Luna-a

Ashveil.

The pack house courtyard was strung with lights that hadn't existed a week ago, black iron poles wound with white cord in preparation for a ceremony that was still two days out but already dressed for. Kael stood at his window and watched them being tested at dusk, one string flickering to life and then another, until the whole yard glowed like something out of a painting he didn't want to be in.

"They look good," Rowan said from the doorway. He didn't come in further than that, arms crossed, watching Kael the way he'd been watching him for weeks now — careful, measuring, like a man checking a wound to see if it was healing wrong.

"They look fine."

"You could sound happier about your own Luna ceremony."

Kael didn't answer that. He kept his eyes on the lights, on the workers below coiling extra cord back onto spools, on the ordinary mechanics of a celebration being built around him whether he felt anything about it or not.

"Kael."

"I'm tired, Rowan. That's all it is."

Rowan didn't push, not yet. He never did, not directly — Kael had learned over the years that his Beta circled a problem for days before he ever said the thing he'd come to say, testing the ground first. Kael appreciated that about him most days. Tonight it just felt like waiting for something inevitable to land.

"Cressida's asking about the seating arrangement for the elders," Rowan said instead. "Wants your input before morning."

"Whatever she decides is fine."

"That's what you said about the flowers. And the invitations. And the—"

"I trust her judgment." Kael turned from the window finally. "That's not a crime, Rowan."

"No." Rowan held his gaze a beat too long. "It's just not what a man usually sounds like, three days out from binding himself to someone for the rest of his life."

Kael didn't have an answer for that either, and the silence between them stretched long enough that Rowan eventually pushed off the doorframe and left him to it, footsteps fading down the hall.

Kael waited until the sound of him was gone before he let his shoulders drop, just slightly, just enough that if anyone had still been watching they'd have seen something crack loose in his posture that he kept locked down in front of everyone else.

He went to the window again.

Past the courtyard lights, past the training yard, the tree line sat dark and unbothered, the same as it had every night for the last several weeks. He didn't know why he kept looking at it. He told himself he wasn't looking for anything, that it was just where his eyes landed when his mind wandered, but some nights he stood at this window for an hour at a time with his hand braced on the sill, staring at those trees like they might give something back if he waited long enough.

She went that way. 

He didn't let himself finish the thought most nights. Tonight, for some reason, he did. She went that way, and I don't know where she stopped. 

He hadn't asked. That was the part that sat wrong in his chest, low and constant, a low hum he couldn't shake loose no matter how many times he told himself it was settled, done, the right call made for reasons that mattered more than his own comfort. He hadn't asked where she went. Hadn't asked anyone to find out. Hadn't let himself want to know, because wanting to know meant admitting there was still something in him that cared where Sera Voss had ended up after he'd stood in that study and cut her out of his life with a handful of words and a witness to make sure it stuck.

He pressed his palm flat against the cool glass.

The bond wasn't supposed to still feel like this. Rejection was supposed to sever it clean — that was what the books said, what the elders said, what every account he'd ever heard described. A cut, sharp and final, and then silence where the connection used to be.

He didn't feel silence.

He felt an ache. Low and persistent, like a limb gone numb but not gone, still there under the surface, still sending some faint signal his body refused to stop listening for.

Some nights, standing here, he swore he could feel something else too. Not the bond exactly — something under it, something new, faint and strange, like a second thread he didn't have a name for.

He told himself that was grief playing tricks. He told himself a lot of things these days.

A knock at the door pulled him back. Cressida let herself in before he answered, the way she'd started doing over the past month, comfortable now in a way that used to feel like progress and now just fe lt like something he was watching happen from a distance.

He didn't know how long he stood there. Long enough that the lights below finished their testing and went dark for the night, leaving only the moon over the tree line, thin and pale behind a slow drift of cloud.

That's when he felt it.

Not the ache — he'd grown used to the ache, had learned to carry it the way you carry any old injury, a weight you stop noticing until something jars it loose again. This was different. Sharper. It hit him low in the chest, sudden and unexpected, like something pulling taut and then snapping, and he actually staggered back a step from the window, one hand catching the sill to steady himself.

His wolf came up hard and fast, a surge of instinct with no clear direction, no clear threat, just an overwhelming, bone-deep certainty that something was happening. Somewhere. To someone.

He stood in the middle of his room, breathing hard, heart hammering against his ribs for no reason he could name, and the strange second thread he'd been telling himself wasn't real pulled tight enough that he nearly went to his knees with it. What was that. 

He crossed to the window again, scanning the dark tree line like it might explain itself, like the answer was written somewhere in the shapes of the trees if he just looked hard enough.

Nothing moved out there. Nothing changed.

But his wolf wouldn't settle. It paced inside him, low and restless, pulling toward the border with an urgency that made no sense, that had no source he could point to, and for the first time in weeks he let himself fully consider the thought he'd been keeping locked away. Something's wrong with her.

He didn't know how he knew. He didn't know if it was real or if it was grief finally cracking through the wall he'd built to hold it back. But standing there in the dark, hand pressed to his chest where the ache had turned to something sharper, more urgent, he felt certain — bone-deep, undeniable — that somewhere past that tree line, something had just happened that changed everything.

He didn't move from the window for a long time.

He just stood there, watching the dark, waiting for a feeling he couldn't explain to either fade or make itself clear, and dreading, somewhere underneath all of it, that it was about to do exactly that.