CHAPTER 001: THE LUNA'S BETRAYAL

Sienna's POV

Tonight I became Luna of the Silver Fang.

I'd waited for this for a long time. Longer than anyone below knew.

I put my hands on the stone rail. The cold hit fast, deeper than I expected. I held my breath and waited for the moment to settle into something real. It didn't. My chest stayed tight.

The gown had taken two weeks. Three women had sewn late into the night to finish it in time. I should have felt something like pride wearing it. Instead it pulled wrong at the seams, and I kept noticing it, over and over, like my body couldn't stop checking.

Lucas used to say this night was coming, back when we were kids running through these halls. He told me I was the reason any of it made sense to him. I believed that for years.

Then I heard it.

From the room behind me. Skin against skin. Wet. A rhythm I recognized before I let myself understand it.

I didn't run. My legs just started moving toward the door, ahead of the rest of me, while some other part of me stayed a few steps back, refusing.

Cedar reached me first. Then her perfume, thick enough that I could taste it before I crossed into the room.

Her fingers were in his hair. Her head was tipped back, her throat bare, her mouth working low against his skin. She said something too smooth to be spontaneous.

"Remind me." Her voice was calm. "Tell me whose mark really matters."

"You know it is yours."

Flat. Certain. The same voice he used to end an argument with the elders before it started.

Ivy's eyes found mine over his shoulder. She didn't stop moving. She reached sideways to the dresser, to the box of hairpins finished that morning for my hair, and worked one loose into her own without ever looking away from me.

My shoulder hit the doorframe. I didn't move after that. I just stood there and waited for him to look up.

He didn't. His hands slid to her waist and pulled her closer, and something crossed his face that I had never once seen him wear for me.

Downstairs the music kept going. Nobody down there knew yet that everything had already changed.

I stood in the doorway a long time. Every time he'd stepped between me and something that wanted to hurt me, at the academy, in the pack halls, whenever Morrigan found some new way to test me, I'd called it love.

He was never protecting me.

He was deciding when.

The thought sat in my chest like something too big to move. Then one sob broke out of me, too loud for the room. My hand came up over my mouth a second too late.

My mother's grave. Morrigan standing over the body, telling me to be grateful for the roof she'd given me. My father, driven out while the whole pack watched and looked away. I stood there and let it all come, one piece after another, until I couldn't tell which one hurt the most.

My breath kept catching wrong, quick and then not at all. I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, anything to keep more sound from coming out of me.

I heard the door handle turn before I heard his footsteps.

Lucas walked in without knocking. He didn't look at me, his eyes stayed on the rug the whole time he crossed the room. He shrugged the jacket off his shoulders and let it drop over a chair.

"You are still up," he said.

"I saw you." My voice was barely holding. "Lucas, after everything we've shared, how can you look at me like this?"

"Drop it, Sienna." His jaw ticked once. "The ceremony was a chore. I do not have the energy for this."

"A chore?"

Something in my chest gave out, slow, like a held breath finally let go.

"I thought tonight was ours."

He looked at me the way someone looks at a door right before they close it. Not angry. Just finished.

"I, Lucas of the Silver Fang, reject you," he said. "You are not my Luna."

The bond didn't fray.

It broke. All at once.

Heat tore across the mark at my neck and down into my collarbone, and for a second I couldn't remember how to breathe at all.

My knees hit the floor. The silk did nothing against the stone beneath it. My hands reached for something to hold onto and found nothing.

My teeth had started to chatter, though the gown still held some warmth in it.

He didn't move. He didn't flinch at the sound of my knees hitting the floor. He didn't take one step closer.

"I will speak to the council tomorrow." Level. Even, like he was discussing the weather. "You will keep the title publicly. People need a face during the transition. But that is all you are now."

"Why?"

The word came apart on its way out of my throat.

"Lucas. I loved you."

He crouched down until his face was close to mine. Cedar and her perfume both still on his skin.

"Because you are a dead end," he said. "A broken wolf. You cannot give me a strong heir."

He paused, just long enough for it to land.

"But your essence will keep the son Ivy carries strong."

"Ivy?"

Her name left me before I understood why I'd said it.

Footsteps sounded behind him. She stood in the doorway wearing the Luna's robe. My robe. She looked down at me on the floor the way someone looks at a thing they've already stopped being patient with.

I pushed myself up. My arms shook, and my hands kept sliding against the stone.

"Get out." My voice shook with something closer to fury now. "How dare you stand in my home wearing that."

"Quiet, Sienna."

Alpha Command.

It hit before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, locking every muscle at once. My cheek hit the marble. Dust filled my mouth. The weight of it pressed down my spine and didn't lift.

"Watch your mouth when you speak to my Luna," Lucas said.

Ivy knelt beside me. Her nails caught my jaw and tipped my face up. She studied me the way someone studies a thing they already suspect they understand.

"You feel it." Quiet. Almost gentle. "Is it starting? Your pure blood, waking up for me?"

I didn't understand what she meant, and I couldn't have asked even if I wanted to. My throat was still locked shut. I lay there and looked at her and found nothing in her face but that same slow, patient hunger.

The marble beneath me didn't give at all. Firelight moved somewhere above her head, and I couldn't move even a fraction of an inch to look at it.

Morrigan stepped out from the shadows behind them.

She looked down at me the way she had at my mother's deathbed. The same way she'd looked the day they drove my father out of the pack lands. Calm. The calm of someone who had already decided how this ends and was only now watching it happen.

"Enough."

Flat. Final.

"Take her to the basement. The siphoning needs to begin before dawn while the moon holds its position."

I never saw the hand that hit me. The world just cut out, between one breath and the next.

The last thing that reached me was Lucas's footsteps, walking away. Cedar, thinning with every step.

Then nothing. Just dark.

I was no longer a bride.