Chapter Ten — The Moon Answers

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTER

Chapter Ten — The Moon Answers

Sophia POV

The gate stays shut long after the voices behind it fade into silence.

Two guards were posted near the wall when they first left me here, murmuring between themselves, casting the occasional glance my way to be sure I hadn't moved. Eventually even they gave in to the cold, retreating toward the small watch-shelter near the gate to wait out their shift, their voices dropping to nothing, until I couldn't tell if they were still awake at all.

I don't know how many hours pass after that. Time stops meaning very much once the cold settles all the way into my knees, into the raw skin of my palms where the stone has worn them open again. I don't watch the pack house for movement. I don't listen for footsteps that might belong to him. I already told myself, once, plainly, that I wouldn't do that anymore, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I actually manage to keep a promise to myself.

So the night is just the night. Cold stone. My own ragged breath. The distant sound of nothing at all.

It's the quiet that changes first.

Not a sound. An absence of one — the kind of stillness that feels deliberate, like the whole courtyard has been asked to hold its breath. I lift my head, expecting to see something, the guards shifting in their sleep perhaps, or an animal crossing the yard. There's nothing. Just the moon, high now, its light pooling across the stone in a way that seems, for no reason I can name, brighter than it should be.

I tell myself it's exhaustion. Fever plays tricks with light. I've heard servants say as much, feverish themselves, swearing the walls breathed or the ceiling dripped stars. I close my eyes and open them again, expecting the ordinary dark to reassert itself.

It doesn't.

I notice the flower because I nearly kneel on it, shifting my weight to ease the ache spreading through my legs.

A single small bloom, pale in the moonlight, pushing up through a crack in the frozen ground beside my knee. I stare at it for a long moment before my mind catches up to what I'm seeing.

Nothing grows here. Not in this cold. Not through stone-hard earth that hasn't seen a plow or a drop of rain in weeks.

I reach out, carefully, and touch the edge of one petal. It's real. Cool and slightly damp, the way a living thing should feel, not some trick of moonlight or exhausted imagination.

I press my fingers into the ground around it, half expecting to find some ordinary explanation — a seed carried by wind, some hardy weed that survives where nothing else does. The earth is frozen solid everywhere except the small circle directly around the flower's stem, as if the cold simply forgot to reach that one place.

How is that possible.

I don't have an answer. I sit back on my heels and stare at it, my heart beating a little too fast for something so small and harmless.

It's the animals that make it stop feeling harmless.

I catch movement at the edge of the darkness first — small, low to the ground, quick. A fox, I think, though it's hard to be certain in the shifting light. It stops at the tree line and simply watches me. Doesn't approach. Doesn't run.

Then another appears, further along, equally still.

I've seen foxes near the estate before, skittish things that bolt the moment a door opens or a voice carries too loud. These don't move at all. They watch me with a stillness that has nothing skittish in it, nothing frightened, nothing that resembles ordinary animal caution.

They're watching me.

The thought lands wrong in my chest, cold in a way that has nothing to do with the night air. Whatever had drawn them here, it seemed strangely uninterested in anyone but me — though I couldn't have said, even to myself, whether that was truly what was happening, or only what it felt like.

"Go," I whisper, my voice cracking from disuse. "Please. Go away."

They don't.

The warmth comes without warning — spreading low across my forearm, faint at first, easy to dismiss as circulation returning to a limb gone numb from cold. I look down anyway.

The old scar-like mark near my wrist — the one I've had for as long as I can remember, the one no one has ever explained to me — is glowing.

Not bright. Just a thin, silver-gold line tracing its shape, faint enough that I could almost believe I imagined it if I weren't staring directly at it.

I go completely still.

The flower and the animals I could almost talk myself out of — strange, unexplainable, but distant from me, happening around me. This is on my own skin. I can't set it at arm's length. I can't decide it belongs to the night instead of to me.

My breathing goes shallow and fast. The moment it does, the light along my arm brightens, sudden and sharp enough to make me gasp.

The flower beside my knee opens wider. Two more push up through the frozen ground a few feet away, blooming so fast I can almost watch it happen. The foxes shift, ears flattening, some current passing through all of them at once. And for one impossible second, the moonlight itself seems to sharpen — every edge of stone and shadow around me suddenly clearer than it has any right to be, gone again before I can be sure I saw it at all.

I did that. The thought arrives before I can stop it, unwelcome, impossible. *Somehow, I did that.

I try to breathe slower. I don't know why I think it might matter, only that some instinct older than thought tells me to try.

The glow along my arm dims, just slightly, matching the calm I force into my chest.

Then panic finds a new foothold — what if I can't stop this, what if this doesn't end, what if the guards wake up and see — and the light flares again in answer, the flowers trembling as if a wind had passed through them that I never felt on my own skin.

It's answering me, I realize, with a horror that has nothing to do with the cold. Whatever this is — it's answering what I feel.

That should be less frightening than not understanding it at all. It isn't. Understanding nothing has always been dangerous. Understanding that something inside me responds to my own fear, that it grows stronger the more afraid I become, that I have no idea how to control the very thing making it happen — that's worse. That's so much worse.

The fear climbs past anything I can hold steady.

And then, all at once, it stops.

The glow along my arm fades to nothing. The flowers still their frantic blooming, settling into ordinary, motionless plants. The foxes scatter into the dark without a sound, gone as suddenly as they arrived. The moonlight above me settles back into its usual pale, distant self.

I sit there, breathing hard, staring at the small cluster of flowers still growing impossibly out of frozen ground, the only proof left that any of it happened at all. The guards, thankfully, haven't stirred.

I press my fingers against my own wrist. The skin is just skin again. No warmth. No light. Nothing to show for what I just felt except my own racing heart and the flowers I can't explain away.

For nineteen years, the only question I've ever had about myself was simple, even if the answer hurt: why don't I have a wolf. I understood that question. I understood its shape, its cruelty, its place in every day of my life.

Tonight I have a new one, and I don't understand it at all.

What is happening to me?

I don't have an answer. I don't think I'm ready for one.

Above me, the moon hangs bright and unbothered, exactly as it always has.

At least, that's what I tell myself.

Because somewhere beyond the darkness, something has noticed me. I can't say how I know it. I only know, kneeling here with flowers no one will believe I didn't imagine, that for the first time in my life, I am no longer certain I'm the only one who knows something is waking.

End of Chapter Ten.