My mate

KIANA POV

Her name is Luna.

I repeat it in my head like a chant, like if I stop I'll lose her again the way I lost her five years ago.

I don't know how I missed it. The eyes, once I looked past the color hiding them. The scent, familiar since the second she crossed my threshold, that I was too much of a coward to name because naming it meant admitting what I did to her. My wolf hadn't settled once since she arrived pacing, restless, already knowing what I refused to.

Five years ago I stood in front of my whole pack and rejected the girl the moon herself chose for me. I did it because the elders told me a bond formed at seventeen was weakness, that a future Alpha needed a clear head, that love could wait until I'd proven myself. I believed them because I was scared and young and desperate to be enough. I've spent every year since learning exactly how wrong that was.

Now she's back under another name, and Cassia stands before the council like she's already won.

"Alpha." Cassia doesn't hide her satisfaction as I enter the hall. "I believe you'll want to hear this. Our Ashwood guest is not who she claims."

The hall is packed, tension thick enough to choke on. Two guards flank Luna, unsure whether to treat her as guest or prisoner. Her chin stays up. Her spine stays straight. I know her well enough knew her well enough, once to see the fear buried under that calm. I taught her to hide it like armor. Now that armor is all that stands between her and a room full of wolves.

I did this to her. The knowledge sits like a stone in my chest.

"Explain yourself, Elder." I keep my voice level, though everything in me wants to put my body between Luna and every wolf in this room.

"Her papers list her as Rhea Sorensen of Ashwood." Cassia's smile cuts thin. "But Sorensen is a Blackthorn bloodline. Exactly one Sorensen left this pack five years ago and vanished." She rises, turning to address the room, performing for her audience. "This woman is Luna Sorensen. The omega you rejected, Alpha, returned under a false name, planted inside Ashwood's diplomatic ranks sent not to broker peace, but to gather intelligence. Perhaps to finish what her pack started with those border attacks."

The room erupts in murmurs. Wolves lean toward each other, whispering, swallowing her words whole because she's old and confident and they've never learned to question her. Luna's jaw tightens. Her hands curl at her sides. If I don't speak now, Cassia buries her before she says a word in her own defense.

"That's not what happened." My voice cuts the noise like a blade. The hall drops silent. "Luna isn't behind the attacks. I'd stake my title on it. My life."

"Would you?" Cassia's eyes gleam. "Careful, Alpha. That's a dangerous thing to stake on a woman you didn't recognize an hour ago. A woman who lied to your face the moment she arrived."

She's right, and it costs me to admit it, even silently. I let Luna stand in my hallway, my dining room, my training yard, and I didn't see her until she nearly said the words herself. But I feel her. I've felt her since she crossed onto my land, and that has to count for something.

"I have proof." Luna's voice rings clear across the hall steady, though I hear what it costs her to keep it that way. Every head turns.

She pulls a folded paper from her boot and holds it high. Her hands don't shake. This is the woman underneath the diplomat's mask sharp, dangerous, ready.

"A requisition form for scent-masking herbs," she says, crisp, "dated the same week as the second border attack blamed on Ashwood." Her eyes lock on Cassia's. "Signed by you, Elder. Personally."

The color drains from Cassia's face for one second before she catches it but one second is enough. The whole council sees it.

"That form is forged." Desperation cracks through her denial now. "Planted by Ashwood to discredit me."

"Then you won't mind," Luna says, ice in her voice, "if the council checks it against your handwriting in the pack ledger. Ink doesn't lie, Elder."

The hall goes dead silent.

Cassia's eyes cut toward the exits just a flicker, but enough. She's measuring her odds of running.

She's guilty. Undeniably. And I have a sick certainty that whatever pushed the elders to force that rejection five years ago carries her fingerprints too.

"Guards." My voice drops into the register that means Alpha, not the frightened boy who ruined his own life at seventeen. "Elder Cassia does not leave this hall."

Her composure shatters like ice under a boot.

"You'd take her word over five generations of Blackthorn loyalty?" she snarls, backing toward the wall as my guards close in. "She is nothing. She was rejected. She was nothing then and she is nothing"

"She is my mate." The words detonate through the hall, silencing even Cassia. Every wolf goes still. "She was my mate the day the moon chose her, and I was a coward for saying otherwise. That doesn't make her nothing. It makes me the fool who wasted five years figuring out what I threw away."

I hold Luna's eyes as I say it, and something in her face breaks open grief, hope, disbelief, all at once. For one suspended second the hall disappears and it's just the two of us and every word I never said five years ago.

Then Cassia moves.

It happens too fast for most of the room to track. She shifts mid-stride, wolf form exploding outward, and slams through the crowd toward the side exit. A guard goes down hard, blood spraying, the copper stench of it flooding the air instantly.

Luna's already moving before I can even shout her name. Her wolf tears free silver-eyed, fast, brutal and the bond between us roars to life for the first time in five years.

Then someone steps out from the shadows behind the council seats. Someone none of us expected. Someone I'd have trusted with my life until this exact second.

Someone I trained. Someone I called friend.

Declan.

He stands with a blade dripping in his fist, eyes locked on Luna, and something ice-cold rips through my chest.

"Sorry, Alpha." His voice comes out flat, foreign. "But Cassia's not working alone. And neither am I."

For one heartbeat, the entire hall freezes. I watch the betrayal land across every face in the room Declan, the guard I raised through the ranks, the man who fought at my back in the last border war, the man I trusted with this pack's life. His words hit me like a fist to the sternum.

My wolf slams against my ribs, demanding the shift, demanding blood. I hold him back by sheer force, because losing control now means losing Luna to whatever poison Cassia and Declan have been brewing for years.

Cassia barrels toward the exit, her wolf shouldering aside anyone in her path. Two council members go flying. Fear floods the room like smoke.

Declan lunges for Luna, and every instinct in me detonates at once.

She shifts mid-stride, silver fur rippling into place with a speed that steals my breath even now. She's fifty pounds lighter than Declan and twice as fast. She always was. It's part of why I knew she was mine the second I met her.

The two wolves collide with a crack like splitting timber. The hall erupts wolves shifting everywhere, some charging toward Cassia, others frozen, unable to process a world where the rules they've lived by their whole lives just collapsed in front of them.

I shift without breaking eye contact with the fight. My wolf tears forward, every ounce of Alpha strength driving me toward them. Declan moves faster than he should faster than I've ever seen him move. He's been training for this. Preparing. In secret. For how long?

Luna isn't fighting to win. I catch it mid-stride she's stalling him, keeping him locked in place so he can't bolt for the exit behind Cassia.

The bond sings through every nerve in my body now. I feel her fear underneath the calm. Her fury. Years of being discarded, underestimated, thrown away all of it surging through the link between us at once.

A guard blocks Cassia's path and she rips into him without hesitation. He drops and doesn't move. This isn't posturing anymore. She's committed to blood, and there's no walking that back.

I close the gap toward Declan, my mind screaming one question. Why? What did Cassia offer him that was worth burning everything down?

Luna slams a hit into Declan's shoulder and he yelps, staggering. Good. Let him feel exactly what he's about to lose.

Around us, the pack is finally organizing. Younger wolves the ones who've only ever known me as Alpha move to seal Cassia's escape routes. The older ones hang frozen between blind tradition and the instinct to follow strength. Holding this pack together after tonight is going to take everything I have.

But first I have to stop my oldest friend from tearing my mate apart.

I close the last stretch of distance, and as Declan's eyes meet mine, I catch something I don't expect. Grief. The look of a man who's already mourned what his choice is about to cost him.

"You don't have to do this," I growl, and even in wolf form the words carry the full weight of five years as Alpha. "Whatever she promised you, it isn't worth this."

For one flicker of a second, Declan's body wavers hesitation cracking through.

Then Luna's wolf plants herself at my shoulder, and whatever hesitation lived in Declan's eyes dies instantly, replaced by something cold, final, and already decided.