Luna stepped out of the shadows, and for a heartbeat I thought the curse had finally cracked my mind.
It couldn't be her.
Not the girl I'd watched slink through this courtyard with her shoulders rounded and her eyes down, hoping no one noticed when a tray shook in her hands.
Not the runt I'd stood above—*towered* above—when I threw her away in front of these same watching wolves.
But it was.
My lungs forgot their work.
She moved toward the little pup on the stone—Lina, Rhea's niece, I realized distantly—with the same care I'd seen her use once to carry a pot twice her size across this yard. The same deliberate gentleness.
Everything else about her was different.
The girl in my memory had been small and half-starved, hair a dull dark curtain she hid behind, scent thin under the pack's musk.
This woman walked like the land itself made way.
Power rode her shoulders like a cloak. The air changed around her—brighter somehow, sharper. Torches leaned toward her; the flames themselves *reached*.
Wind crawled over the courtyard floor and curled up her legs, playful as a familiar hound.
Lightning flickered on her skin.
Not a hallucination.
Not a trick of failing light.
Pale threads of energy danced over her fingers, so delicate they should have looked fragile.
They didn't.
They looked like the first warning above a mountain ridge, seconds before the storm breaks.
"Luna?"
I hardly recognized my own voice.
Too rough.
Too thin.
Too late.
She didn't look at me.
Didn't even flinch.
She dropped to her knees beside the pup with the same quiet focus I remembered from the kitchens—Luna mopping a spill while everyone else shouted, Luna binding a warrior's cut hand when the healers were too busy, Luna doing whatever needed doing as if no task was beneath her.
Only now, when she put her hands on a child, the world itself answered.
I watched her fingers close around Lina's small, limp one.
It was back years ago, seeing those same hands raw and reddened from scrubbing stone, carrying my plate and Selene's, shaking under the weight.
Then light bloomed around them.
Soft at first.
Not the violent, searing flare of the curse in the cracks.
Something... warmer.
It thrummed under my skin though I stood half the courtyard away.
The shadow around the girl shivered.
I felt it—felt *it*—recoil.
My wolf pressed against my ribs, whining, tail low.
*Mate,* he breathed, not in triumph.
In awe.
In relief.
In *shock.*
I slammed a wall up against that word.
Now was not the time.
Now was never the time.
And yet—
When Luna whispered to the pup—sounds too low for me to catch—every hair on my arms stood on end.
The darkness clinging to Lina's mouth and nose had been a familiar sight these last moons. The curse settled softest in pups; it liked the ones who played too close to the seams in the stone, who slept along outer walls.
I'd watched others slip like this.
Watched their eyes glaze, their breaths go shallow, their souls... dim.
We'd carried some to the healers, to the elders, to the Goddess' stones.
Hoped.
Begged.
Buried.
Lina *gasped.*
Her little chest heaved.
Color flooded back into her face.
Her eyes—once that sick, drowned grey—snapped back to warm brown, ringed with shock and tears.
She cried for her mother.
Her mother answered with sobs so loud they shook the balconies.
The courtyard's sound changed.
Fear didn't leave; it didn't have anywhere to go.
But something else cracked through it.
Something electric.
Hope.
It stung.
Like salt in a wound.
My hands were shaking.
I didn't realize it until my fingers curled into fists at my sides and my nails bit palm.
She'd done it.
In front of all of them.
What I couldn't do.
What the elders' rituals couldn't do.
What my training, my strength, my *oaths* couldn't touch.
The Goddess had reached past me and put that power into the one wolf I'd declared too small to stand beside me.
Air felt thin.
I took a step, then another, drawn as surely as if someone had hooked a chain behind my ribs.
"Luna."
Her name left me without permission.
When she rose from Lina's side and turned, the courtyard narrowed to the two of us.
Her face was the same and completely different.
Same bones.
Same eyes—green, but now threaded through with silver that caught the torchlight and held it.
Not the soft, pleading glow of a pup begging to be seen.
Moonlight, cut and honed and unafraid.
She met my gaze.
Didn't look away.
Didn't drop her eyes to my chest or my shoulder.
Didn't give me an inch of her throat.
"Alpha," she said.
My title, in her mouth, did not sound like reverence.
It sounded like a fact.
Like a name that belonged to the pack, not to me.
A heat I couldn't name crawled under my skin.
I wanted to step closer.
I wanted to step back.
Instead, I stood there and stared, every memory of her that I'd shoved down, down, down clawing its way to the surface.
Luna with tangled hair in the moon-shed yard, looking up at the stars like they might give her answers.
Luna flinching when I barked her name, then forcing her shoulders straight anyway.
Luna standing in this courtyard, cheeks raw from the cold, when the moon flared and the scent of mate-bond hit me like a fist.
I remembered her eyes that night.
Wide.
Disbelieving.
Filled with a hope so bright it hurt to look at.
I'd crushed that hope with a few precise words.
"I reject you."
I'd watched that light go out.
I told myself afterward that it had been necessary.
That the pack needed Selene's alliance, Selene's connections, Selene's backing more than it needed a runt at my side.
That the Goddess had made a mistake.
That I had corrected it.
Looking at Luna now, blood on her palms from ripping a child back from the curse, fire in her hair, wind at her back—everything in me knew exactly who had been mistaken.
The regret hit in a wave so strong my knees almost buckled.
Not clean.
Not noble.
Ugly.
Acid.
It burned through all the stories I'd told myself to sleep at night.
If I'd chosen her then—
If I'd trusted what the moon gave me instead of what the elders wanted—
Would the cracks be here now?
Would the curse have found such easy lines to slip into?
Would this courtyard be full of half-empty eyes and too-thin pups and a pack that looked at each other like strangers frozen at the same feast?
I didn't know.
I'd never know.
What I *did* know was that she'd left with nothing but hurt and half-grown bones, and she'd come back dripping with the very power I'd told myself she could never have.
My wolf, usually silent under the constant, grinding pressure of the curse, surged.
*Ours,* he said urgently. *We threw her away. Look.*
I was looking.
I couldn't stop.
Selene's voice cut at my side, sharp as a blade.
"The runt returns," she said too loudly. "Right when the wind howls loudest. How... dramatic."
Old habits rose, ready: the instinct to smooth, to shield, to let Selene's venom slide off me and off the pack without comment.
I saw Luna's gaze shift to Selene, steady and unflinching.
She didn't shrink.
Didn't snap.
"I went looking for a place the moon could see me," Luna said. "Turns out it was never these walls. It was always the sky."
The courtyard sucked in a breath.
So did I.
She'd always had a tongue.
I remembered that—little barbs under her breath, a flash of temper when she thought no one important was listening.
Back then, it had cost her bruises and extra duties when Selene heard.
Now, those same words cut in a different direction.
Not up.
Out.
At the whole pack.
At me.
The sting landed where it should.
Stone groaned behind us—a crack deepening somewhere out of sight.
The curse liked our lies.
It chewed on them.
It grew.
Luna's presence felt like the opposite of that.
Not soft.
Not gentle.
*True.*
When she lifted her hand and calloused fingers filled with lightning, the pack gasped.
When wind wrapped around her, my hackles rose—not in fear of attack, but in some buried recognition.
That power had brushed me in dreams I never spoke of—nights when I jolted awake with the taste of rain in my mouth and the sound of a girl's voice calling my name from very far away.
I'd thought those dreams were just guilt, mixed with the curse's whispers.
Now I wasn't so sure.
Goddess.
Goddess, what had I done?
"Do not interfere with Luna," I'd told Selene like a child trying to sound like an Alpha.
As if I hadn't already interfered in the worst way anyone could.
As if saying that now balanced the scales.
Luna healed the girl I couldn't save.
Then she turned to the rest of them and spoke words I should have said moons ago.
"You pups are slipping into shadow while your elders blame you for it," she told them. "Rogues circle like crows. The land itself is choking on what you brought into it."
She was talking to all of them.
Including me.
Especially me.
My shame pulsed in time with the crack in the wall behind Maera's head.
The elders' faces went pale under her words.
Selene glared, lips a thin, furious line.
Luna stood there, storm-wrapped and resolute, and my past collided with my present so hard my skull rang.
I remembered the first time I saw her.
Really saw her.
Not as hands in the kitchen or a set of eyes lowered at my presence.
I'd been sparring Rhea in the yard; Luna had been carrying water.
Rhea had feinted; I'd stepped back; Luna had been right there.
I'd knocked the bucket from her grip.
Water had soaked her dress, her feet, the dirt.
She'd frozen, eyes round, waiting for the blow, the insult, the inevitable humiliation.
Selene had laughed from the balcony.
I'd opened my mouth to say something cutting—some mix of apology and mockery that would keep my pride intact.
Then Luna had... smiled.
Small.
Wry.
"Sorry, Alpha," she'd mumbled. "Didn't mean to throw my water at you."
It had been nothing.
A scrap of humor.
But in that instant, something had sparked in me—something that had nothing to do with duty and everything to do with *her*.
I'd buried it.
Let Selene's scoff wash over us both.
Told myself that whatever flicker I'd felt then was irrelevant.
Years later, the moon had forced my face into it with claws.
She's your mate.
I'd rejected her with words that still echoed, louder now that she stood before me in power.
Luna was right: the curse had not been a random punishment.
It had found eager hosts in old cruelties.
In my choices.
I stepped toward her again.
"Luna."
Her eyes snapped back to mine.
Up close, I could see tiredness in the smudges beneath them, the new fine scars along her knuckles, the way her shoulders held weight she hadn't had before.
I could also see the flinch she hid when I spoke her name.
She couldn't hide it from me entirely.
Mate-bond or not fully sealed, some currents ran too deep.
"You came back," I said, stupid, obvious, like a boy seeing fire for the first time.
She looked at me like the words offended her.
"Yes," she said. "Not for you."
They hit like a blow, but I deserved that.
More.
I nodded once.
The pain didn't go away.
It joined the others.
Stacked.
Prefect little cairn of all the ways I'd failed her.
*Failed them all.*
"Then let us... try again," I heard myself say.
I didn't know where the words came from.
Not my pride.
Not my habit.
From whatever part of me the curse hadn't managed to wrap in its cold fingers.
"Not as mates," she cut in, quick, sharp. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. As... allies."
Each "not" twisted something in my chest.
My wolf whimpered once, low.
*Ours,* he insisted stubbornly. *Ours, ours, ours.*
I pushed him back.
He wasn't wrong.
He also wasn't helping.
Because looking at this Luna—storm-wrapped, moon-touched, eyes steady—I understood something that had always made me angry when the elders said it:
The Goddess didn't owe us anything.
Neither did she.
She had every right to turn her back on this courtyard and never look over her shoulder.
She'd come back anyway.
Not for me.
For them.
For the land.
For the very stones that had heard her pleas and ignored them.
Regret coiled tighter.
Not the sharp stab of a single bad choice.
A slow, grinding ache that had sunk into the bone.
All the nights I'd walked the walls, smelling the cracks widen, hearing the soft, horrible *nothing* from the bodies the curse had taken, thinking: *If only I could give them something more than my teeth and orders.*
The Goddess had given that "something more" to Luna.
I'd thrown her away.
Now *she* was extending terms.
"Ally," I repeated, tasting it.
So small compared to what the moon had declared us.
So much more than I'd given her before.
"Yes," I said.
I didn't add *please.*
The word lived in my throat all the same.
I could feel Selene's glare between my shoulders, hot as a brand.
I could feel the elders' stares, heavy with their own fear.
I could feel the pack's attention, prickling on my skin.
I didn't care.
Not in that瞬.
There was a strange freedom in admitting how much I'd gotten wrong.
The weight shifted.
Didn't leave.
Moved.
Where it used to sit on my shoulders alone, it now pressed between me and the woman standing in front of me, storm and shame and shared danger braided together.
She turned to go, lightning humming at her fingertips, wind tugging at her cloak.
"West wall," she said.
My wolf surged again, ears pricked.
Go with her, he urged. *Guard our storm.*
This time, I didn't fight him.
I shifted as I ran, bones snapping into new places, fur bursting along my spine.
The world sharpened—smells layered, sounds distinct.
The crack-stink in the stone.
The copper of old blood.
The clean sting of Lina's new breath.
And under it all, threaded through, Luna.
Her scent no longer thin and easily dismissed.
Wild now.
Rogue and rain and something that hummed like stone after lightning.
I followed it toward the west, paws pounding, heart pounding harder.
Behind me, in the courtyard, Selene's scent soured.
Jealousy.
Fear.
Burning.
Ahead of me, Luna's storm built.
My regret ran at my heels like a second shadow.
I'd thrown away the girl who'd needed me, needed this pack, and grown into her power *without* either.
Now I was chasing a goddess-touched storm I had no right to ask anything of, desperate to prove—to her, to the moon, to myself—that I could be something other than the Alpha who had broken what he was meant to protect.
I didn't know if she'd ever look at me and see anything but the wolf who'd rejected her.
I didn't know if the bond the Goddess had written between us could be salvaged, reforged, or if it was a frayed rope the curse would snap at the worst possible moment.
But I knew this:
I would rather stand beside her storm and be burned than watch from the shadows again while she did the work I should have done from the start.
If regret was the price the moon demanded for my arrogance, I'd pay it.
Every step I took toward that failing wall, toward her bright, terrifying power, was an admission:
I had been wrong.
About her.
About the Goddess.
About myself.
Now I had to prove—through teeth and blood and choices—that I could be something else.
If she let me.
If she survived.
If *we* did.