Chapter 3 — The Wedding Night

Bella's POV

The room they gave me was at the far end of the east wing.

Small. Plain. A single bed with a iron frame, one window that faced the back wall of the packhouse and a wooden chair that looked like it had given up on life years ago. No flowers. No welcome. No nothing.

Just four walls and a door that locked from the outside.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my hands. The mark on my wrist had stopped glowing but it was still there, settled into my skin like it had always been there. Like it belonged. Like it had simply been waiting for tonight to show itself.

I pressed my thumb against it.

It didn't hurt. It didn't burn. It just... was.

Outside, the party had stopped.

I had been here all alone without food or water and no one bothered to come ask the omega in the east wing if she was alright.

Nobody came.

Not Zane. Not Elder Crest. Not a single packmate or warrior or even a house servant knocking to bring water.

I was alone in the way only truly unwanted people understand. The kind of alone that isn't just physical. The kind that settles into your bones and whispers that the world keeps spinning just fine without you in it.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

Today I had been humiliated in front of every Alpha in the region. I had been rejected publicly, laughed at, insulted and dumped in this place. My wrist carried a divine mark that nobody wanted to acknowledge and I had signed marriage papers that the elders slid in front of me with shaking hands while Zane stood ten feet away with his back turned.

He hadn't looked at me once during the signing.

Not once.

I should have cried. Any reasonable person would have cried. But the tears wouldn't come and I wasn't sure if that made me strong or just empty. I closed my eyes and pulled the thin blanket over myself without bothering to change out of my uniform.

What was the point.

Sleep came slowly. Shallow at first, restless, my mind replaying Zane's voice over and over. I reject you, Bella Cooper. The laughter. The flower hitting my shoulder. Tyla's face twisted with fury and relief at the same time.

Then deeper sleep pulled me under like water.

And that was when the light came.

It started small. A thin silver thread at the edge of my vision, the kind you notice in that strange space between sleeping and waking where everything feels both real and impossible at once. I turned toward it instinctively.

It grew.

Slowly at first and then all at once, silver light poured into the room like the moon itself had leaned down and pressed its face against the window. It filled every corner. It swallowed the shadows. It was warm in a way light had no business being warm. Something I had no word for.

I sat up.

I was not afraid. I knew I should have been but I wasn't.

In the center of the light, a figure formed. Woman-shaped but not a woman. Too still. Too luminous. Her hair moved like it was underwater and her eyes when they opened were the exact silver of a full moon on a cloudless night. She looked at me and I felt it in my chest like a bell being struck.

The room was absolutely silent.

She stepped closer and the light moved with her, gentle and unhurried and she stopped at the foot of my bed and looked at me for a long moment without speaking. Like she was making sure it was really me. Like she had been looking for a very long time.

When she finally spoke, her voice came from everywhere at once. From the walls and the floor and somewhere deep inside my own chest.

"Bella Cooper."

My name in her mouth sounded different. Heavier. Like it meant something it had never meant before.

"Yes," I whispered.

She tilted her head slightly.

"Do you know how long I have been searching for you, child?"

I shook my head.

She smiled. It was the saddest and most beautiful smile I had ever seen on any face in my entire life.

"They hid you well," she said softly, almost to herself. "Your whole life, kept small. Kept invisible. Kept in the back of every room so nobody would look too closely." Her silver eyes held mine. "But I always knew where you were."

My throat tightened.

"Who are you?" I asked, even though some part of me already knew.

The light around her pulsed once, warm and ancient and absolute.

She didn't answer that question directly. Instead she reached out and her fingers, cool and impossibly gentle, touched the mark on my wrist. It lit up immediately, blazing silver and gold so bright I had to squint.

"This mark was never about him," she said quietly. "It was always about you. About what you carry. About what you were born to do."

"I don't understand," I whispered.

She looked at me with those moon eyes and spoke with the kind of certainty that leaves no room for doubt anywhere in your body.

“Child… I finally found you. You are the chosen one. The pack's true Luna. The royal healer."

The light exploded.

And everything went white.