The night the moon whispered

CHAPTER 3

The Night the Moon Whispered

“Keep it on if you want.”

Wren’s fingers had stopped at the ribbon of her mask. The hotel suite was dark, lit only by the thin silver blade of light slicing through the curtains. Kaelen stood in front of her, close enough to touch, and he had not made a single move she hadn’t invited.

“You don’t want to see my face?”

“I want to see all of you.” His voice was rough with restraint. “But not before you’re ready. I’ll know you either way.”

Her throat tightened. She had expected a man like this to take. She had not expected him to wait.

“Why are you being so kind?” she whispered.

“Because you’re shaking.” He caught her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “And because I think you’ve been starved of kindness for far too long.”

She laughed, wet and breathless, and realized to her horror that she was crying under the mask.

He didn’t ask why. He just gathered her gently against his chest, and she felt the steady, heavy thud of his heart through his shirt. For a long moment they simply stood there, wolf and wolfless, two strangers in the dark.

Then she tilted her chin up, and he kissed her, and the world rearranged itself around the shape of him.

*   *   *

Later, she lay curled against his side in the tangled sheets, tracing the lines of his shoulder in the half dark. The full moon was setting. Her body felt strange and new, as if someone had opened a window in a room she’d never known was shut.

“You’re quiet,” Kaelen murmured into her hair.

“I’m thinking.”

“About?”

“About how I’ve never felt this before.” She hesitated. “It’s like there’s a thread in my chest. And it pulls toward you.”

His arm tightened. “Like a heartbeat that isn’t yours.”

She went very still. “You feel it too?”

“I thought I was imagining it.” He was quiet. “In my pack, they say a true Mate bond comes as a whisper at first. A pull. A recognition. Most never find it.”

Mate. The word brushed her skin like cold fingers.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “I’m wolfless. The Goddess doesn’t give a Mate to someone who has no wolf.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everyone.”

“Everyone is an idiot.” He pressed a kiss to her temple, and then his fingers found the pale scar running along the inside of her forearm, a thin, curved line like a crescent moon. “What’s this?”

“Old accident.” She tucked her arm away. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Everything about you matters.” He said it so simply that it took her breath away.

She lay awake long after his breathing slowed, staring at the ceiling, with a quiet, impossible thought blooming in her mind.

What if I’m not wolfless? What if my wolf is only asleep?

The thread in her chest hummed softly, as if in answer. And Wren Hartley, who had spent eighteen years being told what she wasn’t, fell asleep believing for the first time that she might be something more.

*   *   *

She woke to cold sheets.

For a long moment she lay there, one hand stretched across the empty space beside her. Gray light seeped through the curtains. The room was silent. His jacket was gone. His shoes were gone. There was no note, no message and no trace.

“Kaelen?” she called, feeling foolish the second it left her mouth.

Nothing.

She sat up, holding the sheet to her chest. The thread in her chest had gone slack, a loose string with nothing to pull against.

Maybe he went to get coffee, she thought. Maybe he’ll be right back.

She dressed slowly, hands clumsy. She waited an hour. She waited two. Her mask lay on the nightstand where she had finally taken it off at some point in the night, and she realized, with a small cold lurch, that she had never even told him her name.

At the front desk, the receptionist barely glanced up.

“Excuse me,” Wren said. “The man who booked suite 1204, tall, dark hair, gold eyes. Do you know where he went?”

The receptionist looked her up and down, from the creased waitress uniform to her messy hair, and her mouth twisted into a knowing smirk.

“Another one,” she said to the bellman, not bothering to lower her voice.

The bellman snorted. “Honey, men like that don’t leave forwarding addresses. Check the ceiling next time. Maybe he climbed out the window.”

“I just want to know...”

A few guests in the lobby had started to stare. A woman in a fur coat curled her lip. “Disgraceful. Does she think this is a charity?”

“Maybe if you’d asked for payment up front,” said a man with a coffee in his hand, and flicked the contents of his cup at her shoes.

Something wet hit her chest, and then another splash hit her hair. Someone laughed. Wren stood frozen in the middle of the marble lobby with coffee dripping down her collar, and every humiliation of her life came crashing back at once: the ceremony, her father’s face, Damien’s smirk, Vivienne’s heels.

Just one night, she thought. Just one night I felt like someone’s person. And I was a fool.

She straightened her back, because pride was all she had left.

“Thank you for your time,” she said, and walked out through the glass doors without looking back.

*   *   *

The bus station smelled of diesel and cold coffee. Wren sat on a plastic bench, a duffel bag at her feet, and stared at the ticket in her hand.

Destination: Rivermont. A human city, three hundred miles from any pack, any scent, any Alpha. A place where nobody knew the word wolfless.

She had thought about going to Lily first. But her sister was still guarded, and Gideon’s warriors would have dragged her out in minutes. She could do nothing for Lily with empty pockets and a bleeding pride.

I’ll come back, she thought. I will come back with enough money to buy her out of that place and enough power that no one can touch her.

She pressed a hand to her chest, to the quiet place where the thread had been, and felt it flicker once. A faint, stubborn, impossible warmth.

“Stay with me,” she whispered to whatever was in there. “Wherever you are.”

The bus rumbled into the station. Wren Hartley, the girl who never had a wolf, climbed aboard with her duffel, her scar, and a secret she did not understand yet.

She did not know that three miles away, a man with burning gold eyes was tearing through that same hotel like a storm, demanding to know where the woman in the black mask had gone.

She did not know that he would spend three years looking.