His Silenced Luna

Brian smelled smoke before he saw the bodies. It hung in the high hall like a bad memory-thick and soft, clinging to the stone, settling into the cracks where the light didn't reach. Men and women in torn cloaks slumped against the blackened pillars, eyes empty or full of things they couldn't say. It should have been a clean job, Lucius had said. Clean like a blade. Instead it felt ragged, like someone had dragged a net through the pack and only kept what they liked.

He walked slow. He had to-slow suited him when his insides were a riot. His father stood at the dais, the cloak heavy on his shoulders, voice like iron in the hush. Asher leaned at his side, all teeth and angles, looking like he'd swallowed a wasp and liked it. Guards moved like shadows. Their boots slid over ash and broke old prayers.

"You said the Mantle were stubborn," Lucius said, not looking at Brian. "You said they would bend. Did they bend, my son?"

Brian kept his face blank. He'd learned that early-how to put a lid on the storm so no one saw the lightning. "Some bent," he answered. The word tasted like the inside of his cheek. He'd watched the Mantle fall from a distance, learned the rhythm of surrender and the slow drag of chains. When they paraded the captives through the yard later, Brian followed. He should have had nothing but duty in his chest. Instead there was a hollow that had the shape of a name he didn't want.

They pushed them into the slave pens like cattle. He saw men clench and hold each other close, and women with children who wouldn't cry-too shocked or too dead inside to find a sound. That's where he saw her.

Lyra stood with chains at her wrists, dark hair stuck to her neck. Her face was clean, if you could call something clean that had ash smeared across it. She didn't beg. She didn't bow. She held herself like a blade waiting to be pulled. Her mouth-liquid with bruises-was shut, held by a ribbon of shadow that must have been the ritual's mark. You could see it at the corner of her jaw, a small scab that would scar a voice for life.

He felt something like a tug. Not his heart. Not exactly. It was a quiet thread, like the pluck of a harp string you didn't know you owned. He blinked and the sound of his boots on stone was loud, like someone else had dropped a pan. He shouldn't have noticed her. She was one of many. But his gaze stuck.

A guard spat and laughed at her. "You see that one?" he jeered. "They say she was the Alpha's daughter. Look at her now-silent as a mouse."

Lyra's eyes were a different thing. Wolf-amber with ragged gray around them now, but there was something beneath that-coal under ash. She didn't answer. She couldn't. But her eyes