The Alpha Rejected Me, His Father Claimed Me
she said aloud, to no one, her voice sounding strange and small in the dusty quiet.
Miriel Aurora had been a healer. A slave. A woman with no family Aeloria had ever heard named, no history beyond the small, careful stories she'd offered her daughter before her death. There was no reason a dead Luna from thirty years ago should share anything with a woman who'd spent her whole life scrubbing floors and setting bones in a pack two territories away.
And yet.
Aeloria reached up, without entirely deciding to, and touched her own cheekbone, then the painted one, comparing angles that made no logical sense to compare.