The Warden Luna

CHAPTER 4: THREE YEARS

Three years is long enough to build a life out of the wreckage of another one, if a person is stubborn about it. Wren Calloway had always been stubborn.

The town of Hollow Creek sat two hundred miles south of Thornhaven, far enough that no pack claimed the surrounding woods, close enough to a river that the healer's cottage she rented never lacked for clean water or the herbs that grew wild along its banks. It was not much. A single room with a loft bed, a small garden out back that she had coaxed into something productive with three years of stubborn effort, a modest reputation as the healer who did not ask questions and did not charge more than a person could afford.

It was hers. That was the part that mattered.

She had not planned to become the town healer. She had planned, in the weeks after leaving Thornhaven, to keep walking until the ache in her chest stopped feeling like something with teeth. But Hollow Creek had a fever outbreak the week she passed through, three years ago now, and something in her had not been able to keep walking past a sick child while she carried a satchel full of the exact herbs that could help. She had stayed to treat the fever. She had never quite left.

Nobody in Hollow Creek knew what she had been. Not a Luna candidate, not rejected, not anything except the quiet woman with steady hands who had shown up out of nowhere and stayed.

She liked it that way.

"Wren." The voice belonged to Tomas, a lanky boy of maybe sixteen who ran errands for half the town in exchange for coin and the occasional meal, poking his head through her open door without knocking, as he always did. "Old Mrs. Farrow says her hip is bothering her again."

"It has been bothering her for the better part of a decade." Wren did not look up from the herbs she was sorting, sage from rosemary, the mundane rhythm of it a comfort she had come to depend on. "Tell her I will stop by this afternoon."

"She also says you should come by sooner because she has fresh bread."

Wren's mouth curved despite herself. "That is a much better argument. Tell her I will come within the hour."

Tomas grinned and disappeared as quickly as he had arrived, and Wren allowed herself a moment of something close to peace, sorting herbs in the thin morning light with the river murmuring somewhere beyond her garden wall. This was what she had built. Small, unremarkable, entirely her own. Nobody here had ever watched her walk down an aisle toward a future that dissolved in front of two hundred witnesses. Nobody here knew the shape of that particular humiliation, and she intended to keep it that way.

Her wolf, at least, had gone quiet these past three years, or quiet enough. The restless ache of a severed bond never fully disappeared, she had learned that much, but it had dulled into something bearable, a scar rather than an open wound. Most days she did not think of Grayson Ashford at all.

Most days.

It was the nights that betrayed her, occasionally, in the loft above the cottage with the window cracked open to the river sounds, when her mind wandered without her permission back to a great hall full of gold light and a boy who had once looked at her like she was something worth keeping. She had stopped being angry at him somewhere in the second year. Anger required more energy than she had left to spare, and besides, she understood the mechanics of a mate bond well enough as a healer to know that what happened to him had not been a choice any more than what happened to her had been.

Understanding did not make it hurt less. It only made the hurt quieter.

There was one thing, though, that had started three years ago and never quite gone away, small enough that she had never mentioned it to anyone, not even in her letters to Marlowe, which had grown sparser over the years but never stopped entirely.

Sometimes, at the edges of sleep, she felt something pull at her. A low hum beneath her skin, faint and directionless, like standing too close to a struck bell long after the sound should have faded. It never came with pain. It never came with warning. It simply arrived, sat with her for a few restless minutes, and receded again, and she had long ago decided it was nothing more than a strange side effect of grief that her body had never fully processed.

She did not know, sorting sage from rosemary in the thin morning light with a peace she had fought hard to build, that two hundred miles north, the northern ward line of Thornhaven had failed for the third time that month.

She did not know that Alpha Grayson Ashford had spent the better part of three years quietly, methodically, searching for an explanation he could not find.

She did not know that the search had, four days ago, finally led him to a name in an old healer's ledger that made his blood run cold.

Warden.

She would know soon enough.