Chapter two

Chapter Two: What the Moon Woke Up

Aurora woke to the sound of hushed voices arguing somewhere nearby.

Her body ached in places she didn't know could ache, and her throat felt raw, as if she'd been screaming for hours instead of minutes. She kept her eyes closed for a moment, listening.

"—cannot happen. The council will hear about this within a day, you understand that? A day." That was Luca's voice, tight and clipped.

"Then we deal with the council," Kieran said, quieter but with an edge that made the room feel colder.

"Deal with them how?" Damon's voice, low and controlled, the way it always was right before he made a decision nobody could argue with. "There is no precedent. None. A wolf bonding with five Alphas isn't just rare, it's against the law we've upheld for three hundred years."

"So what, we pretend it didn't happen?" Ryder snapped. "I felt it. You felt it. All of us felt it at the same time, Damon. You can't reject something like that."

Silence followed his words, heavy enough that Aurora finally opened her eyes.

She was in her own bed, the familiar blue curtains drawn against the morning light. Noah sat in the chair beside her, his face pale, his hands pressed together like he was praying for patience. Damon stood near the window, arms crossed. Ryder paced by the door. Kieran leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching everyone but saying little. Luca sat at the edge of the room with a notebook, already filling pages with notes even now.

"She's awake," Noah said, relief flooding his voice as he leaned forward. "Aurora. How do you feel?"

"Like I got hit by a truck," she said, voice hoarse. She pushed herself up slowly, wincing. "What happened last night?"

The room went quiet again in that particular way that told her something was very wrong.

"You shifted," Noah said carefully. "For the first time."

"I know that part," she said. "I remember the pain. I remember losing control." She looked around the room, taking in the tension on every face. "What I don't remember is why you all look like someone died."

Ryder let out a short, humorless laugh. "Nobody died. Yet."

"Ryder," Damon warned.

"What? She deserves to know." Ryder crossed the room and crouched beside her bed, meeting her eyes directly. "Aurora, when you shifted, something happened. A mate bond ignited. Not with one of us."

Her stomach turned cold. "What do you mean, not with one of you?"

"He means all of us," Kieran said flatly.

For a moment Aurora simply stared at him, certain she had misheard. "That's not possible."

"That's what we said," Luca muttered, not looking up from his notes. "And yet here we are."

Noah rubbed a hand down his face. "Five bonds. Simultaneous. Nobody in our history has ever recorded anything like it."

Aurora felt the room tilt slightly, though she hadn't moved. She looked at Damon first, the one who had spent years pretending she barely existed, standing there now with tension coiled through every line of his body like he was fighting something inside himself. Then Ryder, still crouched beside her, his usual humor completely gone. Then Kieran, silent and unreadable as always but watching her more openly than she'd ever seen him do. Then Luca, refusing to meet her eyes at all, jaw tight.

"This is a joke," she said. "Right? Someone tell me this is some kind of sick joke."

"It's not a joke," Damon said. His voice was steady, but something underneath it wasn't. "The council will be here by tomorrow. Bonds like this can't be hidden, and they won't be ignored."

"What happens if the council finds out?" she asked, though some part of her already feared the answer.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

"Ancient law forbids a single mate bonding with more than one," Luca finally said, closing his notebook. "If a woman refuses to choose, if she can't choose, or if the bonds themselves are seen as unlawful—"

"Just say it," Aurora snapped.

Luca met her eyes for the first time since she'd woken up. "Execution. For all five of us."

The words hit the room like a physical blow. Aurora's breath caught. Noah stood so fast his chair scraped against the floor.

"That's not happening," Noah said, voice hard. "I don't care what the council says, that's not happening."

"It's the law," Damon said quietly. "The same law our fathers upheld. The same law I've enforced myself, more than once."

"Then unenforce it," Ryder snapped.

"It isn't that simple."

Aurora sat frozen in her bed, staring at the five men who had somehow, impossibly, all become bound to her in the space of a single night. Men she had grown up around, trusted, feared, admired from a careful distance for years. Men who were now facing death because of something none of them had chosen or asked for.

"There has to be another option," she said finally.

Damon's eyes finally met hers, steady and unreadable. "There is. The council allows thirty days for a mate to choose one Alpha and reject the rest. If you choose, the bond with the others dissolves. If you don't—"

He didn't finish the sentence.

He didn't need to.

Aurora looked around the room at the faces of five men whose lives now depended entirely on a decision she hadn't asked to make, in a world where the law had never once bent for anyone, and felt the full weight of what her twentieth birthday had truly awakened settle over her like a shadow she couldn't outrun.

Thirty days.

To choose which one of them would live beside her, and which four would simply cease to exist in her life forever, one way or another.

She had no idea, not yet, that the choice itself might be the smallest problem she was about to face.