All Chapters of The Space Between Moons: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The Space Between MoonsChapter One: Fig Doesn't Care About Your ProblemsThe cat was sitting on her chest again.Ivory cracked one eye open to find Fig staring down at her with the particular brand of feline indifference that she had come to understand was actually a form of love — or at least, the closest thing to it that lived in this apartment."Good morning to you too," she rasped.Fig blinked once. Slowly. Then headbutted her chin hard enough to knock her teeth together.She took that as get up, the food bowl has been empty for six minutes and I've aged considerably.The alarm on her phone read 4:47 a.m. — thirteen minutes before it was supposed to go off, because Fig operated on his own schedule and had precisely zero respect for hers. She silenced the alarm before it could sound, swung her legs over the side of the mattress, and sat there for a moment in the dark.Rain again.It was always rain here in Crestfall. That had been part of the appeal when she'd first arrived, two y

She found out about the stories at breakfast.Not from Stellan, who was already gone by the time she came downstairs — early patrol rotation, her mother explained, something Rhett had implemented pack-wide, rotating responsibilities so that no single wolf carried the same post for more than a week at a time. Not from her mother either, who had apparently decided that information would be delivered in the same sequence as everything else in this house: after coffee, never before it.It was Delia Marsh who told her.Delia had been Ivory's closest friend from childhood through adolescence and then into the murky territory of early adulthood where friendship either deepened or became something you maintained out of habit. With Delia it had deepened — or it had been deepening, before Ivory left and made the deepening difficult by removing herself entirely from the geography of it.She appeared at the back door at half past eight with two pastries from the village bakery and the specific ex

Her name was Petra Solano, and she lived on the western edge of pack territory in a house that was aggressively, defiantly covered in wind chimes.Ivory stood at the gate and counted eleven of them before she stopped counting.Stellan, beside her, had the expression of someone trying very hard not to say something."Don't," Ivory said."I wasn't going to say anything.""You were going to say something about the wind chimes.""I was going to say that this is a very charming property." He paused. "And also that there are a lot of wind chimes."The gate was iron, decorative rather than functional — it swung open at a touch, the latch long since rusted into ornamental irrelevance. The path to the front door was flagstone, bordered by winter-bare rose bushes and three ceramic garden wolves that had been painted with what could generously be described as artistic confidence.Ivory knocked.Petra Solano opened the door after thirty seconds and looked at them both with the bright, assessing e

The days between Wednesday and Friday moved the way time moved when you were braced against something — not slowly exactly, but with a strange granular quality, each hour more textured than usual, more present. She noticed things she might not have otherwise. The way the snow settled differently on the east side of the ridge than the west. The specific hour of the morning when the pack's collective energy shifted from rest to motion. The sound of Stellan's laugh from the kitchen below her room, easy and unguarded, when he thought no one was paying attention to it.She documented. She prepared. She met Rhett at six-thirty Thursday morning and they worked through the final arbitration framework until noon, and neither of them mentioned Dorian Ashvale, and the not-mentioning was neither avoidance nor denial — it was simply that there was nothing more to say about it yet. Friday would say it.What she noticed, in that Thursday session, was that she had stopped cataloging his qualities and

She dressed for the meeting the way she dressed for things that mattered — not formally, not performing anything, just with the care of someone who understood that how you inhabited your own body was a form of communication before you'd said a word.Dark clothing. Her hair down. The coat that had survived two winters in Crestfall and still fit right across the shoulders.Stellan was in the kitchen when she came downstairs, standing at the counter with his coffee, making a concentrated effort to appear as if he was thinking about something other than where she was going. He was doing it badly."Say it," she said."I'm not saying anything.""You're doing the face.""I have many faces.""The specific face where your mouth is closed but your eyes are conducting an entire conversation without permission." She poured herself coffee. "Say whatever it is."He turned. Set his mug down. "Are you okay about this?"She considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "I'm not dreading it