MOONBOUND TO THE ENEMY

THE KINGDOM SHE LEFT BEHIND

Cassian Ashmoor had not slept.

He stood at the window of his father's study, the one that overlooked Silvermoon Square, and watched servants sweep the last of the celebration debris from the stones where Aria had stood hours ago. Someone had already replaced the torches. Life in the Ashmoor Pack moved on quickly. It always had.

He wished it would stop moving so quickly in his own chest.

"You look like a man regretting a decision," said a voice from the doorway.

Cassian didn't turn. "I don't regret it."

"Liar." His father, Alpha Damon Ashmoor, crossed the room with the unhurried authority of a man who had never once in his life doubted himself in public. "You did what the council required. That's not regret. That's discipline."

"She ran into the Frost Divide."

That got a pause out of his father. A small one, but Cassian had spent his whole life learning to read the man's silences, and this one carried weight.

"The scouts confirmed it?" Damon asked.

"An hour ago. They lost her trail at the boundary marker." Cassian finally turned from the window. "Nobody crosses the Divide, Father. Nobody. And she did it running from wolves you sent."

"Wolves the council sent."

"You sit on the council."

Damon's expression didn't change, which was somehow worse than if it had. "Careful, son."

"Why does it matter this much?" Cassian pressed. "She's a girl from a minor bloodline. Rejecting her should have been the end of it, a scandal for a season, forgotten by spring. Instead the council sends an armed party after her before the bonfire's even cold. Why?"

For a long moment his father said nothing, staring past him toward the window, toward the square, toward whatever version of tonight existed only in his own head.

"Because your mate was never meant to survive rejection," Damon said finally. "Rejected bonds cause a wasting sickness. Weeks of pain, sometimes months, occasionally death if the bond ran deep enough. That is the natural order of things."

"And?"

"And Queen Mother Evelyne received word within the hour that Aria Vale showed no sign of the sickness at all." His father's voice dropped lower. "That should not be possible, Cassian, unless the bond she carried was never truly a fated bond to begin with."

Cassian felt something cold settle low in his stomach. "What are you saying?"

"I am saying there are things about the Moon Ritual this family has never been told, and things I suspect your Queen Mother has known for a very long time." Damon's jaw tightened. "I am saying you may have rejected the wrong girl for the wrong reasons, and if the council's fear is what I think it is, you have just handed them exactly the excuse they needed to kill her."

"Then I'll go after her." Cassian was already moving toward the door.

"You will do no such thing." Damon's voice cracked through the room like a whip, stopping him cold. "If you chase after a girl you publicly rejected, you hand the council proof that your judgment cannot be trusted. You will sit, you will wait, and you will let this play out the way it must."

"She could be dead by morning."

"She crossed into Lycan territory," Damon said. "If the old stories carry any truth at all, dead may be the kinder outcome."

Cassian's hands curled into fists at his sides. He thought of the way her voice had cracked when he said the words. He thought of the bond snapping taut instead of breaking, the confusion on his own face that he hadn't been able to hide fast enough. He thought, and hated himself for thinking it only now, of every quiet kindness she had offered him in the weeks leading up to tonight that he had dismissed as beneath his attention.

"I made a mistake," he said quietly.

"You made a political decision." His father's tone gentled, barely. "There is a difference, and you will learn to live with it, the way every Alpha before you has learned to live with the choices the crown demands."

Cassian said nothing. He looked past his father, out the window, toward the dark tree line at the edge of the pack lands, where somewhere beyond sight and reason, the girl he had humiliated in front of his entire kingdom was either dying alone in the cold or discovering something about herself that no council, no bloodline record, and no ritual had ever prepared either of them for.

"Send scouts to the boundary at dawn," Damon said, already turning to leave. "Quietly. If she's alive, I want to know before the council does."

"And if she's not?"

His father paused in the doorway, and for the first time that night something that might have been genuine regret crossed his face.

"Then pray the Lycans buried her properly," he said, "because if word gets out that a Moonbound line crossed into the Divide and died there, every kingdom on this continent will go to war over what might have been sleeping beneath it."

The door closed behind him, and Cassian stood alone in his father's study, staring out at a kingdom that suddenly felt smaller than the mistake he had made inside it.