Chapter 1

Chapter One: 

The Last Innocent Morning. 

I had spent nineteen years learning how to survive being hated. Nothing taught me how to survive being loved, not until the morning it was taken from me in front of every Alpha in the Northern Territories.

"Stop fidgeting," Lyra said, pins between her teeth. "If you ruin this braid, I am blaming you to the Moon Goddess herself."

"I'm not fidgeting, I'm breathing."

"You're doing both far too fast." She stepped back and studied me in the mirror. 

"Selene, look at yourself. Just once, before you talk yourself out of how happy you're allowed to be."

I looked. The girl in the mirror barely resembled the one who used to walk the long way to the training grounds so the other children wouldn't have a clear shot at throwing stones at her.

"You look like a Luna," Lyra said quietly.

"I look like someone wearing a Luna's dress."

"That's the same thing, and you know it."

A knock interrupted us before I could argue. Kael's voice came through the door, low and amused. "Is it permitted for the groom to speak to his mate, or has Lyra declared the room a fortress?"

"Fortress," Lyra called back. "No men allowed until the ceremony."

"Even the man she's marrying?"

"Especially him."

I laughed, the first easy laugh I've had all morning, and pressed my hand flat against the door as if I could feel him through the wood. 

"I'll see you at the altar."

"You'll see me long before that," he said. "I plan on staring the entire walk down."

"That's against tradition."

"I have never once cared about tradition where you're concerned."

Lyra rolled her eyes at me, but she was smiling. "Ten years, and he still talks to you like that."

"Like what?"

"Like he can't believe you're real."

I wanted to tell her that some mornings, neither could I. That every kindness Kael had given me since we were children felt borrowed, like the universe would eventually realize its mistake and take it back. I didn't say it. I had learned long ago that voicing a fear sometimes invited it closer.

"My father would have liked him," I said instead.

Lyra's hands stilled on my hair. We rarely spoke of my father. Most people in Moonfang only spoke of him in hushed warnings to their children, a cautionary tale about blood and betrayal. Lyra was one of the few who let me remember him as more than that.

"He would have loved him," she corrected gently. "And he would have been furious it took you this long to be happy."

"I don't know if I'm allowed to be this happy."

"Selene." She turned me by the shoulders so I had no choice but to face her. "You have spent your entire life apologizing for something you didn't do. Today, you get to stop."

"Do you ever think about her?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

Lyra's hands paused on my hair. "Think about who?"

"Aurora."

"Why would you think about her today, of all days?"

"I don't know. My mind keeps reaching for the worst thing it can imagine, and apparently, the worst thing it can imagine is her walking through those doors and ruining everything before it even begins."

"She's gone, Selene. Wherever she ran off to with that other Alpha, she's not coming back to ruin your wedding."

"You're probably right."

"I'm always right, ask anyone." Lyra smoothed the last strand of hair into place. "Now stop thinking about ghosts and start thinking about how you're going to walk down that aisle without tripping over your own dress."

I wanted to believe her. I wanted, more than anything, to walk into that hall and let nineteen years of whispered accusations dissolve the moment Kael said the binding words.

"Promise me something," I said.

"Anything."

"If something goes wrong, you'll tell me the truth. Not what you think I want to hear."

Lyra's expression flickered, just for a second, into something I couldn't name. 

"Nothing is going to go wrong."

"Promise anyway."

"I promise." She picked the last pin from between her teeth and slid it into place. "There. Perfect."

The elder assigned to escort me arrived precisely when the sun reached the top of the ceremonial hall, exactly as tradition demanded. I had imagined this walk a hundred times since Kael and I discovered the bond between us, and in every version, my heart had been racing from joy alone. It still was, mostly.

The doors of the hall opened onto rows of Alphas and elders from every territory in the north, gathered to witness what the pack had begun calling, with no apparent irony, the unlikely union. I kept my eyes on Kael as I walked, refusing to let myself see the faces of people who had spent years deciding I was unworthy of standing among them.

He looked at me the way he always did, as the rest of the room had simply stopped existing.

"You're shaking," he murmured when I reached him.

"I'm fine."

"You're allowed to not be fine. You're allowed to feel whatever you feel today."

"Today I feel like the luckiest woman in the Northern Territories."

His thumb brushed across my knuckles, slow and certain. "Say that again after the ceremony. I want to hear it when it's permanent."

"Kael, what if the elders never fully accept me, no matter what we do?"

"Then they will have to live with their disappointment, because you are the only Luna this pack will ever have while I am its Alpha." His voice was low, meant only for me. "I stopped needing their approval a long time ago. I only ever needed yours."

"You have it. You've had it since we were children."

"Then nothing else in this hall matters."

The elder presiding over the binding lifted his hands, and the hall fell into the particular silence reserved for moments that cannot be undone. I felt the pull of the bond rise in my chest, warm and insistent, the same pull I had felt the night the Moon Goddess first told me Kael was mine.

"We gather beneath the eyes of the Goddess," the elder began, "to witness the binding of Kael Draven, future Alpha of Moonfang, and Selene Ashwood, his fated mate."

I heard murmurs ripple through the gathered Alphas at my name, the same murmurs that had followed me my entire life. For once, I didn't care.

"Should anyone present know of a reason this binding cannot proceed," the elder continued, "let them speak now, or hold their peace until the next full moon."

It was tradition. A formality. No one ever spoke.

The doors at the back of the hall slammed open hard enough to crack against the stone, and a woman I had hoped never to see again stumbled across the threshold, her clothes torn, her arms wrapped around herself, screaming Kael's name as if he were the only person in the world who could save her.