The Moon Witch Who Chose the Cursed Alpha Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

The inside of the cottage smelled like dried herbs and woodsmoke, and it was, Ronan noted distantly, the calmest he'd felt inside four walls in longer than he could remember.

Lyra didn't offer him a chair so much as point at one, hard, and busied herself at the hearth with her back to him — putting distance between them the only way the small space allowed. When she finally turned around, she had a cup of something dark and bitter-smelling, and she set it down in front of him without ceremony.

"Drink that. It won't fix anything, but it'll stop you from shaking."

"I'm not shaking."

"You are. You just haven't noticed yet because you've spent so long white-knuckling through it that trembling registers as normal to you." She said it without heat, an observation rather than an accusation, and it landed harder for that. She sat across from him, arms crossed, studying him the way he imagined she studied a plant she wasn't sure was poisonous. "Tell me about the curse."

"Why would I tell a stranger that."

"Because the stranger's wardline is the only thing that's kept you human for the last ten minutes, and you'd like to know why, same as I would." Her jaw was tight. "I didn't invite this. I didn't ask my magic to reach for you. Believe me, Alpha, if I'd had a say in it, you'd still be face-down in my garden."

That, at least, he believed. There was no softness in her, no performance — just a wary, exhausted honesty that matched something in his own chest.

"It's a bloodline curse," he said finally. "Old. Older than the pack records go. Every generation, it skips — sometimes two, sometimes five. When it lands, it doesn't kill you outright. It just… peels the human away from the wolf, a little more each moon, until there's nothing left wearing your face but the animal."

"How long."

"Old Maeve gives me three moons before it's past stopping."

Lyra's arms tightened across her chest. "And you came out here because—"

"I didn't come out here. I told you, I didn't mean to come this far." He looked down at the untouched cup. "I was losing the fight tonight. Worse than usual. And then I was standing in your yard and it just — stopped. Like something reached in and held the door shut."

"That was me," she said, quiet. "Or my magic, anyway. I don't fully control the difference anymore, which is its own problem." She studied him a long moment, and something in her expression shifted — not warmer, exactly, but less guarded. "I was cast out of my coven for the same reason you're looking at me like that right now. My magic doesn't behave. It doesn't follow the old registers, it doesn't answer to anyone's rules but its own, and six years ago that meant it reached for something during a binding ceremony that it had no business touching. People got hurt. I got blamed. I've spent every year since making sure it never happens again."

"And tonight it happened again."

"Tonight it happened again," she agreed grimly. "For you. Which means either this is a coincidence I'm supposed to believe in, or your curse and my magic are answering the same question, and I don't like either answer."

Ronan finally reached for the cup and drank — bitter, earthy, and it did, in fact, steady the tremor in his hands he hadn't wanted to admit to. "What question."

Lyra held his gaze, and for the first time since he'd stumbled into her clearing, he saw something underneath the wariness — a flicker of the same unwilling recognition his own chest had been aching with since the moment her wardline touched him.

"I don't know yet," she said. "But I don't think either of us gets to walk away without finding out."