The Moon's Last Heiress

The dream always begins the same way.

Running. Always running , through darkness so thick it has weight, presses against my chest like a fist. My mother's hand is slick with something warm around mine, pulling me faster than my small legs want to go. I can hear her breathing , ragged, desperate, wrong , and I know, the way children know things in dreams, that whatever is behind us will not stop.

"Elara." Her voice is barely a sound. "Stay still, baby. Stay still."

She shoves me into the hollow of a rotting tree, presses her body against the entrance so I can only see slivers of forest between her arm and the bark. Her hands are at my throat. I feel something cold drop against my collarbone.

"This will protect you." Her fingers fumble with the clasp, fast, urgent. "It will hide your scent. It will hide your wolf. No one will know what you are."

'I don't want to hide.' I don't say it. Her face is carved out of grief , all sharp planes and desperate love , and I'm eight years old and I understand that whatever I want doesn't matter right now.

"The necklace stays on, Elara. Always. You'll never be able to shift. You won't feel your mate when the time comes." Her palms cup my face, and even in the dream her touch is the only warm thing in the world. "But you'll be safe. You'll live. That's all that matters to me."

"When can I take it off?"

She hesitates , just a fraction of a second, but I've replayed this moment ten thousand times and I always catch it.

"When the Moon's Chosen One comes. When your protector finds you." She presses her lips to my forehead, hard, like she's trying to leave an impression. "Until then, you keep it on. No matter what. Promise me."

In the dream, I promise.

I always wake up before she runs back into the dark.

My ceiling is water-stained. That's the first thing I register every morning , the brown bloom above my bed that crept outward over years like something living. The second thing I register is the pain.

Today it's my ribs.

I press two fingers carefully along my left side, mapping the damage the way you'd catalog something you've long accepted. Yesterday it was the glass of orange juice. Blaire knocked it from my hands in the kitchen, watched it shatter across the tile, and then looked at me with that particular smile she wears , like a cat that's already decided what it wants to do with the mouse , while Eleanor told me I was clumsy and disgusting.

The beating came after.

I sit up slowly, bracing against the wall, letting the ache settle into something manageable. The necklace shifts against my sternum , a small crescent moon pendant on a delicate silver chain, unremarkable to anyone looking at it. I close my fingers around it without thinking.

Still here. The thought comes and goes like breath. Still no wolf. Still nothing.

Every werewolf in this world has a wolf inside them. A soul, a second self , a presence you can hear, feel, argue with. Mine is absent in a way I've never quite been able to explain. Not gone. More like... behind glass. Muffled. The necklace sees to that. It suppresses everything , the wolf, the strength, the healing ability that should have had these bruises faded by now. Without it, I might have shifted for the first time at eight. Might have. Instead, when the birthday came and went with nothing, Eleanor and Blaire had all the ammunition they needed.

Weak. That was the first word. Then: defective. Then, slowly, over years of careful erosion: ugly. worthless. something wrong with the way she smells.

I've spent so long inside those words that I can't always tell anymore where they end and where I begin.

My uncle Marcus is the King's knight , one of the elite guard sworn to the royal family. He is, objectively, a good man. He checks in when he can. He brought me a sweater once, forest green, that Blaire shredded the same day he left.

He doesn't know. That's the thing I remind myself every time the resentment tries to take root. Marcus doesn't know because I don't tell him, and I don't tell him because Eleanor is clever and Blaire is her mother's daughter, and by the time Marcus comes home everything is always fine.

He married Eleanor two years after my parents died. I've spent a long time trying to understand why , whether it was loneliness, or practicality, or some impulse to give me and Caleb a family structure. Whatever the reason, it didn't work. It created a roof and a front door and two women who resented sharing a home with us.

Caleb, at least, they left mostly alone.

I think about my brother the way other people think about exits.

Caleb Trevilhian is three years older than me, and he is everything I am not: broad-shouldered, confident, blazing with a power even other wolves can feel. He shifted the day he turned eighteen and his wolf was enormous , silver-grey, larger than any normal wolf, the kind of wolf that makes Alphas step back and reassess. He protected me every day he was here. He stood between me and Blaire more times than I can count. He held me when I cried and he never once called me defective.

A year ago, he was selected for the Royal Academy.

The Royal Academy is not a school in any normal sense. It is a crucible. It is a place where the most powerful young wolves in the kingdom are sent to be tested, broken, and rebuilt into something the royal family can use. The attrition rate is not publicly discussed. The things that happen inside those walls are not publicly discussed. You go because you are chosen, and you do not leave until whoever holds the power there decides you're done.

Caleb went because he had no choice. He went, and I watched him go, and I held the piece of hope I'd kept alive for years: he'll come back. He'll come back and take me with him.

Then, six months after he arrived, the soul bond happened.

The bond between an Alpha and a Beta is not the same as a mate bond. It's a different kind of tie , a recognition of complementary power, a linking of purpose and loyalty at the soul level. It can't be manufactured and it can't be refused. When it happens, it happens, and it means that Beta is bound to that Alpha for life.

Caleb was soul-bonded to Prince Damien.

Prince Damien. Even thinking the name does something unpleasant to my pulse.

He is not human. That's the first thing you learn about him , he is not, in any meaningful sense, operating on the same level as other wolves. He's a Lycan, the rarest and most powerful evolution of our kind, and within the Lycans he is singular: inside him live not one but three entities. His human self. His wolf, Rogue. And Fenrir , the Lycan, ancient and enormous and terrible.

The stories people tell about him at night, when they think children aren't listening: A girl once claimed to be his mate. She wasn't. He knew she wasn't , Lycans always know , and he tore her apart anyway, slowly, while his court watched, as a message. The message being: do not waste his time. Do not waste his attention. Do not get within reach unless you're prepared to live with the consequences.

Caleb is bound to that.

Which means Caleb can never come back.

Which means there is no exit.

I sit on the edge of my bed and I let that settle over me the way cold water settles , fully, completely, without mercy. Eleanor's voice has been in my head so long I sometimes can't turn it off, even alone. No one will want you. You smell off , not even a full wolf, whatever you are. You'd be doing someone a favor by staying invisible.

She started saying things like that when I was twelve. By fourteen I'd stopped being surprised by them. By now they've become the weather , something you live inside, not something you fight.

The worst part is the logical part of my brain agreeing with her. Without the wolf, without the healing, without any ability to shift , I am, functionally, the weakest creature in this world. In any confrontation I lose. In any evaluation I fail. In the academy, which is built specifically to test and break powerful wolves, I would be the first to die.

None of that matters, because I was never supposed to go.

KNOCK.

My body goes rigid.

Three sharp raps on the door, and all the careful numbness I've cultivated shatters. My heart throws itself against my ribs.

Breakfast. I'm late for breakfast. She'll have timed me. She always times me and she is always ,

"Coming." My voice sounds better than I feel. I'm already reaching for my shoes. "I'm coming right now."