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