Betrayed by My Triad: The Luna’s Return

Within days, the story had a name.Ivy heard fragments of it everywhere she went, in the pause before a conversation resumed too quickly when she entered a room, in the way two young wolves near the kitchens went quiet and busied themselves with nothing in particular as she passed. Once, rounding a corner near the training yard, she caught the tail end of a sentence from an older wolf she had known her whole life, something about how the Luna’s mother always did keep to herself. The voice cut off the moment Ivy came into view, replaced by a smile that did not reach the speaker’s eyes.What she pieced together, from half sentences and careful glances, was this. Vera had gone to a handful of the elders privately in the days after the gate, telling them what she had felt was not simple unease but something with a name. A forced binding. The kind old grimoires described in careful, frightened language, a ritual that could chain an unwilling wolf to a mate for life whether the wolf wanted

Dawn arrived too fast.Ivy had spent the night on a narrow stone bench in a cell she had once toured proudly, back when she was newly made Luna and wanted to know every corner of the territory she now protected. She had not slept. She had simply sat with her back against the cold wall, one hand pressed to her chest where the bond still beat steady and familiar, memorizing the feeling of it the way a person memorizes a face they know they are about to lose.When the guards came for her, the sky outside the small barred window had only just begun to lighten from black to grey. Nobody spoke to her as they walked her out. Nobody met her eyes either, though she searched for it anyway, some flicker of the wolves who had bowed to her a week ago, some proof that the woman they had trusted for four years had not simply vanished the moment a stranger walked through the gate.The ritual grounds sat in a clearing at the edge of Ashworth territory, a wide circle of packed earth ringed by standing

Ivy Calloway sat with her back against a tree that wasn't Ashworth's, and made herself take inventory.Yara's pouch first. Coin, wrapped tight in cloth so it wouldn't clink. Dried meat, dried fruit, enough for four days if she was careful, six if she wasn't picky about hunger. A waterskin, half full. She catalogued each item the way she'd once catalogued grain stores and grievances, because it was the only skill she had left that still worked exactly the way it always had.Then she reached for the pendant.She'd carried it for three years without unclasping the chain, without turning it over in her palm the way she was turning it now. Grief did that. It took an object and made it too heavy to hold properly, so you carried it instead at the very edge of your attention, present and unexamined, until one day there was nothing left to distract you from it.There was nothing left now.The metal had gone warm from her body heat, or maybe it had never been cold. She turned it toward what lit

The fire had burned to embers by the time the wanderer arrived, and Ivy almost missed the moment entirely — she was watching the coals, not the tree line, when Marrow's low whistle brought a stranger's head up across the clearing. He wasn't rogue. Ivy could tell that much before he spoke, from the way he held himself at the edge of the firelight instead of stepping fully into it — a trader's caution, not a wolf's. He carried a pack too light for goods and too heavy for nothing, and he set it down slow, both hands visible, the way a man moves when he's crossed a dozen borders that didn't want him and learned to make the crossing look harmless before he made it look anything else. Marrow crossed to him without hurry. They traded words too low for Ivy to catch — a name, maybe, or a toll, or nothing more than the shape of where he'd come from. Something in his posture eased when no one moved to threaten him. He said more after

It took three days of asking before anyone pointed her toward Hollis. Not Marrow. Marrow’s answer had been a long look and a short sentence — not her territory. But someone at the fire on the second night said the name like it settled something on its own, and by the third morning Ivy found her at the camp’s far edge, in a shelter set apart from the others, working a strip of hide between her fingers. The shelter smelled of tanned leather and woodsmoke banked low. Nothing about it looked like a place where anyone learned anything. That was probably the point. Hollis didn’t ask what Ivy wanted. She just held out her hand. The pendant had been warm from being carried all morning. It went cold fast once it left Ivy’s palm, and that seemed to be the first thing Hollis noticed — she let it sit against her own skin until it took her temperature instead of Ivy’s. Sh