All Chapters of The Luna With Ruin: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

Stefan was gone for nine days before he came back with anything substantial, and when he did come back he looked like a man who'd been sleeping in vehicles, which he had been.He sat down across from Jasmina's desk without the report folder this time, which she noticed immediately because Stefan always had the folder. He said he wanted to tell her in person first because some of it wasn't the kind of thing that read well on paper, and she said go ahead, and he started talking and didn't really stop for twenty minutes.Aldric was not what either of them had expected. Stefan had gone in assuming he'd find another Gareth, a power-hungry Alpha building a coalition for territory or title, and what he'd found instead was a man who didn't appear to want territory at all. He had no pack of his own that anyone could identify, no compound, no fixed seat. He moved between the seven packs that made up the Eastern Collective and stayed with each one for weeks at a time, and from what Stefan had pi

Vincent took two weeks to come back with anything, and when he did it came in a long phone call rather than a written report, because what he'd found wasn't the kind of thing he wanted sitting in a file that other people might eventually read.He said his people had gone through every council record they had access to going back forty years, looking for any mention of a wolf matching Aldric's description, and they'd found almost nothing under that name, which on its own confirmed what Stefan had already suspected—the name was either adopted or it was simply not the one he'd used for most of his life. What they had found was a single thread, thin and circumstantial, that connected a man matching his rough age and description to a pack called Hollow Vale that had existed in the deep eastern territories about thirty-five years ago and didn't exist anymore.Jasmina asked what had happened to it.Vincent said the official record was sparse. Hollow Vale had been a mid-sized pack, maybe nine

The representative came in the third week of the new exercises, and he came through the front gate the ordinary way, in a single vehicle, with no escort and no weapons visible, which Stefan noted immediately as either genuine confidence or a deliberate performance of it.His name was Tomas. He was younger than Jasmina expected, maybe early forties, with the kind of unhurried manner that suggested either real calm or extensive practice at appearing calm, and he asked at the gate, politely, whether the Alpha Supreme might have twenty minutes for a conversation.Jasmina took the meeting in the main hall rather than her office, with Stefan present and Elara taking notes, because she wanted this on record from the first sentence.Tomas opened by saying he wasn't there to threaten anyone or deliver an ultimatum, and that he understood word of the Eastern Collective had likely already reached her in some form, and he wanted the chance to explain their position directly rather than let it arr

The news about Silas came through Stefan's network on a Wednesday morning in the fifth month after the battle, and it came without drama, which somehow made it worse. A simple message from his contact in the eastern independent network: Bloodmoon Pack had formally affiliated with the Eastern Collective as of the previous Friday. The affiliation had been announced internally to Bloodmoon's senior council first, then quietly passed through the independent network, deliberately not announced through council channels, because Silas was smart enough to understand that a formal council notification would invite formal scrutiny and he wasn't ready for that yet.Stefan brought it to Jasmina while she was doing the morning brief with Jetstar, who looked at the note and then looked at Jasmina and then went back to his files without saying anything, because there wasn't much to say that the note didn't already make clear.Silas had sixty warriors and Bloodmoon sat directly south of Strong Black

The first visit was to a pack called Mosswood, forty warriors, a territory that sat directly east of Strong Black Clan's recognized border and which Stefan had flagged as one of the three where Aldric's representatives had been within the last two months. The Alpha was a woman named Rina who had held the position for eleven years and who had the specific manner of someone who had spent those eleven years being underestimated by every larger pack in her vicinity and had adapted to it by becoming very careful about what she said and who she said it to.Jasmina drove herself and took Elara. She hadn't taken Stefan, same reasoning as the Doyle meeting. She hadn't taken Damoew either, which he hadn't pushed back on but which she'd explained anyway—she needed these meetings to feel like one Alpha talking to another, not a delegation arriving with its Alpha Supreme and her mate, which would read as a show of weight rather than a genuine conversation.Rina met them at the edge of Mosswood's c