A Luna's Revenge After Betrayed

The broken wolf's head rolled to a stop against Juliana's bare toes.

She didn't move it. She just curled her toes around it, like a child claiming a marble.

I stared at the carved wood. I stared at her foot. I stared at my husband's hand, still stroking her hair.

And I went somewhere else.

I went back seven years.

I was nineteen. I was barefoot in the river that ran behind the old Beta cabin, and I was laughing because my father had just told me, in his serious voice, that the new Alpha was coming for the formal welcome and I had to wear shoes for once in my life. I had laughed so hard I'd lost my balance and sat down in the water.

That was the day I'd met Jasper.

He had been twenty-four. Already Alpha for six months. Already cold. He had walked out of the trees in a charcoal suit and looked at me sitting in the river with my skirt floating around my waist, and the bond had snapped between us so hard I had felt it pull a sound out of my throat. *Mate.* He'd felt it too. I'd seen him stop walking. I'd seen his jaw clench.

He hadn't smiled. He had held out his hand and said, "Get up. You'll catch cold."

That was his proposal, essentially.

I had been so soft then. I had cried at sad commercials. I had brought wounded birds to my mother in cupped hands. I had wanted, more than anything in the world, to deserve the man the moon had given me.

So I had learned.

I had learned to keep my voice low at council meetings. I had learned to not flinch when the warriors brought back the bodies. I had learned to stand on the dais next to Jasper with my chin up and my eyes flat while he announced punishments and policies, because *Blackridge runs cold*, he'd said, *and the Luna runs coldest of all.*

I had cut every soft thing out of myself with a knife I had sharpened myself.

For him. For our pack. For the boy I would give him.

And now I was standing at the bottom of my own staircase, watching my husband stroke the hair of a girl who cried easily and laughed easily and let a five-year-old wrap his arm around her thigh.

A girl who was exactly what I had been at nineteen.

A girl Jasper had apparently wanted all along.

My stomach turned over. I tasted the split in my lip again. I thought, very clearly, *He didn't want me cold. He wanted me gone. He just didn't have the words for it until she walked through the kitchen door.*

"Yolanda." Jasper's voice cut through whatever was happening in my head. "Are you listening? I asked you to apologize to Juliana."

I blinked at him.

"Apologize," I repeated.

"For your language. For your tone. You upset her."

I looked at Juliana. Juliana's face was tucked back against Jasper's shoulder, but I could see her eye. Just the one. It was watching me.

It was dry. And it was bright. And it was *amused*.

"No," I said.

"Yolanda—"

"I said no, Jasper."

The amused eye narrowed.

Then Juliana moved.

It was small. I almost missed it. Her shoulders rolled forward, her chin dipped, and the air behind her shimmered the way it does when a wolf is about to push through. I felt the shift before I saw it — a hot, animal pressure against my chest, the brush of another wolf's intent reaching for my throat.

Her wolf lunged.

Not in body. In spirit. A gray shape, low and fast, came out of Juliana and came at me across the marble.

I didn't think. Seven years of training did it for me. My own wolf rose up under my skin and I threw my arm out — just my arm, just a block — and the gray shape crashed into the wall of my defense and bounced.

Juliana's human body jerked back like she'd been shoved. She hit the bottom stair and went down hard on her hip with a small, sharp cry.

The hairpin fell out of her ear and bounced twice on the marble.

"Juliana!" Jasper was on his knees beside her before I'd even lowered my arm.

"I didn't touch her," I said. My voice was flat. "Jasper. I didn't touch her."

"She's bleeding." He was holding her elbow, turning it over. There was a scrape there, pink and shallow. "Yolanda, what is *wrong* with you?"

"Her wolf came at me."

"She doesn't have her wolf trained yet," he snapped. "She's an Omega, Yolanda, she barely knows how to shift — she couldn't have—"

"She *did*."

Juliana made a small, broken sound against his chest. "I'm sorry, Alpha, I'm sorry, I didn't — she just — she scared me and I—"

"Shh." He cupped the back of her head. "Shh, baby. It's okay."

I watched my husband shush the woman who had just tried to put her teeth in my throat.

I felt something happen in my chest. Not a break. A *settling*. Like a heavy thing finally landing on the floor of me and staying there.

Leo was standing two feet from his father, still holding the apple. He was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before.

It was disgust.

Five years old, and my son was looking at me with disgust.

"You hurt Mommy," he said.

"Leo—"

"You hurt Mommy." Louder. His small chin trembled, but not the way it should have. It trembled with rage. "I don't like you. Go away."

I opened my mouth.

I closed it.

There was nothing to say to a five-year-old who had already chosen.

And then — between one breath and the next — something else hit me. Something that had nothing to do with the three people on the floor in front of me.

The bond to my father snapped tight and then went thin.

It was like a guitar string being pulled and pulled and pulled until the note went so high it almost wasn't sound anymore. I felt my mother on the other end of it too — a flutter, a flicker — and then a spike of cold so sharp I gasped and grabbed the cracked newel post again.

Something was wrong at the Beta house.

Something was very wrong.

I pushed off the post.

"Yolanda?" Jasper looked up, finally. "Where are you going? We're not done—"

"My father." The words came out of me like I was someone else. "Something's happened to my father."

He stared at me. For a half-second I thought I saw the man I'd married — a flicker of the Alpha who used to put his hand on the small of my back during council, who used to know what my silence meant.

Then he looked back down at Juliana.

"Go check, then," he said. "Send word if it's serious."

*Send word.*

Not *I'll come with you.* Not *take the car.* Not *are you all right to drive.*

Send word.

I turned and I ran.

I ran in my torn silk gown and my throbbing silver pumps. I ran through the foyer and out the front door and down the long gravel drive and I kicked the pumps off halfway and kept running barefoot on the cold stones. The Beta house was a mile through the woods. I knew every root. I knew every dip in the ground. I had run this path a thousand times as a child with my hair in my mouth and my father's laughter behind me.

I ran it now with my heart trying to come out of my ribs.

I smelled it before I saw it.

Blood.

The front door of my parents' cabin was open. The porch light was on. A boot print — not my father's, too big, too deep — was pressed into the mud of the bottom step.

"Dad!" I screamed it. "Mom!"

I came through the door and I went down on my knees.

My father was on the kitchen floor. My mother was halfway to him, one hand stretched out, as if she had been crawling to reach him when whatever happened to her happened. There was a knife on the table that wasn't ours. Long. Curved. The handle wrapped in dark leather.

My father's eyes were open.

They moved when I came in. Just a little. Just enough.

"Dad — Dad, oh god, stay with me—" I was already pulling out my phone, my fingers slick, the screen smearing. I hit Jasper's name first. It rang once. Twice. Three times.

Voicemail.

I hit it again.

Voicemail.

I hit the pack emergency line.

It rang. And rang. And rang.

Nobody picked up.

I sat on the kitchen floor of the house I had grown up in, with my father's blood soaking through the silk over my knees, and I listened to a phone ring in an empty room somewhere in the Pack House, and I understood, finally and completely, that nobody was coming.

My mother's hand twitched against the floorboards.

I crawled to her. I took her hand. It was cold.

Her lips moved.

I bent my ear down to her mouth, and through the blood and the shallow rattle of her breath, my mother said one word.

She said, "*Run.*"

The curved knife on the table caught the porch light, and the dark leather grip had three small notches cut into it — fresh, pale, the wood underneath still bright.

Outside, in the woods behind the cabin, a branch snapped.

Then another.

Someone was still here.