LOGINPlease comment your thoughts ‼️ ~Leela Wrights 💙
The pale dawn did not break the cold inside the Blood Moon palace; it merely turned the shadows a sterile grey.In the center of the guest chamber, my fingers worked the small hooks along the front of Naya’s dark wool tunic.The fabric was coarse, stripped of any royal pretense, but I had meticulously brushed every stray speck from it before the guards arrived.We were not entering that chamber as beggars looking for crumbs, nor as petitioners pleading for a place at a table that had already rejected us."Will it take long?" Naya murmured, her small face completely unreadable as she looked down at her own boots. "The trial.""No," I replied. "It will be over quickly. And when we are finished, we will go back to the room and have hot broth. Just you and me.""With the bread from yesterday?" she asked, her eyes lifting to mine."With the bread from yesterday," I promised, offering her a faint smile that felt foreign on my face. "But for now, you must remember what we practiced. You look
For a long time, I had imagined this confrontation, rehearsing lines of venom and indifference in the quiet hours of the dead zone, wondering if the sight of him would make my wolf howl with the agony of the rejection or tear itself apart for a second chance.Instead, looking at him now, I felt an icy clarity."You look at me as if I am the one who poisoned him," Zarek said. "Theron was the closest thing I had to a father after the winter wars, Rya. If I thought for a fraction of a second that his death was orchestrated within these walls—""You would what?" I interrupted, cutting through his rising Alpha authority without a single tremor. "Deploy the guards? Hold an inquiry? You did not even notice when your own mate was hunted out of your territory by the omegas you command. Do not play the vigilant protector now. It doesn't suit the color of your coat."Zarek’s jaw tightened, a sharp pulse jumping at the base of his throat. He took a step forward.The scent of him surged over me, th
The quiet inside the study did not just deepen; it pulled the remaining warmth straight out of the air.On the terrace, my palms remained pressed flat against the stone rail. I did not move. I simply listened to the sudden, uneven hitch in Zarek’s chest - the distinct sound of an Alpha completely stripped of his royal armor by a single question from a seven-year-old child.When Zarek finally spoke, the roughness in his voice surprised me. It was ungrounded. Raw."I made a mistake, Naya," he said quietly."Grandfather said dropping a porcelain plate is a mistake," Naya replied, her voice holding that flat, factual, completely unbothered rhythm she had learned from Theron. "Leaving people in the freezing woods is a choice. Why did you choose it?""I was blind," he murmured, and the admission sounded like it had been dragged from his throat. "I listened to council advisors who cared far more for bloodlines and territory distribution than the truth. I believed things that were systematica
I felt him as a change in the room - the way the sea pulls back before a wave, gathering itself.Yet, I stayed rooted to my spot, my hands remained on the cold stone of the terrace rail, my eyes on the mountains that had stood here long before the first wolf built the first hall, that would stand here long after the last wolf was dust.His footsteps crossed the stone behind me. I braced for his voice - my name, a command, the cold formality of his.He gave me none of it. The footsteps passed behind me and kept going, toward the hearth, toward the chair where Naya sat with her feet dangling far above the floor.The leather of his tunic creaked. He was kneeling. I had heard that sound before, in the cottage, when he first met her and did not know what to do with his hands - this man who had commanded armies and broken alliances and thrown me away like a thing of no value, brought to his knees by a child."Naya."His voice came out differently than I had ever heard it. This was something
The mountains were still beautiful.I stood at the terrace, looking down at the courtyard far below.Wolves in dark robes crossed the stones in patterns I could almost read - pausing, speaking, moving on. Their voices did not reach me through the glass. I could only watch their mouths open and close, open and close, a silent opera I had no part in.The peaks beyond them were white-capped and eternal, the same peaks I had stared at from Theron's garden. After everything - the rejection, the exile, seven years of silence - this land still caught the light in a way that made my chest ache. The rivers still cut silver through the valleys. The sky still stretched pale and endless.It was the sky I had fallen in love with as a girl, back when I believed in mate bonds and happy endings and the Moon Goddess. I had been young. I had been dumb. I was neither of those things now, I hoped.Behind me, Naya sat in one of the chairs near the cold hearth. She had not spoken since we arrived. Her feet
Naya had arranged her lunch into a battlefield. Apple slices were soldiers. The honey pot was a fortress. She was making small explosion sounds under her breath, too absorbed in her war to notice I hadn't eaten a bite."The carrots are dying bravely," I said."The carrots are traitors. They're fighting for the wrong side.""Which side is that?"She gave me a look that suggested I had asked something deeply stupid. "The side that loses."I pushed my plate away. The grey gown I'd worn to the funeral was draped over the chair, and I was back in the frayed dress from the dead zone, the one that still smelled faintly of Theron's herbs. I had not been able to bring myself to wash it. Grief made you hold onto stupid things.Naya's battle sounds faded. She had stopped moving, her hand suspended over an advancing carrot, her head tilted toward the window."Mommy."Something in her voice pulled me to my feet before I'd made the decision to stand."There's a bird," she said. "It's been there sinc
***SEVEN YEARS LATER***Naya was seven years old, and she had never seen another wolf outside of Theron and me.She had his eyes, Zarek's eyes, silver and sharp and full of questions I could not answer. Most nights she asked about her father, and every time I told her the same lie, telling her he w
The nausea started on the nineteenth day of hiding in Theron's cottage.I woke before dawn with my stomach heaving, barely making it to the basin before the bile rose in my throat. I knelt there on the cold floor, shaking and sweating, until the wave passed. Then I sat back on my heels and pressed
The forest changed around me as I stumbled deeper into the dead zone. Trees grew twisted and pale, their branches clawing at a sky I could barely see.The air felt heavy, wrong, as if the land itself was holding its breath. No patrols came here, no wolves howled at night. This was the forgotten edg
I smelled him before I saw him.My wolf froze mid-step, and then she screamed inside my head: Mine!The word hit me like a thunderbolt, and my wine glass slipped from my fingers, shattering on the stone floor of the moon lodge.Around me, the Blood Moon Pack's celebration continued without pause; w







