Author's Preface
Chapter Two — The Beginning of the End
30 minutes later.
4:15 pm.
Lyra
“She scratched me! Ethan! Bloody moon…get the fuck off—”
Bastian’s high and furious voice was the first thing I registered when the rage left. Next was the crowd.
Someone was holding my arms.
Two people, actually. Asher on my left, shaking so hard I could feel it transferring into my own bones. Old Maren was on my right, an older omega whose grip was surprisingly strong for someone her age.
They had been holding me back from attacking Bastian again.
My claws had retracted and I could see the blood on my nails, a thin dark crescent under each tip, and some distant rational part of my brain noted that I had done that. I’d marked him.
Good.
“Let me go!” Bastian was still at it, somewhere behind the wall of bodies that had formed between us. One eye was swollen shut while blood ran from the claw marks across his face. I could hear Ethan’s low urgent voice trying to talk him down. “Her fucking claws aren’t normal, you know they aren’t! She’s scratched my fucking face—”
“Bastian.” Ethan, harder this time. “Stop.”
I also became aware, gradually, that I was crying, bawling even.
The kind that involved snot reaching my upper lip and my chest heaving in ugly uneven lurches and sounds coming out of me that I didn’t entirely recognize as mine.
I hated it. I hated every second of it.
“You cheater.” My voice came out wrecked and strange, words arriving in the wrong order, my tongue not cooperating. “Die! Cheating bastard…You want to…”
“Luna, please—” Asher pressed his face into my shoulder. “Please don’t say anything else, please.”
“With her?”
My finger was pointing at Isolde before I decided to point it.
She stood in the corner near the far wall, Bastian’s ceremonial shirt clutched to her chest for modesty. Shame flickered across her face as the pack looked her way — then vanished, replaced by that same cold, cocky look from earlier. The one that told me she wasn’t sorry.
I had known her for three years — she’d danced at my mate-choosing, checked on this pregnancy every month as my healer. Three weeks ago she’d complimented this very dress when I showed her the finished alterations.
“You don’t even—” My voice broke clean in half. “You don’t even feel anything, do you—”
Bastian’s face was still twisted in fury, thrashing around as pack warriors joined Ethan to hold him down as he tried to lunge at me.
Asher squeezed my hand. I turned to look at his face and wished I hadn’t. The pain there was so naked and so old, like he had been quietly dreading this moment for longer than I knew.
The words died in my mouth.
I looked around.
The rest of the pack had formed a loose horrified circle. Still in their ceremony best, flowers still in their hair, children being quietly pulled away by parents who didn’t want them to see. Warriors standing with their hands uncertain at their sides.
My legs stopped working.
I went down slowly. The reality slowly sinking in, my binding ceremony, the one I’d been looking forward to for years is completely ruined. Maren and Asher went with me, both of them trying to catch what they could, and then I was on the ground in ivory and silver and I couldn’t remember how to be a person.
“Four years.” The words came out of somewhere I couldn’t locate. “Four years and he…I don’t …it’s gone, Asher.”
I knew I wasn’t making sense.
I couldn’t make it make sense. There was no arrangement of words that covered this.
Then Elder Constance cleared her throat.
The sound cut through the noise and unease as she finally emerged from where she’d been standing. The circle shifted. Bastian stopped pulling against Ethan’s grip. She stepped forward.
“This,” she said, “is unnecessary.”
Her voice was low and calm, her expression somber, a huge difference to her normal grumpy and cutting feel. The pack as usual quietened to hear her talk.
“We are in the middle of a war.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “Today is our long awaited binding ceremony—a moment of unity for this pack, a show of strength to our enemies. Instead we have—” a brief pause, a gesture that encompassed the entirety of what was on the floor in front of her “this.”
Bastian straightened at her tone. He stopped trying to reach me as a deep growl of frustration escaped his gritted teeth.
He pulled back grudgingly pressing a cloth to his bleeding lids. The alpha’s agitated scent that had been flooding the air pulled back like a tide going out. Pack members relaxed slightly as the pressure in the air reduced.
“What the Alpha did,” Elder Constance continued, “was not conducted in the right manner. That is acknowledged.”
A brief weighted pause.
“However.” Her eyes moved to me. “Future Luna Lyra. You are to be the example of this pack. What you chose to do—” another brief pause, another gesture, this one toward Bastian’s face where three parallel marks had risen red and vivid. “reflects not only on yourself but on every member of Ashveil.”
She looked at me for one moment and something moved through her expression so fast I almost missed it. Something that in another woman I might have called pity.
Then it was gone.
“The binding will proceed.” She lifted her chin. “Admit your fault to the Alpha, Future Luna. Let us move past this.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
I stared at her.
“What?”
“The ceremony has been delayed long enough.”
“What did you just—” I got to my feet. Maren’s hands fell away. Asher made a small desperate sound beside me. “What did you just say to me?”
Elder Damos stepped forward from behind Constance, his brow doing its permanent furrow. “Your claws carry something unusual, Luna Lyra. Those marks on the Alpha may scar. That is not a trivial—”
“The baby,” said Elder Setha, from his other side, her eyes on my stomach and not my face. “You’re heavily pregnant. You should not be escalating your distress.”
“Couldn’t have said it better.” Damos nodded. “Admit the fault. Preserve the ceremony.”
I looked at Asher.
He was shaking. His eyes were red and enormous and fixed somewhere near the ground, his hands pressed flat together in front of his mouth like he was about to recite a prayer.
I looked at Maren.
Maren who had held my hands this morning while the light was still blue and new, who had pinned the silver clasp at my shoulder and held on a second longer than necessary.
She was looking at the ground.
Nobody was going to say anything.
The anxiety that had lived in my chest for four years, that quiet hum I had learned to call nerves, to call love, to call the natural consequence of wanting something this much, rose up all at once and became something else entirely.
I have to leave.
Poison didn’t ask permission.
She came up through me like a tide, the full shift cracked through my bones before the gasp had finished leaving the nearest pack member’s mouth and then I was on four legs and the world was wider and louder and full of a grief so enormous it ached.
And I ran.
The fastest I’ve ever done, using my shift and poison’s red wolf advantage. I didn’t want to be here any longer, I didn’t want to hear another word from elder Constance mouth any longer.
Behind me the pack was shouting. Bastian was saying my name for the first time since this started, the sound of it strange and late and completely useless.
I ran until the sounds stopped.
I ran until there was nothing but trees and darkness and the steady percussion of my own heartbeat telling me I was still, unfortunately, alive.