Chapter 2: The Night The Wolves Came

“Open the gates.”

“Alpha Lucien ordered the rejected Luna gone before sunrise.”

“She’s barely standing.”

“That’s no longer our concern.”

The iron groaned open. A guard hurled a leather satchel into the mud at my feet … one dress, a handful of coins, my mother’s journal. Everything I had left, thrown like scraps to a dog.

A younger guard flinched, opened his mouth. “I’m… sorry, Luna.”

“Don’t call her that,” the captain snapped, and the gates slammed shut behind me with a sound like a coffin lid.

I didn’t cry. I was done giving them that.

⸻

I stood there longer than I should have, staring up at walls I’d bled for, my hand lifting toward the gate on its own before I caught myself and let it drop.

“Goodbye,” I said, to no one.

No one answered. Of course no one answered. I turned into the dark and started walking, because standing still meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the warmth of his hand under that table.

⸻

Rain found me within the hour, cold enough to make my teeth ache. My sleeve had stiffened where the healers had taken blood for their ritual, dark and crusted against my skin. I walked until the ache in my legs drowned everything else out, then opened the journal just to feel something familiar in my hands … the only thing left that still smelled faintly like her.

A page slipped loose … folded small, tucked somewhere I’d never noticed before, not in all the nights I’d read this book cover to cover looking for her voice. My mother’s handwriting, but shaking, rushed, nothing like the careful script in the rest of the book.

If you are reading this, then I have already failed to protect you.

My fingers went numb around the paper. I read it twice, certain I’d misunderstood.

Never let anyone see the mark beneath your collar.

I stopped walking. Rain ran down the back of my neck and I didn’t feel it. My free hand found my collarbone on instinct, pressing flat over silk, over the place that had burned silver hours ago in front of three hundred witnesses. How. How could she have known, when I’d only ever hidden that mark out of shame, never once telling her, never once telling anyone …

A howl split the trees, close, and every thought in my head went white.

⸻

The forest had gone wrong around me. No insects. No birds. Even the rain sounded muffled, like the world was holding its breath.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Not one set of footsteps. Dozens. Gold eyes bloomed between the trunks, too many to count, too still to be scavengers.

They weren’t circling like hungry things. They were closing in like something trained.

“Found her,” one rogue said, grinning wide enough to show teeth.

“Alive if possible,” another answered, flat, businesslike.

Alive. The word hit harder than a threat would have. They didn’t want me dead. They wanted me kept.

⸻

I ran before I decided to.

Barefoot, bleeding, my lungs already screaming. Branches opened new lines across my arms. Mud sucked at my ankles and nearly took me down twice. Behind me, laughter … unhurried, cruel, the sound of men who knew exactly how this ended.

One shifted mid-stride, fur rippling out of skin, and closed the gap in three bounding strides. Another cut across the road ahead of me. I skidded, fell hard onto my palms, and the journal flew from my grip into the mud.

A rogue snatched it up, turning it over with mock interest. “Looks valuable.”

He tore a fistful of pages loose.

“No!”

I threw myself at him without thinking, fingers hooking into his sleeve, and the backhand that followed sent the whole world sideways. I hit the road. The sky spun black at the edges.

⸻

Steel sang through the rain.

The rogue’s head was gone before his body understood it, and then there was only silence … until hooves broke it, dozens of them, riders pouring out of the treeline like something summoned rather than arrived. Moonlight caught on silver armor stamped with crescent moons.

“Silvercrest,” someone screamed. “Retreat!”

The rogues scattered like smoke.

Their leader wheeled his horse toward me, sword still raised, not at me … over me, a wall between my body and the dark. “Get up.”

I couldn’t. My arms had stopped answering.

He looked past me at the retreating shapes in the trees, then back down, and something in his face shifted from soldier to something closer to afraid.

“Princess…” He caught the word in his own throat, swallowed it whole. “Run!”

An arm closed around my waist. The ground dropped away beneath me, and the forest, the rogues, the torn pages scattering in the mud … all of it vanished behind a wall of galloping horses and rain.

⸻

I woke to warmth. Fur against my skin, the gentle sway of a carriage, every muscle in my body reporting its injuries at once.

Across from me sat the rider who’d pulled me onto his horse. He wasn’t looking at me … or he was trying not to. His eyes kept sliding down, snagging on my collarbone, then darting away like he’d touched something hot.

My collar had slipped in the fall. I felt the cool air on the mark before I understood why he’d gone pale.

He came off the bench and dropped to one knee on the carriage floor. Not a bow. A kneel … the kind reserved for something far above a rejected Luna.

Another rider leaned in through the curtain, voice low, urgent. “Is it really…”

“There’s no mistake,” the first said, and his hands were shaking when he said it.

I pulled my collar back into place, heart hammering. “What are you talking about?”

Neither answered. They only bowed their heads lower, like looking at me straight on might cost them something.

⸻

The carriage lurched to a stop.

Outside, an old man stepped into the storm, a silver cloak stitched with wolves clinging wet to his shoulders. Every rider dropped to their knees in the mud without being told, heads bowed so low their foreheads nearly touched the ground.

He approached slowly, like he didn’t trust his own legs, one hand braced against the carriage frame as though the last few feet might undo him entirely. When his eyes found mine through the door, they filled and spilled over before he could stop them. His hand rose toward my face, trembling, and stopped an inch from my skin … like he needed permission he was too afraid to ask for, like touching me might prove this was only a dream and he’d rather not know yet.

“We’ve searched for you,” he said, voice breaking apart on every word.

A pause long enough to drown in. Rain dripped from his beard onto the carriage step.

“…for twenty years.”

I stared at him. I had never seen this man in my life. And yet something in his face … the shape of the grief there, worn deep like a groove carved by years, not minutes … made my chest ache like recognition.

⸻

He drew a portrait from inside his cloak, the paper soft with age, and pressed it into my shaking hands before I could refuse it.

A woman looked back at me from the paint … my own face, down to the shape of my mouth, the tilt of my eyes. Beside her stood a little girl, small and solemn, one hand pressed to her collarbone where a six-pointed mark caught the light exactly like mine did.

The old man sank to one knee in the mud, head bowed, voice cracking wide open around the words that stole every breath left in my body.

“Welcome home… Princess Felicia Silvercrest.”