The Rouge Luna's Retribution

A Message From the Dead Pack

Malakai didn't hesitate. "Bring him in. Under guard, and searched twice over before he sets foot past the outer wall."

I fell into step beside him as the war council scattered to their tasks, ignoring the healer who trailed after me insisting I return to bed rest. My shoulder still burned with the memory of silver, but nothing short of physical restraint was going to keep me away from whatever message Ashwood had sent chasing after the hunters they'd hired to kill me. Every step toward the gate felt strange in a way I couldn't quite name — like walking toward a piece of my old life I'd assumed was permanently sealed off behind me.

"You don't have to do this," Malakai said quietly, matching my pace toward the gate. "Nobody would think less of you for staying back."

"I would think less of myself." I kept my eyes forward, watching torchlight flicker against the black stone walls ahead. "I spent nineteen years letting other people decide what I could handle. I'm done with that."

Something in his expression softened, just slightly, before the mask of the King settled back into place as we reached the courtyard. The messenger stood between two of Malakai's warriors, hands bound, Ashwood's colors unmistakable on the tattered cloak he wore — deep green edged in silver thread, a design I'd sewn myself once, in another lifetime, as part of training exercises meant to teach pups pack heraldry.

I recognized him.

Torren. One of the border scouts I'd grown up alongside, a boy — a man now — who used to sneak me extra bread from the kitchens when my aunt worked late shifts and I went to bed hungry. We'd trained together as pups, competed over who could climb the watchtower fastest, shared the small, ordinary friendship of two children who happened to grow up under the same roof of a pack that never quite knew what to do with either of us — him, a scout's son with no particular bloodline to speak of, and me, the unshifted orphan everyone tolerated more than embraced. I hadn't thought about him once in two years. Seeing him now, bound and exhausted in front of a fortress that used to be a nightmare story told to frighten pups, felt like being handed a piece of a life I'd buried without ever properly grieving it.

He looked older than the two years should have accounted for, exhaustion carved into lines around his eyes that hadn't been there before, and when his gaze found mine across the courtyard, something in his expression cracked open with a shock so raw I almost believed, for one confused second, that he thought he was looking at a ghost.

"Aria." My name came out of him like a question, disbelieving. "They said — the rumors said a Moon-Wolf, but I never thought—" He stopped himself, visibly gathering the scattered pieces of whatever composure he'd arrived with. "You're alive."

"No thanks to the hunters your pack sent to fix that particular problem," I said, and watched him flinch like I'd struck him.

"That wasn't sanctioned by the pack," Torren said quickly, urgently, glancing toward Malakai like he understood exactly how much danger he stood in and was desperate to make his case before that danger caught up with him. "That's — that's part of why I'm here. Alpha Killian didn't order the attack. He didn't even know about it until after the hunters had already left Ashwood territory. When he found out, he—" Torren swallowed hard. "He nearly killed the enforcer who arranged it. Would have, if the pack council hadn't intervened."

I felt Malakai go very still beside me, absorbing this the way he absorbed every piece of information in a fight — cataloguing it, weighing it, deciding how much of it he actually believed.

"And who did arrange it?" Malakai asked, voice deceptively mild, though I'd learned by now that mildness from him was often more dangerous than shouting.

Torren's throat worked. "Luna Selene. She acted alone, using pack resources without the Alpha's authorization. The council's still deciding what to do about it — whether that counts as treason against Alpha authority or simply falls under a Luna's discretionary powers. It's..." He shook his head. "It's a mess. The whole pack is a mess right now. That's actually part of why I'm here."

I thought of Selene's golden composure at the ascension ceremony, the way she'd looked at Killian like a woman who'd already won everything worth winning. Whatever had driven her to hire hunters against a rumored threat two years later, it clearly hadn't been born from confidence. Fear made people reckless in ways ambition rarely did, and I found myself wondering, uncomfortably, what exactly Selene had learned that frightened her enough to risk her own position within the pack over it.

"Get to the message," Malakai said, patience visibly thinning.

Torren reached, slowly, careful not to startle the warriors flanking him, into his bound cloak and produced a sealed letter, offering it forward with both hands still tied at the wrist. "Alpha Killian sends this personally. He asked me to make certain it reached the Lycan King directly, and no one else." His eyes flicked to me again, something complicated moving behind them. "He also asked me to tell Aria — if she really was alive, if the rumors were true — that he's sorry. That he never meant for any of this."

The words landed strangely in my chest, not quite the vindication I might have once imagined, not quite forgiveness either — just a hollow, uncomfortable ache where the old bond used to live, stirred awake by an apology that came two years and one assassination attempt too late. I'd spent that first agonizing night in Darkwood imagining a hundred versions of an apology from Killian, back when I still believed I might want one. None of those imagined versions had ever arrived wrapped around news of his pack's imminent destruction, delivered by a childhood friend bound at the wrists in enemy territory.

I realized, standing there in the torchlit courtyard, that I felt almost nothing at all — not triumph, not the cold satisfaction I might have expected, just a distant, clinical sort of pity for a boy I used to love who'd apparently spent two years learning exactly how much his choices cost, far too late to undo any of them.

Malakai took the letter without comment, breaking the seal and scanning its contents with an unreadable expression while the entire courtyard seemed to hold its breath around him. I watched his eyes move across the page, watched the faint tightening at the corner of his jaw that I'd learned, over these past weeks, meant he was recalculating something faster than he wanted anyone else to notice.

"Well?" Rhea finally asked, when the silence stretched past the point of patience.

Malakai's jaw tightened. He looked up, not at Rhea, but at me, something unreadable moving behind his black eyes — something that looked almost like reluctance, like a man about to hand someone a choice he wished he didn't have to offer.

"Ashwood is under attack," he said. "Not by us. Someone else got to them first — an alliance of rival packs, capitalizing on the chaos of tonight's failed hunt to move against a weakened target. Killian isn't writing to apologize for old wounds, Aria." He held the letter out, and I took it with hands that weren't entirely steady. "He's writing because his pack is dying, and he's asking for our help to save it."

I stared down at Killian's handwriting, familiar in a way that felt almost obscene given everything that had happened since the last time I'd seen it, and understood, with a slow, dawning weight, exactly what kind of choice was about to be placed in front of me.