THE BLOOD MOON LUNA

The candles had burned down to their last inch yet Selene didn’t move.

She sat at the head of the dining table she’d spent three hours setting... White cloth, silver cutlery, the good wine Victor kept locked in the cellar that she’d broken into with a hairpin because tonight was supposed to mean something. But instead, she watched the wax drip onto the cloth and thought about nothing at all.

The clock above the fireplace read 11:47.

Her phone screen lit up and she grabbed it so fast, she nearly knocked her glass over.

It was a text from Mira, the only person she found confidence in, after the incident.

"You still up?"

She set it face-down.

Across the table, Victor’s plate sat untouched. The food had gone cold at nine. She’d covered it at ten and at eleven she’d stopped pretending she was going to reheat it.

After Five years of marriage, She’d learned to stop counting the disappointments. But anniversaries, she’d told herself anniversaries were different. Anniversaries were the one night Victor Ashfang would remember he had a wife... Or so she thought.

Her phone buzzed again.

She ignored it.

Then it buzzed a third time. Fourth. Fifth... Rapid, insistent, and in the wrongest of ways.

She had known Mira for years and this was not her rhythm.

She turned it over half exhausted, half curious.

But this time the text was from an unknown number with no message. Just an image file loading slowly from the top down, the way bad news always arrives, unhurried, inevitable, almost bored with itself.

Opening the file, the first thing she saw was a hotel entrance. Marble steps and gold lettering. 'The Crescent Grand,' forty minutes from Ashfang territory, which meant he’d driven past three perfectly adequate hotels to get there.

The second thing she saw was Victor.

Her husband, in the grey suit she’d ironed that morning, his hand pressed against the small of a woman’s back with the exact pressure of a man who has done this before and expects to do it again.

Selene’s thumb moved before her brain did. She pinched the image wider.

The woman was laughing at something. Her head thrown back with dark loose hair. Damn Moon goddess! She was young, the kind of young that made Selene feel every one of her twenty-four years like weight on her spine.

Her phone buzzed again with a second image file.

Again it was Victor, in a corridor now, his jacket off and the she-wolf’s hand in his. He had a smile she hadn’t seen in two years of their marriage or three? The details blurred itself in her mind.

Then, a third image file.

She didn’t look at it this time, she didn't have to.

Instead, she set the phone down gently, which surprised her, because some distant part of her had expected to throw it. She picked up her wine glass. Drank. Set it down with the same careful precision, like if she was quiet enough, the chaos happening inside her chest might not become real.

The clock ticked to midnight and her phone lit up one last time.

The sender was still unknown but this time, the message had words.

"Happy Anniversary, Luna."

And below it, another image: Victor’s mouth on another woman’s throat, his eyes closed, her fingers in his hair, the hotel room door half-open behind them like whoever took this photo wanted to make absolutely certain she could see the bed.

Selene read the message again.

"Happy Anniversary, Luna."

Not her name but her title. The title she’d been handed like a consolation prize when everything else was taken from her, traded from one pack’s disgrace to another pack’s politics, dressed up, presented and told to smile... And be grateful.

"Luna..."

She laughed.

It came out wrong, short, sharp and not quite normal. She pressed her hand over her mouth and breathed through her nose until it passed.

Then she stood up, walked to the kitchen, and poured the rest of the wine down the sink.

She was rinsing the glass when her phone rang. Victor’s name came up this time lighting up the dark kitchen like something holy.

She watched it ring.

Once. Twice. Five times.

And on the sixth, she picked it up, letting the silence in that split second settle inside her longer than it should. Then the ambient noise of a hotel bar, soft music, low voices, and the clink of ice cleared it as quickly as it started.

“Selene.” His voice was careful. “I’m going to be late. Alliance business ran long, there’s...

“Which hotel?” She sighed.

Silence.

“What?”

“Which hotel are you at, Victor.” She kept her voice even, not asking a question. She looked at the dark window above the sink, at her own reflection looking back with her hair still pinned, dress still neat, candle wax drying on the good cloth in the dining room.

“Selene, I told you—”

“The Crescent Grand is forty minutes away. Which means you left at seven.” She turned the tap off. “We had a reservation at eight.”

More silence came from the other side of the line, a silence that came not because words weren't available but because they weren't needed.

“This conversation can wait until...

“You answered your phone.” She set the glass down. “So let's have it now.”

She could hear him breathe. She could hear, beneath the bar noise, a soft sound, a voice she didn’t know, asking him something she couldn’t catch.

“Who is that?” she said.

“Selene—”

“Who is that.”

He hung up.

She stood in the dark kitchen for a long time as the tap dripped slowly, as though it didn't want to be noticed.

Somewhere in the house a clock was ticking. Through the window, the moon was rising, full, white and indifferent, the way moons always were, the way everyone in her life eventually became.

She touched her chest, slowly, and clutched to the skin there hoping to fill the void her wolf left five years ago. A tear slipped past her eyelids and at once she cleaned it before picking her phone to open the image from the unknown number to look at the third image for the first time.

She studied it the way she’d learned to study everything that hurt her; clinically, completely, letting the full weight of it land so there was nothing left to be surprised by later.

Victor’s closed eyes. The woman’s hand. The open door.

Then something else, small and almost invisible.

In the mirror on the far hotel room wall, barely visible in the background was a figure standing just outside the frame.. Watching.