Chapter #2 The Night the Moon Turned Away

Emara Dell POV

Stocks Courtyard, Nightfall Range

The courtyard emptied slowly, like wolves leaving a kill they’d already stripped bare.

The laughter faded first. Then the whispers. Then the footsteps crunching over snow.

Soon, only the torches remained, hissing, guttering, and spitting orange sparks into the darkness like they were mocking me too.

My wrists throbbed in the wooden stocks. My neck was pinned at an awkward angle, and snow was melting against my cheeks. Overripe fruit and maggots clung to my hair. My dignity was gone long before anyone threw the first rotten pear.

I couldn’t even lift my head. A healer was supposed to be calm. Strong in the quiet ways. Useful.

But I felt like a shadow of a shadow.....barely there at all.

The rejection still echoed inside me like a cracked bell.

Not tits and ass. Not you. Never you.

Corvin’s voice, once the voice I used to imagine as my future, now lived inside my skull like a knife.

My childhood crush. My secret hope. My first love.

My fated mate.

He had rejected me like I was filth stuck to his boots.

Tears slipped down my nose and froze before they hit the ground. I wanted to sink into the snow and disappear. I wanted to stop feeling. I just wanted my heart to stop hurting.

A soft crunch broke the silence.

“Emara… sweetheart…”

Rowan’s voice cracked the way ice cracks on a thawing river, it was thin, trembling, and full of dangerous things underneath.

He rushed to his knees in front of me, his hands shaking as he cupped my face. “Oh, darling… what did they do to you?”

He brushed the frozen fruit from my hair, wiping my cheeks clean with his sleeve. He used warm rags and soft towels to clean my face and hair as I shook.

“Here,” he whispered, bringing a waterskin to my lips. “Small sips. Good girl.”

The cold water stung my throat, but it helped. Everything he did helped. He tucked three blankets around my shoulders like a cocoon. Then he fed me a chunk of bread, piece by tiny piece, as if he knew I couldn’t chew much more.

“I’ll come back at sunrise when they release you,” he promised, brushing hair from my forehead. “Just hold on. Ignore their cruelty. You’re stronger than them. You always were.”

His voice trembled. He pressed a kiss to my hairline.

“I love you, Em,” he whispered. “Don’t you fucking leave me.”

Then he slipped into the shadows. His warmth vanished with him. And the cold seeped back in.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, each breath shallow, each heartbeat weaker than the last. The humiliation had carved something hollow inside me, and I kept sinking into it, deeper and darker.

Far away, wolves celebrated the end of the Moon Rite. Their laughter carried on the wind, a reminder that life went on without me.

That they didn’t need me. Didn’t want me. Wouldn’t miss me.

I closed my eyes. If the moon wanted me tonight, it could have me.

___________________________

A sharp click jolted me awake. The lock. My eyes snapped open. Torches had burned low. Snow had started falling again. The courtyard was empty except for.....

“Grab her.”

Beta Arros Veega’s slurred snarl filled my ears before I could move.

His daughter, Lyrina Veega, stood behind him with her arms crossed, wearing a smile so sharp it could’ve cut the mountain in half. The torchlight made her eyes gleam with hatred and triumph.

“Unlock her,” Lyrina ordered sweetly. “Go on, Father. You heard the Alpha earlier. He didn’t say to keep her.”

Arros chuckled, a low, wet, drunken sound. “Aye. Time to take out the trash.”

Before I could scream, his hand slapped over my mouth, cutting off the sound. Hard fingers dug into my cheeks. His other hand yanked me from the stocks so violently I bit my tongue.

Blood filled my mouth.

Lyrina laughed. “Shhh. You don’t want to wake the pack, do you? This is just a… private goodbye.”

They dragged me across the courtyard. My feet scraped the ice, and my ribs screamed in protest. The trees swallowed us quickly as they hauled me into the forest path, deeper, darker, and colder.

The snow thickened underfoot. My breath fogged in the air. My legs barely worked. We crossed into the barren frost fields beyond the ridge.

The frozen wasteland. No one survived out here. Arros threw me into the snow. My body crumpled like wet parchment.

He kicked me. Hard. My ribs cracked beneath his boot.

“You disobeyed the Alpha,” he sneered. “Made him look weak.”

Another kick. My lungs seized.

“You embarrassed Lyrina.”

Another kick to my shoulder.

“Shedding tears over a pup like some pathetic breeder.”

Lyrina crouched beside me, her grin glowing like fresh blood on the snow.

“You know,” she whispered, brushing hair from my face, “you almost fooled him once. When we were small. Before you got soft.”

She slapped me, fast and sharp.

“You will never have him,” she hissed. “He was always mine. He will always be mine.”

Blood dripped into my eye. My vision blurred. She leaned closer.

“You will die here. Alone, forgotten, and rejected. And I will be Luna. I will warm his bed. I will carry his heirs. And you....” she tapped my cheek....“will fade from his memory like smoke.”

Arros kicked me again. The world flickered.

My body folded into the snow, blood pooled beneath me, and pain bloomed out in gray waves. My head throbbed. My breath rattled. My skin burned. The cold sank into my bones like knives.

My heartbeat slowed.

“How pathetic,” Lyrina mused, standing. “She’s barely putting up a fight.”

“Won’t matter,” Arros grunted. “She’ll be dead in a minute.”

They turned to leave. I didn’t beg. Couldn’t. I could barely breathe. So I prayed. Not for myself.

“Goddess…” the word slipped through my cracked lips like a dying ember, “please… be gentle… with them.”

Lyrina paused for a moment, confusion wrinkling her brow, but then she scoffed and walked away.

I wasn’t praying because they deserved mercy. But because cruelty had already shaped them so deeply that nothing else lived inside them anymore.

“Watch… over Rowan,” I whispered, each word harder to form. “Please… don’t let… him hurt… alone.”

The snow beneath my cheek felt warm from my own blood. My memories flickered like lanterns in the fog.

Rowan holding my hand after my first shift. My mother’s lullaby. My father dancing with me around the kitchen. The little girl whose leg I healed after she fell from a tree. The pup who brought me flowers for saving his brother. Corvin, when he was younger, handing me a seashell he found because “it looked like something you’d like.”

Soft things. Good things. Things I wasn’t sure I would ever feel again. My heart slowed further. My vision faded to a pale, drifting gray.

My last thought wasn’t of hatred. Or fear. Or even the pain.

It was a wish. A small, hopeless, aching wish.

I wish I had known what love felt like… just once.

The snow muffled everything. My last exhale floated into the night. Then....Silence.

Soft, cold......and absolute.

Emara Dell died under a merciless moon.

And the world did not yet know it had just made its greatest mistake.