LAST LUNA: Return of The Rejected Mate

6

Sera's POV

I hid the letter in my left boot.

Not the most sophisticated hiding place in the world but it was what I had. No locked drawers, no personal chest, nothing in this room that belonged exclusively to me except the clothes on my back and my mother's necklace. The boot was worn at the heel and the inner lining had a small separation at the side seam, just wide enough. I folded the letter twice and pressed it in and laced the boot back up and stood and tested the weight of it.

Nothing. No outline. No sound.

Good.

I didn't sleep well. The wolf howl from outside had stopped after a few minutes and hadn't repeated itself but it sat in the back of my mind. It was the most natural thing in the world. But there had been something directed about that one, something with intention in it, and I had been in the Ashwood Pack long enough to know the difference between a wolf singing to the dark and a wolf saying something specific to someone specific.

Someone outside these walls had sent that sound inward.

Whether it was meant for me or for Alpha Nikolai I didn't know.

I got up before dawn anyway and washed my face and braided my hair and went downstairs.

Mira was already in the kitchen. This, I was learning, was simply always true, Mira existed in the kitchen the way the fireplace existed in the kitchen, as a permanent and defining feature of the space. She looked up when I came in, took in the fact that I was early and said nothing about it, and pushed a cup of tea across the counter without being asked.

Such a lovely person.

I sat down and wrapped both hands around it.

"Heard a wolf last night," I said.

Mira's hands kept moving, kneading something on the floured board. "Boundary scout. They come through every few weeks, check the outer perimeter."

"At midnight?"

"Sometimes." She glanced at me sideways. "Sometimes it means something. Sometimes it's just a wolf doing his job in the dark." She paused. "You'll learn to tell the difference."

I drank my tea and didn't push it.

The morning came in slowly through the kitchen window. I ate what Mira put in front of me — bread, soft cheese, a handful of dried fruit that tasted like summer stored in winter — and then I took the day's intake folder from Edda's morning drop at the office door and got to work.

The correspondence that came into Blackridge Keep was its own kind of education.

Twelve packs. Twelve different voices, twelve different political temperatures, twelve different ways of saying things they didn't want to say directly. I had grown up in a pack that communicated through implication and hierarchy and the particular silence of people who had learned not to say the wrong thing to the wrong person, so I understood subtext. I understood the difference between what a letter said and what a letter meant.

By the end of my third day I had a working understanding of the political landscape that surrounded this territory.

Three packs to the south were restless. Their correspondence was polite on the surface and pressured underneath, the kind of letters that asked administrative questions but were really measuring response times, testing how quickly Blackridge reacted and how much attention its Alpha was paying to the borders. Two packs to the east were solid, their letters warm and efficient. One pack directly north, called Greymoor, sent correspondence that was so carefully neutral it told me more than any of the others. That kind of deliberate neutrality took effort. You only worked that hard at saying nothing when you were trying to hide which way you were leaning.

I flagged it for Edda with a short note explaining my thinking.

Edda read the note, read the Greymoor correspondence, and looked at me over the top of her reading glasses for a long moment.

"Noted," she said. And then, turning back to her desk: "Good catch."

From Edda, I was learning, that was significant praise.

I ran into Nikolai on the fourth day, I guess.

I was crossing from the administrative office to the records room with an armful of bound correspondence and he was coming from the direction of the war room with his Beta, a tall sharp-faced man named Corvin who I'd seen at meals but hadn't spoken to directly.

Not like there was a reason to.

Nikolai stopped when he saw me. Just briefly, a half second pause before he kept moving.

Beta Corvin didn't stop. He glanced at me with the particular eyes of someone who catalogued everything and revealed nothing and kept walking.

"Sera," Nikolai said, as he passed. Not stopping or slowing significantly.

"Alpha," I said.

He was gone around the corner before I'd finished saying it.

I stood in the corridor holding my armful of correspondence and thought about the fact that he'd use my name.

Just Sera. Simple.

I went to the records room and put the thought away.

Days following, something happened that I hadn't exactly anticipated.

I was in the main hall after dinner, using the long table to lay out a full territorial map cross-reference that was too large for the office desk, when Damien Blackridge, the Alpha's younger brother, walked in. I had seen him twice since our kitchen encounter on the first morning — once crossing the courtyard, once at the far end of the dining hall — but we hadn't spoken directly and I had kept it that way deliberately. In a new environment you learned who people were before you decided who to be around them.

He dropped into a chair at the other end of the table with the boneless ease of someone who considered every room equally his.

"You're always working," he said.

"I'm staff," I said.

"You're working after hours."

"The map cross-reference needed the big table. It's not quite much work as you say."

He looked at the spread of documents in front of me with genuine curiosity rather than the performance of it. "What are you cross-referencing?"

I hesitated for half a second. Then decided honesty was more efficient than evasion. "Greymoor pack's communication pattern against their territorial history. Something in their recent correspondence is off and I'm trying to find where it starts."

Damien was quiet for a moment.

Then he sat forward, elbows on the table, and looked at the map properly.

"Show me," he said. I showed him, and explained everything I noticed.

He listened without interrupting, which I hadn't expected. He asked two questions that were sharper than his easy manner suggested, and when I answered them he nodded slowly with the look of someone filing information away seriously.

"You should take this to Nikolai," he said when I'd finished.

"I took it to Edda."

"Edda runs the household. This is a territorial concern." He met my eyes directly. "Take it to Nikolai."

"He's not going to want administrative observations from his correspondence clerk."

Damien looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't fully read, something between amusement and something more careful underneath it.

"You'd be surprised," he said, "what my brother wants and what he lets himself show are two very different things."

He stood, stretched, and headed for the door.

"Uhmm...Lord Damien," I said.

He stopped.

"The wolf that howled the first night I was here," I said. "Boundary scout. Was that true?"

He turned back around slowly. His expression had changed, the ease still there but looking at me with the eyes of someone deciding how much to say.

"Where did you hear boundary scout?" he said.

"Mira."

He nodded slowly. Looked at the floor briefly. Then back at me.

"Mira's not wrong exactly," he said. "We do have boundary scouts." A pause. "But that particular wolf hasn't run our boundary in three years." He held my gaze. "He left the pack. Under bad circumstances."

The hall was very quiet. He left.

I stood at the long table with the maps spread out in front of me and the letter pressed flat against my ankle inside my boot and the name of a person I didn't know yet sitting somewhere in my chest like the first note of a song I hadn't heard before.

Someone who knew my mother.

Someone who said I wasn't safe here.

And now an exiled wolf outside the walls on the same night I arrived, and Damien Blackridge looking at me like the coincidence was anything but.

I rolled the maps up carefully and put them under my arm and went upstairs.

Tomorrow I would take the Greymoor findings to Nikolai.

Not because Damien told me to.

Because the person writing letters in careful handwriting and the wolf howling at midnight and the political temperature shifting in the southern packs all felt, suddenly, like they were pointing in the same direction.

And I wanted to know what was at the end of it before it found me first.