Chapter 3 Luna’s blessing

The yard broke apart with the soft chaos of a theater letting out. I grabbed my canteen and longed for the river. Before I could slip away, Alina was suddenly there in the doorway at the top of the steps, her shawl fallen to her elbows, her smile—the one she only used on me—tilting my heart.

“Walk with me,” she said.

I followed her inside, up the carved staircase that had been polished by generations of paws and boots. The great hall smelled of bay leaf and woodsmoke. She led me to her office, a room I loved. The walls were hung with maps and photographs—the pack through the years, pups shifting in a chaos of fur, the river in winter, a long-ago Alpha with eyes like Tor’s. The tin of caramels sat openly on her desk, as if daring me.

“Take one,” she said, amused. “Pretending not to is exhausting.”

I did. The caramel stuck to my teeth and melted into salt and sweet, and I felt fourteen again, hungry and seen.

“You were magnificent,” she said simply, undoing the clasp at her wrist and setting her bracelets in a neat line. “I wanted to tell you before the chorus of men’s opinions washed the truth thin.”

Heat climbed my neck. “Thank you, Luna.”

She studied me, the way she always had, gaze soft but unwavering. “How many months until your eighteenth?”

“Three,” I said. No point pretending she didn’t know. The Luna knew everything the way the moon knows the shape of the ocean.

“And how are you holding that?” she asked.

There it was. The room seemed to shrink and expand at once. I looked at the maps because looking at her would unmake me. “Like a hot stone,” I said finally. “I can’t put it down. If I keep it too long, it will scar.”

Alina was quiet long enough that I had to breathe again. “Do you know what I prayed for when I was pregnant?” she asked softly.

I blinked. “No.”

“A daughter,” she said, and smiled at my surprise. “I know my boy. He will be a good Alpha in all the ways this world rewards. But a daughter would have asked me where the rules came from. And whether they were worthy of us.”

Something in my chest throbbed. “I don’t want the bond to choose for me,” I said, the words spilling like pebbles finally loosed by rain. “I don’t want to wake up one morning and smell jasmine and have my life reduced to the direction of someone else’s breath. I love this pack, I do. But love can be a net as easily as a home.”

“I know,” Alina said. She reached out and covered my hand with her warm one. “And love can also be a knife that cuts the cords that need cutting.”

I stared. “Luna—”

“You are not the first girl to think of running,” she said mildly. “You are only the first one in a long time to have the spine and the forethought to make it more than a thought.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “Don’t look so shocked. Do you think I cannot smell cedar resin on you, or cash on old cotton? Do you think I was never young?”

A laugh burst out of me, half disbelief, half relief. “Are you going to tell my parents?”

“I am going to tell you three things.” She sat back, threading her fingers together. “One: if you run, run clean. Don’t half-go and don’t leave threads that can be pulled to unravel you. Two: the human world is harder than wolves like to believe. Take what your mother taught you and multiply it. Trust your first no. Make friends of women. Three: my door is a hinge, not a lock. If you go and you need to come home, you will not find it barred.”

My eyes burned. I swallowed hard. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I would have wanted someone to do it for me,” she said simply. “Because the mate bond is a miracle and a menace, and because if the moon is as wise as the old stories say, it will not break over you without your consent.”

Footsteps sounded outside the door, a cadence I knew: my father’s, deliberate, and Tor’s, lighter but charged. Alina’s gaze flicked toward the hall and back. The moment folded itself away like a secret. She patted my hand and stood.

“Go down the back stairs,” she said. “Take the path along the western wall. Your mother is there pretending to check arrowheads. She’ll need someone to tell her the truth she already knows.”

I stood, the room tilting under the weight of what had just happened. “Thank you,” I whispered, and meant it with every piece of me.

Alina smiled as if it cost her nothing and everything. “Run before the moon chooses you, Sable. Or stay and make it choose on your terms. Either way, remember who your parents raised.”

Quick. Steel.

I took the caramels. I took the back stairs. I took the path that smelled like sap and iron and the possibility of a life not given but made. And when I reached the west wall, my mother lifted her head without looking up from the arrow in her hand.

“So,” Mira said, as if we were continuing a conversation we’d been having since the day I was born. “Are we packing for a journey, or are we visiting the river?”

I breathed in the green of the pines and the cold ghost of snow and the salt-sweet of caramel melting on my tongue. “Both,” I said, and meant it.

Behind us, the training yard buzzed. In front of me, the world opened like a door. Somewhere in the middle, the boy who would be Alpha rubbed his sternum and smiled like a man who had finally understood that the future wouldn’t kneel just because it was his.

I wasn’t running from my life. I was running toward it.