Chapter 1: The Perfect Luna

I should have known that a day that beautiful could not last.

But I did not know. I woke up happy. Genuinely, stupidly happy, the happiness that makes you stretch your arms above your head and smile at the ceiling for no reason. The Moon Festival was today. The whole pack had been buzzing about it for weeks. I had been right there buzzing with them, staying up late to help hang the silver ribbons, tasting every dessert Miriam brought to the kitchen for approval, arguing gently with the warriors about where to set up the bonfire so the smoke would not blow directly into the elder seating area.

I cared about all of it. Every small stupid detail. That was just who I was.

Damon was still asleep when I tried to get up.

His arm came around my waist like it had its own instincts, pulling me back before I even made it to the edge of the mattress. I landed against his chest and he made a sound that was not quite a word. Something between a groan and my name.

“Damon.”

Nothing.

“Damon, I have to get up.”

“No you do not.”

“The festival starts in three hours.”

“Then we have three hours.”

I turned to look at him. His eyes were still closed. His hair was a disaster. There was a crease from the pillow running across his cheek and he looked nothing like the powerful Alpha the rest of the pack saw every day. He looked like mine. Just mine. And my chest did that thing it always did when I looked at him too long, that squeezing feeling that was too big to be comfortable and too good to want to stop.

I kissed his jaw. Then I pushed his arm off me before my own feelings talked me into staying.

He groaned into the pillow like I had caused him actual pain.

I laughed all the way to the bathroom.

The grounds were already alive when I came downstairs.

Noise everywhere. Good noise. The high shrieking laughter of children stealing food before the tables were even properly set. The low steady rumble of the older pack members gathered near the fire pit arguing about something that probably did not matter. The smell of roasted meat and cinnamon and wood smoke all tangled together in the morning air.

I stood at the edge of it for a moment and just looked.

For five years I had been Luna of the Silver Moon Pack. Five years and it still hits me sometimes, this feeling of fullness. Like I had been given more than I deserved and I knew it and I was going to spend every day making sure I earned it.

Old Miriam found me before I had taken ten steps into the crowd. She pressed a honey roll into both of my hands without asking and told me I was wasting away. I was not wasting away. Miriam told every woman in the pack that they were wasting away regardless of what they actually looked like. It was how she showed love.

I ate both rolls.

Little Theo found me next. He was eleven years old and had shifted for the first time three weeks ago and had not stopped being proud of himself since. He pulled on my sleeve and asked in a very serious voice if he could sit at the Alpha table for the ceremony. I looked at his face. That eager desperate wanting of it.

“Yes,” I said. “Save the seat next to mine.”

He ran away so fast he nearly knocked over a tray of cups.

I was still smiling when I felt it. That particular weight of someone’s stare. Not admiration. Not the respectful attention I got from pack members who saw their Luna walking through a crowd. This was something else. Heavier. With edges to it.

I turned.

Vanessa Holt was standing near the tree line. Still. Too still for a festival, like she had not come to celebrate anything. She had a cup in her hand but she was not drinking from it. She was just watching me with those dark flat eyes of hers.

There was something in her expression I did not have a clean word for. Not just jealousy. It was older than jealousy. More settled. Like she had been carrying it for a long time and had stopped trying to hide it.

A cold feeling moved through me quickly.

Then I let it go. I turned back to my pack. To Theo’s beaming face somewhere in the crowd. Miriam was already yelling at someone near the dessert table. To my home, my people, my life.

I had learned not to let Vanessa take up space in my good days.

Damon found me before the ceremony.

He came up behind me while I was straightening the flower arrangements on the long tables and put both hands on my shoulders. No words. Just that. The solid warm weight of him at my back, his thumbs moving in slow circles.

“Stop fussing,” he said quietly.

“I am not fussing. The left side is uneven.”

“Aurora.”

“What?”

“Nobody is going to look at the flowers.”

“I am going to look at the flowers.”

He turned me around. I let him. He looked at my face for a moment in that way he had, like he was checking something, making sure I was really there and really okay. His silver eyes were very serious.

“You are the most important thing here today,” he said. “Not the ribbons. Not the food. You.”

I looked away because when he said things like that it was hard to hold his gaze. “You are biased.”

“Completely,” he agreed. “And correct.”

When he spoke about me in front of the whole pack my face got hot. I stood there with five hundred eyes on me and Damon’s voice filling the whole courtyard and I did not know what to do with my hands. He said things I had not expected him to say out loud. Not because they were untrue but because Damon was not a man who performed his feelings for an audience. He kept the most real things quiet, between us, in the dark.

But he said them. In front of everyone.

The pack howled and I laughed and pressed my hand over my mouth because I was about to cry and I refused to cry at my own festival.

When he came down from the platform and held my face I wanted to stay in that moment forever. I want to go back to it now and scream at myself. Hold on. Hold on to this. Do not let it end.

But you cannot warn the person you used to be.

The alarm tore everything open.

One long howl. Three short. Rogues.

The crowd changed in an instant. That is the only way to describe it. One breath it was a celebration, the next it was controlled panic and movement and Damon’s hand gripping mine so hard it hurt.

Then he let go.

He had to. He was Alpha. His pack needed him.

I turned to help the nearest group of frightened pack members toward the safe corridors. I knew what to do. I had trained for exactly this. I was already moving, already thinking, already being Luna the way I had been taught.

I never heard the person behind me.

Just a sharp sting at the side of my neck.

Then the world went sideways. The noise fell away. My legs stopped working the way legs are supposed to work and the ground came up toward me in slow motion and I thought, very clearly, one word.

Damon.

It did not come out of my mouth.

The darkness was fast. Faster than fear. It came in from every edge of my vision at once and pulled everything into it and the last thing my eyes found before they stopped working was a face at the tree line.

Vanessa.

Standing completely still.

Smiling like she had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.