Chapter Two – Dirt and Dust

My world began and ended in stone.

The servant quarters were carved into the cliffside beneath the Hollow—a maze of narrow passages lit by oil lamps and smelling of damp linen and cooked roots. I slept on a cot barely wide enough for my hips, bathed in cold water from the shared basin, and spent my days cleaning blood that wasn’t mine from floors that weren’t sacred to me.

We rose before the sun. Always.

I woke to the sound of buckets scraping and feet shuffling. No one spoke much. Most of us were half-bloods, some too old to shift, others never able to. We didn’t ask questions. We didn’t linger.

Mistress Tessa’s voice cut through the dim hallway. "Get the stones ready. The priestesses want everything purified again."

I didn’t need reminding.

The scent of blood had soaked into my hands. No matter how hard I scrubbed, it was still there—beneath my nails, in the cracks of my palms. The Luna Trials had turned the sacred arena into a battlefield, and it was our job to erase the evidence.

I scrubbed with ash and vinegar until my knuckles bled. The Offering Stones were stained with dried gore from the last trial. Sienna had split a girl’s jaw in half, and the crowd had roared with approval. Helena had held her own blade to another’s throat and asked if she wanted to die for a crown.

The girl said no.

She was sent home in silence.

And still, Helena smiled.

“She’s the Alpha’s favorite,” murmured a girl beside me—Elara, small and sharp-eyed, with burns along her neck from a kitchen fire no one ever talked about. "You can see it when he watches her."

I didn’t respond. I never did.

It was safer not to be part of conversations. Safer to pretend I didn’t dream.

But I did dream.

Even as I knelt in the blood of the girls who’d tried and failed to become Luna. Even as the nobles’ daughters passed by in perfume and silk, never looking down at the servants who cleaned their path. I dreamed of something more.

Not a crown. Not a title.

Just a name.

One someone might say with softness.

Ilia.

No one had called me that since I was nine.

---

Later that afternoon, I was sent to clean the balconies outside the Council Hall. No one else wanted the job—it was exposed, hot, and always watched by the guards. But I didn’t mind. From there, I could see the entire Hollow—the arena, the training yards, even the path to the forest.

I moved slowly, letting my rag drag along the carved stone rails as I watched the world of wolves unfold below.

Helena was down there, sword in hand, her tunic stained with sweat. She wasn’t alone. Several of the other final contenders were sparring in front of a gathered crowd. I recognized Sienna, still limping from the blow that cracked her ribs. Nira, the healer’s daughter, fast and cunning but too soft.

And him.

The Alpha.

He stood at the far edge, arms crossed, his eyes locked on the fight. There was no smile on his face. There never was. His features were carved from stone—sharp jaw, cruel mouth, the kind of eyes that could freeze a man mid-shift. His hair was black and closely shorn, not a strand out of place, and his shoulders were broader than any other wolf in the Hollow.

I’d never spoken to him. No servant had.

But the stories whispered through the tunnels.

They said he was born during a blood moon, pulled from his mother’s dying body by the last Alpha himself. That he killed his first wolf at thirteen. That his rage was inherited from the gods, and no one—not even the Elders—could tame it.

They said he once went into the no-man's wildlands alone and came back with the heads of seven rogue wolves, teeth still dripping.

He ruled through fear. Through dominance. Through an unspoken promise that anyone who dared challenge him wouldn’t live long enough to regret it.

And still, something about him made my stomach tighten.

Not fear.

Something else.

Something I didn’t have words for.

He was studying them.

Assessing. Choosing.

And not once did his eyes flick upward.

Not toward the girl above him with the rag in her hands and a prayer in her chest.

I turned back to my work.

Maybe that was why I liked being up high. No one expected anything from the ghosts in the rafters.

But as I turned away, cloth in hand, a strange chill rolled across my skin.

I paused.

Slowly, I glanced over my shoulder.

He was still watching the fight.

But for just a second—a blink, a breath, a break in the pattern—his eyes flicked up.

Right to me.