Chapter 6

Elara's POV

I woke up the next morning in a room I didn't recognize, tangled in blankets that smelled like cedar and something faintly smoky, and for one long, disoriented moment I forgot everything that had happened the night before.

Right up until I turned my wrist over and saw the mark still sitting there, dark and quiet against my skin, proof that none of it had been some strange dream brought on by heartbreak and too much wine at the ceremony.

Someone had left a plain gray dress folded over the chair near the window, simple, nothing like the wedding dress still lying in a ruined heap somewhere in the woods, and I was grateful for it in a way that surprised me, because putting on something that wasn't stitched with Ryker's rejection woven into every seam felt like the first real breath I'd taken since the clearing.

When I made my way downstairs, Kael was already at the table, a cup of something steaming in front of him that he wasn't drinking, staring at it like it might have answers if he looked hard enough, and he glanced up the moment my foot hit the last step, like he'd known I was coming before I made a sound.

"You slept," he said, and it wasn't quite a question, more like he was checking a fact against something he'd been worried about.

"Surprisingly, yes." I sat across from him, and Nyra appeared a moment later with a plate of bread and fruit that she set in front of me without a word, though her eyes lingered on my wrist again before she disappeared back into the kitchen. "I expected to lie awake all night thinking about everything Nyra said. Instead I think my body just gave up and shut down."

"That happens sometimes, after a shock like the one you had." Kael finally pushed the cup aside, folding his hands on the table in a way that made him look almost younger than the centuries Nyra had implied he'd lived. "How are you feeling this morning? And I mean actually feeling, not the answer you'd give someone you were trying to reassure."

Nobody had asked me that in a long time, not really, not in a way that expected an honest answer instead of a polite one, and it caught me off guard enough that I almost gave him the polite version out of habit before I stopped myself.

"Confused," I admitted. "Yesterday morning I woke up thinking I was about to become someone's Luna. Last night I got rejected in front of my entire pack and told I was too weak to matter. And now I'm sitting in a stranger's kitchen being told I might be the last living piece of some goddess's bloodline that everyone thought was gone. It's a lot to hold onto in less than a day."

"It is," he agreed simply, without trying to smooth it over or tell me it would all make sense soon, which I appreciated more than I expected to. "For what it's worth, whatever Ryker said to you last night, it wasn't true. Weak isn't the word I'd use for someone who walked toward an injured stranger in the middle of a rogue attack instead of running past him."

Heat rose in my face, and I looked down at my plate rather than let him see exactly how much those words had landed somewhere soft and unguarded in my chest. "You don't know me well enough to say that."

"I know what I saw," he said, and there was no flattery in the way he said it, just plain fact, the same tone he'd used to explain the mark and the bloodline and everything else so far. "I've had a long time to learn the difference between someone who's weak and someone who's just been made to believe they are. You're the second one, Elara. I'd bet my crown on it."

I didn't know what to do with the way my chest tightened at that, so I busied myself with the bread on my plate instead, tearing off a piece I didn't actually want just to give my hands something to do that wasn't reaching for the mark on my wrist.

"Can I ask you something," I said, once the silence had stretched long enough to feel safe again. "Last night you said every full moon you lose a little more of yourself. What does that actually mean? What happens to you?"

Something shifted behind his eyes, the same guarded flicker I'd seen right before he told me about the curse in the first place, and for a moment I thought he might deflect the question the way he had a habit of doing whenever the conversation got too close to whatever he kept locked away.

"It means the wolf gets louder every year," he said instead, quiet, like the words cost him something to say out loud. "Less like an animal I share my body with, more like something clawing to take it over completely. Nyra thinks I have maybe a decade left before I can't guarantee I'll come back to myself after the change. Soren thinks I'm being generous with that estimate."

"And nobody's been able to help you? In all this time?"

"Plenty of healers have tried. Plenty of old texts have been read cover to cover looking for an answer." He turned his wrist over, studying the mark again like he still hadn't fully accepted it was real. "The stories all say the same thing, that only someone from the Moon Goddess's own bloodline could ever hope to break a curse like mine. For a hundred years, that was just a story. A cruel one, honestly, dangled in front of me by old texts written by people who never expected anyone to actually go looking for the answer."

The weight of what he wasn't saying settled over the table between us, heavier than anything Nyra had told me the night before, because Nyra's warning had been about danger, about people wanting to use me, but this was different, this was about him, about what my presence might actually mean for a man who had spent a century bracing for the day he lost himself completely.

"You think I'm the answer to your curse," I said slowly, testing the shape of the words as I said them.

"I think," he said, choosing his words with obvious care, "that I don't know how to hope for something I stopped believing in a long time ago. And I think that scares me more than the curse itself ever has."

Before I could answer him, the front door of the cottage swung open hard enough to bang against the wall, and Soren stood in the doorway, chest heaving like he'd run the whole way from wherever he'd come from, his eyes going straight to Kael with an urgency that made every instinct in my body go cold.

"My King," he said, "Alpha Cross is at the border. He's asking for the woman by name, and he's not asking politely."