There was a time Elias could remember everything—the sound of his mother's laugh before the curse took her, the way snow once felt like joy instead of a warning, the way his name used to echo across the pack lands like a promise instead of a threat.
But after too many shifts under a blood moon, the memories began to slip, one by one. First, it was dates. Then voices. Then faces. And finally, names.
His name.
For a while, he let the beast take over. It was easier to exist as fur and fang than as a man who couldn't remember who he had been. Easier to live in instinct than wrestle with the echoing emptiness where his humanity used to sit.
That all changed the night he saw her.
The girl.
The one with quiet blood. B
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He had followed her from the shadows—not to hunt, not even to frighten. He told himself it was curiosity, but deep down, some part of him knew better. There was something wrong with the world when she walked by. The wind shifted. The forest paused. The birds stopped mid-chirp. As if the entire town held its breath when she moved.
She smelled like nothing. And that terrified him.
All things had scent. Even the dead.
But she didn't.
The only time she carried any scent at all was at night, when she was alone. And even then, it wasn't human. It was… moonlight. Bitter herbs. Burnt sugar. A scent that tugged at something ancient in his blood. Something older than the Alpha he was. Something deeper than the man he used to be.
The others noticed too.
They didn't speak of it aloud, but he saw how the pack grew restless when she passed. Even in human form, their eyes flicked yellow, their nostrils flared, their shoulders tensed. She made them afraid—and wolves feared very little.
"She's cursed," Fen said one night at the circle fire, his voice low. "You know that, don't you?"
Elias didn't respond. He stared into the flames as if waiting for them to say her name.
"She's not supposed to be here. She wasn't born of Ash. She came from the north. Where the blood froze and the old gods still whisper under snow."
Another silence stretched between them. Fen leaned closer.
"We should tell the Seer."
Still, Elias said nothing.
Because deep inside, where the wolf curled around his bones, a truth pulsed louder than the fear:
She's not cursed.
She's mine.
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He remembered the night he first saw her face properly. Not in glimpses through fog, not behind windows, but truly saw her—lit by the flickering light of the moon, standing barefoot outside her old, crumbling house, her eyes fixed on the clearing like she'd been waiting for him.
He hadn't meant to shift.
But the call of the moon was strong that night, and her presence pushed it over the edge. His bones snapped, his skin split, and the pain welcomed him into fur. He was on all fours before he realized it, panting, the forest alive around him.
And she didn't run.
She didn't scream or hide or even flinch.
She stepped forward.
"Are you real?" she whispered.
The words wrapped around him like silk. Not a scream. Not a prayer. Just wonder.
And he swore the beast inside him whimpered.
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That night, Elias dreamed of a moon with black veins running through it. A voice whispered in an ancient tongue. He woke with blood on his tongue and dirt in his fists. The others found him near the river, naked, trembling.
"You shifted too deep again," Fen said. "You're forgetting yourself."
But he didn't tell them the truth: that for the first time in years, he had remembered something.
Her voice.
The way she looked at him was like she wasn't afraid.
The way her presence tore the fog from his mind and reminded him—his name wasn't just Elias. It was Elias Thorn, son of the Broken Line, last of the Moonbound blood.
And her scent had called him back to it.
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Over the following days, he watched her from the forest, always careful to stay hidden, always too afraid to be seen again. He saw her reading beneath the pine trees, a threadbare blanket under her legs, her back leaning against ancient bark as though she belonged there more than he ever had.
She didn't