When My Mate Chose the Rogue

My name is Ariana Larson. Beta Female of the Silverfang Pack, the youngest in our recorded history. Daughter of Margaret Larson, former Luna, and the late Alpha she still grieves. I am twenty-two years old, and for three of those years I have loved Kellan Thomas with the full, stupid devotion of a fated mate.

I thought that was the most important thing about me.

I was wrong.

It was past midnight when I came in from patrol. The pack house was quiet, the way it always gets after the second shift settles. My boots were wet from the trail. My shoulders ached from a long run along the eastern ridge. All I wanted was a glass of water and the cool dark of my own room.

I did not get either.

The kitchen light was on. A soft yellow square spilling into the hall. I heard the fridge open, then the small clink of a glass on the counter. Emelia. Of course it was Emelia. She kept night hours like a cat, drifting through our halls in borrowed slippers and one of my mother's old silk robes.

I stepped into the doorway and stopped.

She had her back half-turned, pouring water from the filter pitcher. The robe slid off one shoulder. And there, against her collarbone, hanging from a thin silver chain, was my grandmother's moonstone pendant.

My wolf went still inside me. Not tense. Not snarling. Still. Like an animal that has just realized the trap is already closed.

I know that stone. I have known it since I was a child. My grandmother used to let me hold it on her lap during pack ceremonies. The luminescence is wrong on a fake — too even, too cold. The real ones glow from the inside, like there's a small moon trapped under the surface. The weight is wrong too. Heavier than it should be for the size. A Luna heirloom always is.

This was real.

This was ours.

Emelia turned, saw me, and smiled the way she always smiled at me. Soft. Grateful. A little shy.

"Ari. You're back late."

"Long patrol," I said.

My voice was even. I did not look at the pendant. I did not look at her hand when it drifted up and touched it, the way a woman touches a piece of jewelry she has already decided belongs to her.

"Your mom said I could borrow it," she said, soft, casual. As if the moonstone Luna pendant of the Larson bloodline were a cardigan.

"It looks nice on you," I said.

I got my glass of water. I drank it slowly. I told her goodnight. I climbed the stairs without rushing, walked down the hall past Kellan's door without slowing, shut my own door behind me, and locked it.

Then I sat on the floor and pulled my journal out from under the loose board beneath my bed.

I have kept this journal since I was eight. It is not a diary. There