The Moon Witch Who Chose the Cursed AlphaChapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Ronan didn't remember agreeing to come back. He only remembered that when the sky started to lighten, Lyra stood, brushed off her skirts, and said, "Next moon. Come back before it turns, not after. I'd rather test this while you're still yourself enough to tell me what it feels like."

"Test it."

"You don't think I'm doing this out of hospitality, do you?" A dry look, though something underneath it wasn't entirely unkind. "I want to know why my magic chose you. Until I know that, I don't sleep well. Consider it self-interest."

He'd left before full light, before anyone in the pack could ask where their Alpha had spent the night, and made it back to the manor with the dawn still gray at the edges. It should have felt like nothing had changed. Instead the wolf sat unusually quiet under his skin the whole walk home, like it, too, was turning something over.

Corwin was waiting in the front hall, which meant he hadn't slept either.

"You look," Corwin said carefully, "less like you're dying."

"I feel less like I'm dying."

"So the witch."

"Don't call her that like it's a diagnosis."

Corwin's eyebrows went up, filing that reaction away with the particular attentiveness of a Beta who'd known his Alpha for fifteen years and could read every hesitation in his voice. "Alright. What happened."

Ronan told him — most of it. The pull, the collapse, the wardline that had closed around the curse like a fist and simply stopped it. He left out the hour after, sitting across from her at that small table, the strange ease of being looked at by someone who wasn't afraid of him and wasn't performing loyalty either. That part felt like it belonged to him alone, at least for now.

"So she's the cure," Corwin said when he'd finished.

"She's *something*. I don't know what yet. She doesn't either."

"But you're going back."

"Next moon."

Corwin was quiet a beat too long. "Ronan. You know what the council's going to say if word gets out that our Alpha's tangled up with an unregistered witch on the northern border. Especially one with a coven history like—"

"You investigated her."

"Of course I investigated her. It's my job to investigate anything that gets within a mile of you, curse or no curse." Corwin held up a hand before Ronan's temper could fully surface. "I'm not saying it to warn you off. I'm saying it because you need to know what you're walking into before the council finds out on their own and decides for you. Six years ago, during a binding ceremony gone wrong, three witches were hurt. Word is her power did it — unprompted, unclaimed, uncontrolled. Her own coven exiled her rather than risk it happening again."

Ronan thought of her hands, steady around the iron poker, steadier around the cup she'd set in front of him. Nothing about her had read uncontrolled. If anything, she'd read like someone who'd spent six years white-knuckling her own power into submission — same as he'd spent three years white-knuckling his curse.

"She's not the danger here," he said.

"I hope you're right. Because if the council finds out before you're sure, they won't wait around to ask her nicely to leave." Corwin's voice dropped, less Beta now and more old friend. "You've got three moons, Ronan. Don't spend them making enemies of the one thing that bought you a night of quiet."