Chapter 5: The Fight That Changed Everything

I found Selene in the west corridor, alone, exactly where I expected her to be.

She stood beneath the arched windows with moonlight pooling around her like a spotlight, the sacred necklace still draped across her collarbone as though she'd forgotten it was there. She hadn't forgotten. Women like Selene Ashwood didn't forget anything. She was waiting. She'd probably been waiting since the moment I walked out of the dining hall, counting the minutes until I came looking for her, because she understood something about me that I was only beginning to understand about myself.

I didn't know how to stop fighting for things that were mine.

"Selene."

She turned with that practiced grace, the silk of her gown whispering against the stone floor. Her smile arrived half a second before her eyes focused on me, perfectly timed, perfectly measured. A performance.

"Luna Aurora." She clasped her hands in front of her like a woman receiving a guest in her own home. "I was hoping we might talk. I feel like we've gotten off on the wrong foot."

"The necklace." I stopped six feet from her and kept my voice level. Calm. The way Lyra told me to. "It doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the Luna of the Blackthorne Pack. Whatever Damien told you, he didn't have the right to give it away. It's a consecrated artifact. Sacred. I need it back before the Blood Moon ceremony."

Selene's fingers drifted to the moonstone at her throat. She stroked it the way someone pets a cat they know belongs to the neighbor.

"Damien told me it was a trinket. Something old, sentimental, nothing important." She tilted her head, and the moonlight caught the stone and sent pale fragments scattering across the wall behind her. "But it clearly matters to you. That's... sweet."

"It matters to the pack. The reaffirmation rite requires..."

"Oh, Aurora." Selene's smile widened, and something behind it shifted. Like a curtain pulling back from a window, revealing a room completely different from the one you expected. "Let's not do this. The polite version. The diplomatic dance. You came here to take the necklace, and I'm not going to give it to you, so why don't we skip the part where we both pretend this is a civilized conversation?"

The mask fell.

Not gradually. Not in pieces. It came off all at once, like a snake shedding skin, and the woman standing beneath it was nothing like the gracious guest who'd smiled her way through two days of pack functions. Her eyes went flat. Her posture changed, the softness dropping from her shoulders, replaced by something angular and predatory. She looked at me the way a wolf looks at prey it's already decided to kill but hasn't bothered chasing yet.

"He never loved you, little Luna."

The words hit the air between us and hung there, clean and precise as a surgeon's cut.

"You were a placeholder. A warm body to fill the Luna's chair until I came home. Damien mourned me for two years before your bonding, and he spent every day of your marriage mourning me still. Every meal you cooked that he didn't eat. Every night he didn't come to bed. Every time he looked through you like you weren't there." She stepped closer. "That wasn't neglect, Aurora. That was loyalty. To me."

My claws slid out. I didn't decide to let them. They came on their own, responding to a fury so total it bypassed every rational thought in my head and went straight to instinct.

Selene glanced at my hands and didn't flinch. She looked almost pleased.

"There she is," she murmured. "The real Aurora. Not the patient little Luna. Not the smiling wife. The wolf underneath, the one who's been screaming for three years with no one listening."

I reached for the necklace.

Not to attack her. Not to claw at her face or pin her against the wall or do any of the things my wolf was howling for. I reached for the clasp at the back of her neck, because the necklace was mine and I was taking it back and nothing else mattered.

Selene moved faster.

She caught my wrist, twisted it sideways, and in the same motion brought her other hand to her own face. Three fingernails raked across her cheekbone in a single, deliberate stroke. Skin split. Blood welled up in bright red lines, vivid against her golden complexion.

She smeared the blood across her cheek with her palm.

And then she screamed.

The sound tore through the corridor like a siren. High, sharp, terrified. The scream of a woman being attacked. Selene threw herself backward against the wall, sliding down until she was on the floor with her knees drawn up and her bloodied hand pressed against her face, and the transformation was so fast, so seamless, that if I hadn't been standing three feet away watching her do it to herself, I would have believed it too.

Footsteps. Running. Coming fast from both ends of the corridor.

I stood over Selene with my claws still extended and blood on the tips of her fingers and her scream still echoing off the stone walls, and in the two seconds before anyone rounded the corner, I understood what she had done. What she had been planning since the moment she walked into this pack wearing my necklace.

She hadn't stolen it to humiliate me.

She'd stolen it to provoke me. To draw me out. To engineer exactly this moment: the Luna of the Blackthorne Pack standing over a bleeding, screaming woman with her claws out and no witnesses to tell the truth.

Damien came around the corner first.

He was fast. Faster than I'd ever seen him move for me. His eyes swept the corridor in a single pass: Selene on the floor, blood on her face, tears streaming down her cheeks. Aurora standing above her, claws extended, breathing hard.

He didn't ask what happened.

He didn't look at my face or check my hands for blood or notice that every drop of it was on Selene's own fingers. He didn't pause. He didn't hesitate. He crossed the distance in three strides, seized my arm above the elbow, and dragged me backward with enough force to wrench my shoulder.

"Damien, she did it to herself. She..."

He wasn't listening. His grip tightened until I felt the bones in my arm grind together, and he pulled me down the corridor, past the guards who had arrived too late to see anything useful, past the servants pressing themselves flat against the walls, down two flights of stairs and through a reinforced door that opened into the cold, damp dark of the pack cells.

He shoved me inside. I stumbled, caught myself against the far wall, and spun around in time to see him slam the iron gate shut. The lock engaged with a sound that vibrated through my teeth.

Damien stood on the other side of the bars. His chest heaved. His wolf blazed behind his eyes, amber and furious, and for one disorienting second, I saw something beneath the anger. A flicker. Quick and buried, like a match struck in a hurricane.

It vanished before I could name it.

"You will apologize to her tomorrow." His voice was low, controlled, the voice of an Alpha delivering a sentence. "You will go to her quarters, you will tell her you lost control, and you will beg her forgiveness in front of whatever witnesses she chooses."

I wrapped my fingers around the iron bars. They were cold enough to burn.

"And if I don't?"

"Then I will strip your Luna title before the Blood Moon." He held my gaze, and there was nothing in his face I recognized. Nothing of the man who placed a necklace around my throat three years ago and spoke the bonding vows with steady hands. That man was gone. Maybe he'd never existed. "You brought this on yourself, Aurora."

I stared at him through the bars. My mate. My Alpha. The man I'd cooked for, waited for, grieved for, bled for. The man I'd lost a child for without him ever knowing or caring enough to ask.

"You never came," I whispered. "When I was in the hospital. You never came."

Damien's expression didn't change. He turned and walked away, and the darkness of the cells swallowed the sound of his boots until there was nothing left but the drip of water from a cracked ceiling and the slow, heavy thud of my own heartbeat.

I slid down the wall and sat on the cold stone floor.

My wolf lay still inside my chest. Not howling. Not raging. Just... quiet. The way something goes quiet when it finally stops expecting rescue.

I pressed my forehead against my knees and spoke into the dark.

"I already lost everything worth keeping."

The cells didn't answer. The Blood Moon was two days away. And somewhere above me, in the warm light of the manor I'd spent three years calling home, Selene Ashwood was pressing a cloth to wounds she'd given herself and telling my husband whatever story would hurt me most.

I closed my eyes.

And for the first time since the bonding, my wolf and I agreed on something.

We couldn't stay here.