When My Mate’s Chosen Luna Tried to Destroy Me

My name is Cora Allen, and the night I turned eighteen, I still believed in the Moon Goddess.

I believed in her the way my father had taught me to — quietly, without fuss. Marcus Allen, Head Strategist of the Ironveil Pack, didn't raise me on fairy tales. He raised me on maps, on the soft scratch of his pencil against paper, on long evenings in his study where he'd let me sit at his elbow and ask too many questions. But on the subject of mates, even he went still. "You'll know him when you scent him," he'd told me once, not looking up from his work. "Don't waste the wanting before then."

So I didn't.

I grew up small in a pack of large names. The Wards were Alphas. The Powells of Silvercrest were everything Vincent Powell wanted them to be — and Vincent wanted a great deal. He came often to our house in those last years, smiling, asking my father about troop movements and territory lines, leaving with notes my father had drawn for him in the kind of handwriting people imitate but never quite copy. I didn't understand, then, what was being taken. I thought it was friendship.

I thought a lot of things were friendship.

Easton Ward and I had grown up in the same pack the way two trees grow up in the same forest — separately, with our roots in different soil. He had Brittany Powell at his shoulder from the time we were children. She wore his pack's colors before she was old enough to know what they meant. I would see them in the training yard sometimes, her laugh too loud, his hand at the small of her back, and I'd tell myself it didn't matter. The Goddess decided who. Not Brittany. Not Vincent. Not even Easton.

I was wrong about that, too.

My mother had already taught me people could leave. Jessica Edwards severed her bond with my father when I was twelve and walked west without looking back. I watched my father absorb it without breaking, and I learned how a strong man holds a wound. I did not learn, yet, that some wounds aren't survivable.

The ceremony hall was full that night. White candles. Silver moon-banners. The pack in their best, gathered in a half-circle around the ceremonial floor, watching me step forward in the dress my father had bought me with money I knew he didn't have. He was sitting in the front row. He smiled at me the way he smiled at his maps when a plan came together.

My wolf rose in me for the first time.

It was nothing like I'd imagined. It wasn't gentle. It came up through my spine like a struck bell — and then it screamed.

*MATE.*

The word didn't arrive in language. It arrived in scent. Rain-soaked cedar, dark and clean and impossibly close, flooding the back of my throat until my eyes watered. My knees softened. I turned my head — slow, drugged, sure — and found him.

Easton Ward. Twenty years old. Heir Alpha. Standing not ten feet from me with Brittany on his arm in a Luna's white dress.

For one heartbeat, the entire hall fell away. He was looking at me. He had to feel it. The bond was so loud in my chest I could hear my own pulse in my teeth, and his eyes — gold-green, locked on mine — widened, just barely, the way a man's eyes widen when something he's been told about all his life walks across the room toward him.

I took a step. My mouth opened. I had a word ready. *Mate.* Just the one. I wanted to give it to him like a gift.

He moved first.

He stepped away from Brittany and onto the ceremonial platform — not toward me, *up*, where everyone could see him — and the pack went silent the way a pack goes silent when an Alpha's son is about to speak. I stood there in my too-expensive dress with my wolf trembling under my skin and watched him lift his chin.

"I, Easton Ward, future Alpha of Ironveil Pack —"

My father stood up in the front row. I saw him do it from the corner of my eye. He understood before I did.

"— reject you, Cora Allen —"

The bond. My wolf. It was as if someone reached into my chest and pulled.

"— as my mate and Luna."

I heard the sound I made. It wasn't a scream. It was something quieter and more broken than a scream — the noise an animal makes when it's been hit and doesn't know yet that it's dying. My knees hit the ceremonial floor. The candles blurred. Somewhere very far away, Brittany was laughing. Easton would not look at me.

Then Brittany was in front of me.

She was holding a champagne flute. White dress. Bright eyes. She bent at the waist with a kind of theatrical grace, like she'd practiced it, and she said, sweet as anything, "Welcome to adulthood, sweetheart."

She threw the glass in my face.

The wolfsbane went in through my nose and my open mouth before the burning registered. Then it registered. My skin along my left jaw and down the side of my neck started to cook — there's no other word — the chemical eating through me in a slow widening arc, and I clamped my palm against it because I didn't know what else to do, and the smell of my own flesh rose up around me in the candlelight.

Nobody moved.

Not one wolf in that hall stepped forward. Not one healer. The pack I had been born into watched me burn on my knees in my white dress and did nothing, because the heir Alpha had spoken and the heir Alpha's chosen Luna had decided, and what they had decided was that I was something you threw poison at.

I lifted my head. My neck was on fire. I found Easton's eyes through the smoke of my own scarring skin, and I held them.

He looked away first.

That was the moment. Not the rejection. Not the wolfsbane. *That.* The instant his eyes slid sideways and chose the floor over me.

I don't remember leaving the hall. I remember running. I remember my father's voice somewhere behind me, sharp and Alpha-cold in a way I'd never heard from him, saying Vincent's name like a knife. I remember a door closing on a private chamber I wasn't allowed into. I remember pressing my burned palm to that door and feeling, through the wood, an aura I had never felt before — Vincent Powell's full Alpha pressure, focused down to a point, a weight no non-Alpha wolf could survive intact.

I remember the silence after.

When they let me into the infirmary an hour later, my father was on a cot, breathing. His chest rose. His chest fell. The healer wouldn't meet my eyes.

"His wolf," she whispered. "Cora. His wolf is gone."

I sat down on the floor next to him with my neck still bleeding wolfsbane and I put my hand near his — not touching, I couldn't touch him, I was too afraid of what my hand would feel — and I understood, finally, what my father had meant about not wasting the wanting.

The Moon Goddess had not lied to me.

The people standing in her hall had.

And somewhere under the silence of my father's chest, I made the only promise I have ever kept.