Chapter 3: Death of a Luna

Pain has a color. I didn't know that until it happened to me.

White, first, blinding, when her claws tore through my side. Then red, deep and spreading, warm in a way that felt obscene against the cold night air. I hit the ground and the impact knocked whatever scream I had left right out of my lungs.

"No," I heard myself say, or maybe I only thought it. "No, no, no."

Selene stood over me, chest heaving, her hand dripping red in the moonlight, and for one strange suspended second she looked more horrified than I felt. Like some part of her hadn't actually believed she'd go through with it until her claws were already wet.

"I didn't," she whispered. "I didn't mean, I mean I did, but I didn't think, oh Goddess, Luna—"

I couldn't answer her. Couldn't do much of anything except lie there and watch the stars smear sideways above the pine branches, my own blood soaking into the dirt beneath me, warm and then, horribly, not warm at all.

My body wasn't working the way it should have. I tried to press my hand to my side and my arm barely twitched. Shock, some distant clinical part of my brain supplied. You're in shock. You're dying.

*Dying.*

The word didn't feel real. Nothing about this felt real. Eleven days ago I'd been a bride. Now I was a body cooling in a clearing, and the woman who'd done it was backing away from me into the trees, sobbing, already running, already gone.

I was alone.

Every warning sign I'd ignored paraded through my mind with vicious clarity, the way they say your whole life flashes at the end, except it wasn't my whole life, it was just the last eleven days, replayed and replayed until I wanted to scream at myself to *see it, why didn't you see it.*

Kael's cold eyes at the altar. *Mine*, like a possession, not a promise.

My father's locked jaw. He knew. He'd always known.

The scream from the tree line during my vows. Selene, even then, already unraveling.

*Phase one complete as of tonight.* Written in a ledger like I was a line item.

I'd had every piece of the puzzle laid out in front of me and I'd smiled for the cameras anyway, because that was my one useful skill, because somewhere along the way I'd learned that being agreeable was safer than being right.

It wasn't safer. It got me killed in a clearing at twenty-three years old with a good marriage and a full life still ahead of me that I would never get to have.

My vision was going soft at the edges, the trees losing their shape, the moon smearing into a pale, formless glow. I thought about my mother's pearls, still around my throat probably, ruined now with blood. I thought about Elias, my brother, who would find out I was dead from somebody else's mouth because I never told him the truth about the ledger, about Selene, about any of it.

I thought, *I never even got to hate Kael properly. I never even got to fight back.*

Then the moonlight above me stopped smearing and started to gather.

---

At first I thought I was imagining it, some final trick of a dying brain grasping for comfort. The light pooled directly overhead, thickening, folding in on itself until it wasn't light anymore but something with shape, with presence, with a weight that pressed down on the clearing like the air itself had gone reverent.

A woman stood where the light had been. Or something wearing the shape of a woman, tall and silver, her eyes like the moon seen through water, her face both ancient and achingly young all at once.

I should have been afraid. I wasn't. I was too far gone for fear.

"Little Luna," she said, and her voice moved through the clearing like wind through wheat, gentle and enormous at once. "You are dying badly, and out of turn."

"Am I," I managed, though it came out as barely a breath.

"You were never meant to die in this clearing. Not like this. Not now." Sorrow crossed her face, real and old, the kind of grief that comes from watching something happen a thousand times and never being able to stop it in time. "Kael's greed was always going to find you. Selene's grief was always going to break something. But the hand that shaped this night, child, was not theirs alone."

My mind, slow and fading, tried and failed to grasp what she meant. "I don't understand."

"You will." She knelt beside me, and where her fingers brushed my forehead, the pain receded, just slightly, just enough that I could think again. "There are older hungers than a jealous mate or a power hungry Alpha. Someone wanted you dead before you ever understood why. Someone has been shaping your fate since long before you said your vows. Kael and Selene are not your true enemies, Luna. They are only the blade. Not the hand that guided it."

"Then who—"

"That is the truth still buried. I cannot give it to you freely. Some things must be found, not handed over, or they will not hold weight when you need them most." Her silver eyes searched mine, and for a moment I felt entirely seen, every mistake, every ignored warning sign, every small betrayal I'd swallowed to keep the peace. "But I can give you something else. A second chance to walk this road with open eyes."

My heart, what was left of its beating, stuttered. "A second chance."

"Every memory intact. Every warning sign you missed, you will not miss again. Every lie you swallowed, you will taste before it reaches your throat." She tilted her head, and something almost like a smile touched her mouth, sad and fierce at once. "But I will not lie to you, little Luna. This is not mercy alone. You carry something in your blood that the dark hungers for, something that must not stay buried in silence. You are not only being saved. You are being sent back to finish what was started long before Kael Draven ever looked your way."

The clearing was fading now, the trees, the moon, the copper smell of my own blood, all of it dissolving into silver light that filled every corner of my vision.

"Will I remember this?" I asked, or tried to. "Will I remember you?"

"You will remember everything," the Moon Goddess said, and her voice was the last thing I heard as the light swallowed me whole. "Wake up, Luna Everly. Wake up and choose differently. And this time, child, do not smile at what is trying to kill you."