The Alpha's Stolen Luna

"Why is your door locked from the outside?" Every word I want to say is right behind my teeth. It's me. It's been me since the clearing. And I don't have a single thing in my hands except a bottle my stepmother will say I made, and a fever she'll say proves I'm sick. So I say nothing. And then somebody else does. Not him. Not me. A voice inside my skull, low and rough and amused, like it's been waiting at the bottom of a well for twenty-one years and somebody just cut the lid off. There you are, says my wolf. Now tell him to break it.

Three nights earlier, I'm standing in the back row in my mother's red dress, and nobody's looking at me.

The alpha is three wolves away from me when my chest catches fire.

Not nerves. I know nerves. Nerves are serving soup to the elders with a ladle that drips. This is heat, right behind my mother's moon pendant, like someone has hooked a thread through my ribs and started reeling it in.

Twenty-one today. Mating Moon. Three hundred wolves in a ring around the bonfires, and me in the back row in the only nice thing I own, a red velvet dress that was my mother's and still smells like her cedar chest.

Celeste squeezes my hand. "Breathe, Tally. Nobody's looking at you."

That's my stepsister. She insisted we stand together tonight. She hasn't stood near me by choice in nine years. She smells different, too. Not her usual roses. Something like rain on a hot road, and oranges.

Lucan Calder walks the line. Black coat, amber eyes, a cut on his cheekbone from somebody who regrets it. Girls lift their chins as he passes. He doesn't stop.

Then he stops at me.

He breathes in. The pull yanks so hard I take a step.

His eyes drop to my mouth, then my throat. Then something in his face shuts, like a door.

He turns his head six inches to the left. To Celeste.

"Mine," he says.

The clearing explodes. Howls, whistles, somebody's uncle crying. Celeste presses both hands to her heart like she's practised it in a mirror. She has. I've heard her through the wall.

And my mouth, which has a long history of betraying me, opens.

"No. It's me."

Three hundred wolves, and I can hear the fire eating a log.

Lucan turns back. Slowly. "Say that again."

"It's me. You stopped at me. You felt it."

He leans in. Breathes. "You smell like dish soap."

Somebody laughs. Then the whole clearing does.

"Tally." Celeste's eyes are wet. Perfectly wet. "Please don't do this. Not tonight."

My stepmother glides out of the crowd in her grey cardigan, soft as a nurse. "Forgive her, Alpha. She's unwell. She missed her tonic."

"I took it!"

Lucan raises one hand and I stop, because that hand has stopped bigger wolves than me.

"I, Lucan Calder, Alpha of the Silverpine Pack, reject you, Talia Reyes, as anything to me."

It feels like a rib cracking from the inside.

He takes the silver circlet from Jonah, his beta, and settles it on my stepsister's blonde head. The pack roars. Then they all go quiet again and wait for me to say the two words that end it. I accept.

I don't. I walk.

"Sit," Bea says. "Water. Don't argue with me, I'm holding a knife."

Bea runs the packhouse kitchen. She's the only one here who looks at me like I'm not furniture.

"Did you just tell the alpha he's your mate," she says, "in front of the entire pack, on a Mating Moon, in a dress?"

"He stopped at me first."

"I know. I saw."

She puts the water down. Hard. "Listen. You didn't say it. You didn't accept. So it isn't cut. And until it's cut, he can't mark her."

"Great. So I'm the girl who ruined the Luna's big night."

"You're the girl who didn't fold." She wipes her hands. "And since when does Celeste smell like anything but roses?"

Before I can answer, Odette's assistant leans in the door. "Luna's dress needs washing tonight. By hand. Healer says you."

Of course she does.

The laundry room is a concrete box behind the boiler. I've cried in here before. Tonight I'm too angry to.

Celeste's ivory dress is bonfire smoke all through the silk, and under it, that scent again. When I breathe it in, the torn place under my ribs throbs. Like it recognises something.

There's a hard little lump in the pocket.

A glass vial. Dark oil. A handwritten label in my stepmother's neat hospital capitals.

T.R. Third.

Those are my initials. And the third is the day Odette takes my blood. Every month since I was twelve. To monitor the sickness, she says.

I pull the cork.

Rain on a hot road. Oranges.

The moon didn't choose Celeste.

Celeste is wearing me.

"There you are, sweetheart."

Odette, in the doorway, holding a small glass of something green and bitter. My tonic. Same glass, every night for nine years.

My hand is already in my apron pocket. I don't remember putting it there.

"Celeste's lost a little bottle," she says. "Perfume. Have you seen it?"

"No."

She smiles, and holds out the glass.

"Then drink."