Chapter 1: The Luna Nobody Wanted

AURORA POV

Three years of loving Damien Blackthorne, and all I had to show for it was a cold bed and a gift he would never open.

I pressed my thumb across the moonstone pendant one last time, tracing the engraved Blackthorne crest, the date of our bonding ceremony carved beneath it in letters so small I'd nearly gone blind getting them right. Four weeks of sneaking into the artisan's workshop after midnight. Four weeks of filing, polishing, and setting the stone by candlelight so no one in the pack would ruin the surprise.

Happy third anniversary to me.

His side of the bed hadn't been slept in since... I stopped counting after the second month. The sheets still held the faintest trace of cedarwood and iron, his scent, but it was thin now. Fading. Like smoke from a fire someone forgot to tend.

I set the pendant on his pillow and smoothed the silk case with fingers that refused to stop trembling. Pathetic. That's what I was. A Luna who laid out gifts on a pillow her Alpha never touched, in a bedroom he treated like a storage closet, on an anniversary he probably didn't remember existed.

My wolf stirred low in my chest, a dull pressure behind my ribs that I'd learned to breathe through. She hadn't spoken clearly in weeks. Just these formless aches, these waves of something too heavy to name.

I crossed the room to the vanity mirror and checked my reflection. The deep green dress I'd chosen clung to my waist and fell in soft waves to the floor, the kind of dress that made other women look elegant and made me look like I was trying too hard. I'd curled my hair. Put on the gold earrings my grandmother gave me when I turned eighteen. Even dabbed perfume behind my ears, the jasmine blend Damien once said he liked during the first month of our bond, back when he still pretended.

The dining hall downstairs was set for two. White candles. Fresh moonflowers from the garden I maintained alone. A menu I'd planned with the kitchen staff three days ago: roasted venison with blackberry glaze, his favorite, and honeyed wine from the cellar he reserved for pack celebrations.

He was supposed to arrive at seven.

It was quarter past eight.

I pulled back the curtain and stared out the window at the grounds below. Blackthorne Manor sprawled across the hillside like a sleeping beast, its stone walls silver under the early moonlight. Warriors crossed the courtyard in pairs, trading shifts. A group of Omegas hurried toward the servant quarters with baskets of laundry balanced on their hips. Normal. Everything looked normal.

A knock rattled the bedroom door, and I dropped the curtain like I'd been caught stealing.

"Come in."

Maren, one of the younger house servants, slipped inside with her eyes fixed firmly on the floor. She carried a folded note on a tray, and her hands were shaking worse than mine.

"Luna Aurora, I..." She swallowed. "The kitchen staff asked me to inform you that the, um, the anniversary dinner has been... adjusted."

"Adjusted how?"

Maren's gaze darted sideways. Toward the door. Toward escape.

"Alpha Blackthorne sent word an hour ago. He cancelled the reservation in the formal dining room. He said... he said he wouldn't be needing it tonight."

The words landed somewhere between my stomach and my spine. A quiet, familiar impact. Like a bruise being pressed.

"Did he say where he'd be instead?"

Maren's lips parted. Closed. Parted again. The poor girl looked like she wanted the floor to open and swallow her whole.

"Maren."

"The private wing, Luna." The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other. "He's meeting someone in the private wing. I don't know who. I wasn't supposed to hear, but I was clearing the hallway when Captain Aldric was giving orders, and he said to make sure the west corridor was cleared for the Alpha's guest, and I'm sorry, I shouldn't have..."

"It's fine." My voice came out steady. Level. The voice of a Luna addressing her subordinate, calm and measured and completely in control.

My hands had gone numb.

"You can go, Maren."

She fled. The door clicked shut behind her, and I stood in the center of Damien's bedroom, in my green dress, with curled hair and jasmine perfume, staring at a moonstone pendant resting on a pillow that smelled less like my mate with every passing day.

The private wing.

He cancelled our anniversary dinner to meet someone in the private wing.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum, where my wolf was thrashing now, a silent, airless howl that vibrated through my bones. Not jealousy. I'd burned through jealousy sometime during the second year, when I realized that the emotion required hope to sustain it, and I was running dangerously low. This was something deeper. Something that had settled into the marrow of me like frost, slow and patient and irreversible.

Grief.

Grief for the woman who'd stood at the bonding altar three years ago, trembling with nervousness and something she'd mistaken for destiny, while Damien Blackthorne placed the Luna's sacred necklace around her throat without meeting her eyes. Grief for every meal I'd cooked that went cold on the counter. Every conversation I'd rehearsed in the shower that died on my tongue. Every night I'd lain awake listening for footsteps that never came down the hall.

I picked up the pendant from his pillow and closed my fist around it. The moonstone bit into my palm. Good. I wanted it to hurt. Physical pain was honest. It didn't pretend to be something else.

The balcony doors were open. A breeze carried the scent of pine and damp earth from the forest beyond the manor walls, and something else beneath it, metallic and ancient. I stepped outside and tilted my face toward the sky.

The Blood Moon was rising.

It climbed above the eastern treeline like a wound opening in the dark, deep crimson bleeding into the black. Tomorrow night was the ceremony, the sacred rite where the Luna reaffirmed her bond with the Alpha before the entire pack. I was supposed to stand beside Damien on the ceremonial platform, wear the sacred necklace, speak the ancient vows, and let the pack see us united under the Blood Moon's light.

I almost laughed.

United. As if we'd ever been that. As if "united" described a bond where one person gave everything and the other gave nothing, where one person stayed awake wondering what she'd done wrong and the other didn't wonder about her at all.

My wolf pressed against my ribs again, harder now, and I gripped the balcony railing until the iron groaned under my fingers. Below me, the garden I'd planted in the first year of our bond stretched in ragged rows toward the tree line. Roses I'd pruned myself. Lavender I'd grown from seed. A patch of silver sage that I'd nurtured through two harsh winters because a healer told me it promoted bonding energy between mates.

The sage was dying. I'd noticed last week. Brown at the roots, curling inward, as if the plant had finally absorbed enough of whatever sickness lived between Damien and me and decided it wanted no part of it.

Smart plant.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the Blood Moon to clear the trees and hang full and swollen above the Blackthorne territory, painting everything in shades of rust and shadow. Long enough for the candles I'd set in the dining hall to burn down to nothing. Long enough for the jasmine perfume to fade from my skin and the curls to loosen from my hair.

Long enough to ask myself the question I'd been swallowing for three years.

"How many more years do I give a man who doesn't want them?"

My voice sounded foreign in the silence. Small and rough, like something dragged across gravel. My wolf went still at the words, and for one breath, I felt her clearly, felt the shape of her pressed against the inside of my chest like a second heartbeat. She wasn't howling anymore.

She was listening.

Waiting for my answer.

I looked down at the pendant in my hand. Moonstone and silver. The Blackthorne crest. The date of our bonding. A gift made with love for a man who had never, not once in three years, given me a reason to believe he wanted it.

I set the pendant on the balcony railing. The moonlight caught the stone and turned it blood red.

I left it there.

I walked back into the bedroom, past the cold bed and the empty closet where his clothes used to hang before he moved them to his office, past the vanity mirror where a woman in a green dress stared back at me with dry eyes and a jaw so tight it ached. I reached for the door handle.

And stopped.

Because beneath the silence of the manor, beneath the wind and the distant howl of a perimeter wolf and the faint hum of the Blood Moon's energy pressing against my skin, I heard something that turned my blood to ice.

Laughter.

Coming from the private wing. Low and warm and unmistakable.

Damien's laughter.

I hadn't heard him laugh in three years.

My hand tightened on the door handle until the metal whined. My wolf surged forward, claws scraping against the inside of my chest, and for the first time in months, I felt her voice, raw and ragged, cutting through the fog of resignation I'd wrapped around us both.

Go, she whispered. Go see who makes him laugh when we never could.

I opened the door and stepped into the hallway.

The west corridor was empty, just as Captain Aldric had ordered. Every torch was lit. Every door was closed. And at the far end, light spilled from beneath the last door on the left, golden and warm, the kind of light that belonged to a room where someone had taken the time to set a fire in the hearth and arrange the furniture and make everything perfect for a guest who mattered.

The kind of care Damien had never once shown me.

I walked toward the light.

Each step echoed off the stone walls, and my wolf matched my heartbeat, thudding in my ears, drowning out the voice in my head that said turn around, don't do this, you already know what you'll find and knowing will be worse than wondering.

But that voice had kept me quiet for three years. Three years of silence, of swallowed questions, of pretending that patience was the same thing as love.

I was done being quiet.

I reached the door. The laughter had stopped. Voices murmured behind the wood, too low to make out words, but I caught the cadence, the rhythm. Damien's voice, deeper than usual. Softer. And another voice beneath his, lighter, melodic, a voice I didn't recognize.

A woman's voice.

My fingers closed around the handle.

And from inside the room, I heard Damien say a name. Not mine. A name spoken with a tenderness he had never, in three years of marriage, used for me.

"Selene."

My wolf went silent.

The Blood Moon burned above the manor.

And everything I thought I knew about my life cracked down the center, clean and irreversible, like bone.