side.

Mrs Harlan hovered near the entrance with her clipboard.

I wore a white dress that Mrs. Harlan had laid out on the bed that morning. It fit perfectly. Of course it did. Damien Voss did not do things halfway.

I stood beside him at the head of the hall, our wrists bound together with a silver cord in the old tradition, and I kept my eyes forward and my face calm while an elder said the words that would make this real.

Damien did not look at me once during the ceremony.

I did not look at him either.

But I was very aware of him the warmth of his arm near mine, the scent of him that had settled into something dangerously familiar, the way his pulse was almost perfectly steady in a room full of people who were all, in one way or another, watching to see what the wolfless Ashwood girl would do.

When the elder asked if we accepted the bond, Damien said yes in a voice that was even and controlled and completely empty of feeling.

I said yes in a voice that was the same.

The cord was untied. The elder marked our wrists with a line of silver dust that stung for a moment and then faded. We turned to face the room.

Someone in the back started clapping politely. Like applause at the end of a meeting that had gone on too long.

Damien stepped away from me before the sound had even finished.

The days that followed had a strange rhythm.

I was not a prisoner. I could move through the house freely, take meals in my room or in the kitchen never the dining hall, that felt too exposed and spend time in whatever spaces Mrs Harlan had designated as "available to me," which was most of them, as long as I stayed clear of the Alpha's study, his private quarters, and the lower east wing, which was locked.

I was also not a guest. Nobody asked how I was settling in. Nobody offered to show me around or introduce me to anyone. The staff were polite in the practiced, careful way that people are polite when they have been told to behave themselves but have not been told to care.

So I made myself useful.

Old habit.

I started in the library, because I could not sleep and I needed somewhere to put my hands that did not involve sitting in my room cataloguing everything I did not understand about my situation.

The Voss library was extraordinary, three walls of shelves that went floor to ceiling, a rolling ladder, a fireplace, and thousands of books that were clearly old and clearly never organized by anyone with a logical system.

I spent the first night just looking at the spines. The second night I started moving things.

By the fourth night, I had reorganized an entire wall of historical pack records and old wolf law texts into a proper chronological system and found three books that had been misfiled under fiction that were actually rare primary source documents about the ancient bloodline wars.

Interesting.

I pulled one down and settled into the chair by the fire.

I was three chapters deep into a text on dormant wolf genetics, which are genetic lines that could suppress an active wolf gene for multiple generations under conditions of extreme stress or external interference…when the door opened.

I did not look up. I had learned already that the night staff moved through the library to check the fire. I just kept reading.

"You moved the historical records."

That voice.

I looked up.

Damien Voss was standing just inside the door in a dark shirt with the top two buttons open and his arms folded. He was looking at the reorganized wall with an expression that was somewhere between irritated and... not irritated.

"They were alphabetized by title," I said. "An account of the Second Lunar War filed between Aesop's Fables and a novel about a vampire was not useful to anyone."

He looked at me. "Who told you to touch them?"

"Who told me not to?"

Another one of those tiny, almost invisible shifts in his expression. He walked to the shelves, ran a finger along a row of spines, and pulled out one of the rare documents I had relocated.

He turned it over in his hands. Read the cover. His jaw moved slightly.

"This has been missing for six years," he said. "We thought it was stolen."

"It was in a box under the window seat labeled 'miscellaneous decorative items,'" I said. "Along with two others I've put them on the top shelf. And what I believe is a handwritten ledger from the first Voss Alpha, but the binding is damaged and I didn't want to open it without proper light."

He looked at me for a long time.

"You can read old scripts," he said. It wasn't a question.

"My mother taught me. She thought literacy in the old forms was important."

"Where is your mother?"

I looked back at the book in my lap. "She died when I was eight."

The silence that followed was not uncomfortable, exactly. Just present.

"Continue," he said finally. And he left.

I stared at the empty doorway for a moment.

Then I looked down at the page I had been reading. The chapter was titled: "Suppression of the Silent Gene… Methodology and Historical Precedents."

My fingers had gone cold.

I turned the page.

The next morning, I was up before anyone else.

I had slept badly…dreams I couldn't hold onto when I woke, just a feeling of heat and movement and something howling far away in the dark.

I went to the kitchen and made myself tea because the kitchen was warm and the cook, a round, quiet man named Elio, did not mind me being there as long as I stayed out of his way during breakfast prep.

I was sitting at the corner of the large preparation table with both hands around my mug when the kitchen door from the courtyard swung open and a man walked in wearing what looked like training clothes and a grim expression.

Tall. Mid-thirties. Golden-brown skin, close-cut hair, a scar on his chin that spoke of a fight that had not gone entirely in his favor. He stopped when he saw me.

His eyes flicked to Elio, then back to me.

"You're the mate," he said.

"Apparently," I said.

He looked me up and down in the frank, assessing way that wolves do when they are deciding whether you are a threat or non-threat. I let him look. I kept my hands around my mug and my face neutral.

"Ryker," he said, after a moment. "Beta of the Voss pack."

"Seraphina," I said. "Wolfless disgrace of the Ashwood bloodline."

He blinked. And then, for just a second, the corner of his mouth moved.

He grabbed a mug from the rack, poured himself coffee from the pot on the stove, and sat down three stools away from me at the counter.

He did not speak again for a while. Neither did I.

It was companionable, in a strange way. Like we had both decided, without discussing it, that the morning was too early for the performance of being enemies.

"He doesn't hate you," Ryker said eventually, into his coffee.

I looked at him. "He doesn't know me."

"No," Ryker said. "But he doesn't hate you. With Damien, that's a place to start."

I thought about the study. The library. The way he had stood at that wall of relocated books and said continue like it cost him something.

"What does he want from this?" I asked. "The real reason. Not the official story."

Ryker's expression closed down. Not hostile… just closed. "That's not mine to tell."

"Fair," I said.

He finished his coffee and stood. At the door, he paused without turning around.

"Stay out of the lower east wing," he said. "I'm not telling you that because you're not allowed there. I'm telling you because whatever you are, Seraphina Ashwood, that wing would recognize it. And we are not ready for that."

He left before I could ask what that meant.

I sat very still with my cooling tea and the sound of Elio's knife on the cutting board and the morning light coming through the courtyard window.

Whatever you are.

My wrist

throbbed gently under my sleeve.

And somewhere deep in the lower east wing, so faint I almost convinced myself I imagined it…

Something knocked back.