Chapter 8: Cracks Beneath The Moon

FELICIA

“Again.”

Cassian knocked the sword from my hand for the seventh time. It clattered across the training yard, and I glared at him, chest heaving, palms stinging.

“You’re enjoying this far too much.”

He grinned, unrepentant, and tossed the blade back to me hilt-first. “No. I’m enjoying watching my little sister stop believing she’s weak.”

⸻

A week of this had rearranged something in me. Cassian taught me to hold a blade like it belonged in my hand, adjusting my grip with fingers that had gone gentle despite the calluses. Michael dragged me through the woods before dawn until I could track a deer by a single broken twig, never once raising his voice when I got it wrong. Roger walked me through royal law with the patience of a man who genuinely believed I’d need it someday, always leaving space for my questions instead of rushing past them. Seraphine tried, again and again, to teach my wolf to answer when called, her frustration never once turning into impatience with me.

Every lesson ended the same way … me on the ground, humiliated, furious, palms raw and pride rawer.

Every morning I went back anyway.

⸻

The morning it finally broke loose, I hadn’t meant for it to happen at all.

One second I was reaching for the calm Seraphine kept promising me. The next, silver light tore out of my chest and became a wolf the size of a house, vast and starlit, circling the palace once before anyone could react.

It didn’t attack. It didn’t even look at me.

Every wolf in Silvercrest dropped to the ground at once. Children ran shrieking with delight into the courtyard to watch it pass. Warriors who’d trained me all week went silent, weapons forgotten in their hands.

Then it dissolved back into moonlight before I could call it home.

“It isn’t disobeying you,” Seraphine said quietly beside me.

“Then why won’t it listen?”

Her smile was sad, almost proud. “Because it isn’t learning to become your wolf. You’re learning to become its queen.”

⸻

Somewhere in that week, the palace stopped feeling borrowed.

Cassian teased me mercilessly through every sparring match. Michael kept a private tally, gleeful, every time I finally landed a hit on our eldest brother. Roger taught me to waltz across an empty ballroom floor, humming under his breath when the orchestra wasn’t there to do it for him. Orion started pulling a chair out for me at council meetings without asking.

The servants stopped saying Your Highness.

They started saying Our Princess instead, like I’d always belonged to the word.

I hadn’t known, until then, how much I’d been starving for exactly that.

⸻

That night the dream came back, gentler than I expected … not the rejection, but the morning before it. His thumb against my cheek. His voice, low, certain.

Trust me.

Then the dream shifted somewhere it never had before. A blurred shape, hand hovering over a goblet of wine. Selene’s smile, private and pleased. A healer’s eyes sliding away from something she didn’t want to see.

I woke gasping, his name already loose on my tongue before I caught it.

“…Lucien.”

Outside my door, I would learn later, Cassian had gone very still, the warmth draining out of his face at the sound of it.

⸻

LUCIEN

I hadn’t smiled in weeks. My knuckles had split open twice against a training post that had done nothing to deserve it, skin scabbing over faster than it should have, my wolf’s healing the only mercy left in me. Food sat untouched more nights than not, plates carried away by servants too afraid to comment on it. My wolf answered nothing I asked of him anymore … not commands, not reason, nothing but her name, over and over, until I stopped fighting it and just let the silence sit there instead, hollow and ringing where he used to be.

The pack thought it was the weight of leadership settling onto new shoulders.

Only my Beta knew better. Only he’d watched me stop sleeping, stop eating, stop being anything but a man chasing a ghost through every room in this manor, flinching at silver light that wasn’t there, hearing a voice I had no right to still hear.

⸻

I went looking for the healer’s records at midnight, telling myself it was only to quiet the doubt long enough to sleep. The dates didn’t sit right. Selene had announced her pregnancy weeks before any healer could have confirmed it … far too early, by any measure I understood.

The handwriting on the confirmation page didn’t match the rest of the ledger either. Someone had altered it.

My pulse climbed faster than I wanted to admit.

⸻

I searched the healer’s office properly the next night, tearing through drawers until my hand found a loose stone in the wall behind her desk. Behind it, the original ledger … the real one, one page torn cleanly from its spine.

Ink still ghosted the page beneath. And a scent still clung to the paper, faint but unmistakable to an Alpha’s nose.

Not Selene’s. Not the healer’s.

An elder’s. One I’d bowed to my whole life.

⸻

I found the healer in her chambers and asked one question, calm, level, giving her every chance to answer honestly.

“When exactly did you confirm Selene’s pregnancy?”

She gave me one date. Then another. Then contradicted herself a third time, hands twisting in her lap.

I set the original ledger on the table between us without a word.

All the color left her face at once.

⸻

She was crying before she finished sitting back down.

“I’m sorry…”

“For what?”

Her eyes went to the door like something might be listening on the other side of it. “I never wanted Lady Felicia to suffer.”

Everything in me went cold and still.

“They threatened my son,” she whispered.

She never got the rest out.

An arrow tore through the window and buried itself in her throat before either of us understood what we’d heard. She died against my hands, blood hot over my fingers, the name she never finished saying gone with her.

⸻

I shifted before the second arrow found me, black fur tearing through skin, and hit the corridor at a dead run. Two masked shapes went down under my jaws before they could raise their blades again. A third slipped past me into the dark, laughing over his shoulder as he went.

“You’re asking the right questions too late, Alpha.”

Then he was gone, and I was alone with a body cooling on the floor and every answer I’d wanted bleeding out with her.

⸻

I knelt beside her to close her eyes and felt something folded beneath her still-warm hand … a letter, creased soft from handling, my own name written across the front in handwriting I would have sworn was Felicia’s.

I knew, even as I unfolded it, that she’d never written a single line of it.

At the bottom, a signature forged too carefully to be anything but deliberate. Felicia Ashbourne.

Above it, words that stopped my heart cleaner than any blade could have.

I willingly renounce my position as Luna and release Alpha Lucien from our bond.

My hands shook around the paper. My wolf roared loud enough that every wolf in Blackthorn answered it at once, a chorus of grief and fury breaking across the whole territory.

“…They forged everything,” I whispered, to a dead woman who couldn’t hear me anymore.