Return of the Crimson Luna

Chapter 2 Run

I didn't get up right away.

You would think after eighteen years of being the pack's favorite joke, I would be used to being on the floor. I wasn't.

The stone of the Moon Temple was so cold it burned through my white dress. My chest was on fire. Not metaphorically. There was an actual, physical burn spreading from the middle of my sternum where Jax had ripped the bond out. I could see it when I looked down - a faint, silver-white scar in the shape of a broken crescent moon, glowing under my skin like someone had pressed a hot iron there.

A rejected mate mark. The mark of a wolf who was thrown away by the Goddess herself.

Around me, people started whispering again. Then talking. Then laughing. That was worse than the silence.

"Did you see his face? Goddess, I would have rejected her too—"

"Wolfless and now mateless. What else did she expect?"

"Her father must be so proud."

I tried to push myself up. My arms shook. My stomach, the one that had been cramped all day from Seraphine's tea, lurched violently.

Jax was still standing there. He hadn't moved. His fists were clenched so tight his knuckles were white. His eyes - his stupid, beautiful golden eyes - were flickering between gold and brown. His wolf was fighting him. Even if he hated me, his wolf had recognized me. His wolf didn't want to let me go.

That made it worse.

"Jax," I choked out. My voice didn't sound like mine. "You... you don't mean—"

"Don't," he snapped. And his voice cracked. "Don't say my name like that. Don't ever say my name again."

That was the moment my father chose to move.

Beta Marcus Ashborne walked into the circle. He didn't look at me on the floor. He looked at Alpha Blackwood on the high table. He bowed his head.

"Alpha, I apologize for my daughter's... disruption. She is Wolfless. She does not understand our ways. She let her hopes get too high."

My daughter's disruption. Not Kaia. Not my daughter.

The Alpha, a huge man with Jax's same cruel jawline, looked down at me like I was a dead rat someone had dragged in.

"The ceremony will continue," he announced. "Take the Wolfless girl out. Her presence offends the Moon."

Two warriors came forward. They didn't help me up. One grabbed my arm and hauled me up like a sack of flour. My legs gave out.

"Get off me!" I hissed, shoving him. I stumbled, catching myself on a pillar. The white dress - Seraphine's perfect, too-tight white dress - was now dirty with dust and my own sweat.

I looked for Seraphine in the crowd. I found her near the back, clutching my little half-sister Lila's hand. Lila was eleven, eyes huge, crying. Seraphine's face was white as paper. She was shaking her head at me. Not in disappointment. In panic. Her lips were moving.

Run.

She had told me that in my room. If anything goes wrong, run north.

I thought she was being dramatic. I thought she was threatening me.

I was an i***t.

I ran.

I didn't walk out with dignity like my father wanted. I ran out of the Moon Temple, barefoot because I had kicked off my stupid heels when I fell, white dress flying behind me, through the laughing, whispering crowd of my entire pack. Past the girls I grew up with who were now giggling behind their hands. Past the boys who had pretended not to see me for six years.

I ran all the way home.

Home was quiet. The Beta house was empty because everyone was at the temple. My little room was exactly how I left it - tea cup still half full on the vanity, dark liquid swirling.

Seraphine's pouch was still on my bed where I had dropped it.

I grabbed my old backpack, the one I used for training. I shoved in whatever I could grab with shaking hands. A black sweater. Leggings. My father's old hunting knife he told me I was too weak to use. The dagger Seraphine gave me. The pouch.

I was about to zip it when the front door slammed.

"Kaia Ashborne!"

My father. He was home early. He must have run.

I froze. For eighteen years, my body had been trained to freeze when he used that voice.

He stormed into my room. He wasn't just angry. He was... broken. His face was red. His own Beta aura was rolling off him in waves that made my human knees want to buckle, even though I couldn't feel the pack link.

"You stupid, stupid girl," he breathed. "Do you know what you have done? Do you know what he said to me? The Alpha said if you had stayed, if you had begged, he would have had to cull you for disrespecting an Alpha Heir. Culling. Do you know what that means?"

"It means killing," I whispered. "I know what culling means, Father. You threaten me with it every year."

He flinched. Just for a second.

"You were told to be quiet. To be invisible. That was your one job. To not be noticed until we could marry you off to some low warrior or send you to the kitchens. And you... you had to reach for an Alpha Heir. You had to embarrass me in front of everyone."

"I didn't reach!" I screamed. The eighteen years of quiet broke. "I didn't choose him! The Moon Goddess chose him! I didn't want him! I didn't want any of this! I didn't ask to be born Wolfless!"

"Don't you say that word in this house!" he roared, and he raised his hand.

He had never hit me. Not once. He had done worse - he had ignored me. But he had never hit me.

He didn't hit me now either. He looked at his own hand like he didn't recognize it and dropped it.

From downstairs, we heard the howls. Not celebration howls. Hunting howls. The young warriors. Jax's friends.

Marcus's face went pale.

"They're coming," he said. "The pups. They do this every year after a rejection. A hunt. To chase the rejected one out. It's tradition."

Tradition. They made a game out of chasing broken girls into the forest.

"Father—" My voice was small now. I was terrified.

He looked at me. Really looked at me. For the first time since I was twelve, he looked at me and I saw not a Beta, not a disappointed man, but my dad. The one who used to carry me on his shoulders before my wolf didn't come.

"Go," he said, his voice hoarse. "Go north. Don't stop. Seraphine left you the pouch, right? The dagger? Take them. Go."

"Why are you—"

"Because if you stay here, they will kill you. And I... I cannot watch them kill my daughter. Even if she is Wolfless."

He shoved a loaf of hard bread and a water skin into my backpack. His hands were huge and rough and shaking.

"Go. Now. Out the back window. And Kaia—" He grabbed my arm, tight. "Whatever you do, don't drink any more tea. Don't eat anything from the pack. Do you understand? Nothing. Ever again."

That was the last thing my father said to me before I climbed out my bedroom window into the freezing night, in a dirty white dress, with a backpack and a pouch of herbs I was sure was poison.

I thought he was trying to get rid of me.

I didn't understand he was trying to save me.

The forest was dark and it was hunting me.

I ran until my bare feet bled. The white dress tore on branches. The howls behind me got closer. I could hear them laughing, shouting. "Here, Wolfless! Here, little disgrace!"

I was not a wolf. I could not outrun wolves.

The ravine came out of nowhere. The ground just... ended. I tried to stop but my feet slipped on wet snow and I went over the edge.

I fell.

It wasn't a long fall, but it was enough. I hit frozen earth and snow and rock. Something in my ankle cracked loud. White-hot pain shot up my leg. I screamed, but the wind swallowed it.

I lay there at the bottom of the Forsaken Ravine, staring up at the full moon that had rejected me, bleeding into the snow.

This was it. This was how the Wolfless Beta's daughter died. In a ditch, in a ruined white dress, alone.

I fumbled for Seraphine's pouch. My hands were numb. I opened it. Inside was not poison. It was dried meat, a tiny vial of clear liquid, and more of those bitter herbs, but these ones were different. These ones smelled sharp and clean.

And a folded note, in Seraphine's perfect handwriting:

Don't drink the tea anymore. I am sorry. I was trying to keep you sleeping. If you are reading this, I failed. The herbs in your cup were wolfsbane. It kept her quiet. To keep you alive. They kill Crimson girls. Run north and find him. The King in the Hollow. He will know your eyes. - S

I didn't understand any of it. Wolfsbane? Crimson? King?

The pain in my chest from the rejection was getting worse, not better. The broken moon scar was burning colder. I was dying from a broken bond. Wolfless girls died from rejection because they had no wolf to heal them.

I threw the pouch away from me into the snow. I didn't want her poison. I didn't want any of it.

The second the herbs left my hand, something happened.

For six years, I had drunk wolfsbane every single morning. Six years, every day, my system full of it.

Now, bleeding, freezing, with no more coming in, it was finally leaving my blood.

And in the empty room in my head where my wolf should have been, a door exploded open.

A voice, not sweet, not cute, not like the other girls described their wolves. This voice was old. Female. Furious. And she had been screaming for six years and I had never heard her.

ABOUT f*****g TIME, YOU i***t HUMAN.

I gasped. Blood came out of my mouth.

You let them poison us? You let them feed us weeds and make us sleep while they laughed at us?

"Who... who are you?" I whispered into the snow.

I am you. I am the part they tried to kill. I am Nyx.

And then she howled.

It wasn't a sound from my throat. It was from my chest, my soul. The snow around me melted in a perfect circle. My broken ankle snapped back into place with a sickening c***k and healed. My eyes — I felt them bleed, felt them change.

Somewhere far above me, the hunting howls stopped.

Because every wolf in Silver Ridge just felt something ancient wake up.

And for the first time in my life, I was not afraid of the dark.

I was the thing in it.