She's Mine To Claim: Tasting And Claiming His Luna

The house is too quiet.

That's the first thing that hits me when I push open the front door , not silence exactly, but the specific, suffocating absence of sound that belongs to a place where people used to live and now don't. Mom's cardigan is still draped over the back of the kitchen chair. Dad's reading glasses sit folded on the side table beside a book he will never finish. The coffee mug with the chipped handle that he refused to throw away.

I don't turn on the lights. I can't.

My wolf howls somewhere deep in my chest , not a sound anyone else could hear, just a low, keening vibration that starts behind my sternum and radiates outward until my teeth ache with it. She's been howling since the hospital. She hasn't stopped.

They're gone, she whimpers. Both of them. Gone.

"I know," I whisper to the dark.

I make it as far as the living room couch before my legs give out. I sit there in the middle of all their things , their scent still clinging to the upholstery, fading incrementally by the hour , and I wait for the grief to take some shape I can manage. It doesn't. It just keeps coming in waves, formless and enormous, and between waves there is nothing but the hollow tick of the clock on the wall and my wolf's unceasing, wordless lamentation.

The funeral was today. Leo handled everything , Leo handles everything, always has , and I stood beside him in a black dress that belonged to someone steadier than me and accepted the condolences of people whose faces I couldn't quite focus on. Pack members. Family friends. Alpha Hargrove and his wife, who pressed both my hands between hers and told me my parents were a gift to the community. I said thank you. I think I said thank you.

I don't remember driving home.

You should call Leo, my wolf says around midnight. Her voice is gentler than mine, more animal, more honest.

'He has enough to carry.'

You can't stay here alone.

'I'm fine.'

She goes quiet in the way that means she knows I'm lying but has decided not to push it. Smart wolf.

I'm not fine. I haven't been fine since the police officer knocked on our door eleven days ago, and I don't think fine is a country I'm going to be able to get back to on my own. The walls are pressing inward. Mom's cardigan is going to undo me. I know it as certainly as I know anything , if I sit here another hour, in this silence, in this scent, I am going to shatter so completely that there will be nothing left to put back together.

I grab my keys.

I don't decide to go to Caleb's. That's what I'll tell myself later, at least , that it wasn't a decision, just gravity. Leo's best friend. The person who's been in and out of our house my entire life. The person who was sitting in the second row at the funeral today with his jaw locked and his eyes dry in the way that means someone is using everything they have not to fall apart in public.

He lost them too, in his way. Mom and Dad were practically his second family.

His apartment is dark when I pull up, but his truck is in the lot and a single lamp burns behind the living room curtain. I sit in my car for sixty seconds staring at it, my wolf very still inside me , watchful, attentive , and then I get out.

He answers the door on the second knock. He's in a grey t-shirt and jeans, barefoot, and the look on his face when he sees me is the first thing all day that has felt completely real. No careful condolence. No managed expression. Just , recognition. Like he's been expecting this, or something like it.

"Selene." His voice is wrecked.

"I couldn't stay there," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I expected.

He steps back without a word and lets me in.

We don't talk much. That's the thing about grief when you share it with someone , sometimes the talking is the worst possible thing, just words thrown at a hole too large for language. We sit on his couch with a bottle of whiskey between us that neither of us really drinks, and the lamp casts everything in warm amber, and at some point the silence shifts from empty to held, like something being carried between two people instead of dropped.

He's hurting, my wolf murmurs. The same as you.

'I know.'

You could let him hold you.

I don't answer her. But when Caleb's hand finds mine on the cushion between us , not reaching, just resting there, an offering , I don't move away.

It starts so slowly I can't name the moment it changes. His thumb tracing the back of my hand. My head dropping to his shoulder. The whiskey abandoned. His arm around me tightening, and me turning into it, turning into him, because I am so tired and so broken and he is warm and solid and here in a way that nothing else in the world has managed to be tonight.

The first kiss tastes like grief. That's the only honest way I know to say it. There's nothing clean or simple about the way we reach for each other , it's desperate and shaking and wet with tears that belong to both of us, and when he pulls me closer I go without hesitation because some part of me that bypasses rational thought has decided that this is the only way to survive the night.

Yes, my wolf breathes, and then goes very quiet.

The moonlight comes through the window and lays itself across the bed in pale stripes. We don't speak. There's nothing to say that matters more than this , the press of warm skin, the brief, burning relief of not being alone inside my own body, two wrecked people holding each other up in the dark.

For a few hours, I stop feeling like I'm drowning.

I wake to grey pre-dawn light and the sound of him moving.

Caleb is sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me, elbows on his knees, head bowed. His shoulders carry the same rigid line I've seen on men bracing for impact. Something cold settles in my chest.

"Caleb."

A beat. Two.

"This can't happen again." His voice is rough, scraped raw from the inside. He doesn't turn around.

I sit up, pulling the sheet around me. "Okay."

"Last night was," He stops. Exhales. "It was a mistake. I should have, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have let it,"

"It's fine." The word comes out flat and brittle and I hate the sound of it.

He turns his head slightly, not quite far enough to look at me. "You're Leo's little sister, Selene. You've always been like, you're like my sister. I shouldn't have,"

There it is.

Like my sister.

Something in my chest caves inward so fast I feel it physically, a collapse behind the breastbone, my wolf flinching back as though struck. I keep my face completely still. I have learned, in the last eleven days, that grief can be held very still if you lock every muscle around it.

"It's fine," I say again. "Forget it."

He finally stands, and I can tell by the set of his body that he is not going to turn around and look at me. It's a mercy, maybe. I don't know. He moves toward the door and stops with his hand on the frame.

"I'm sorry," he says, to the wall. "Get some sleep."

He leaves.

I sit in the wreckage of his bed and his words and the night and I wait for my wolf to say something.

She doesn't. She's gone somewhere inside me I can't reach, curled tight and silent, and the absence of her feels like a second loss on top of the first, on top of everything else.

Like my sister.

I stare at the pale morning light on the ceiling and I understand, with a clarity that only arrives in the absolute worst moments, that I cannot stay here. Not in this room. Not in this town. Not in this life, which has just finished losing every anchor it had.

Three days later, I book a one-way ticket to London.

I don't tell Leo. I leave a note on his kitchen table because I can't make myself say the words to his face , I love you, I'm sorry, I'll call when I land , and I pack a single suitcase and I walk out of the home I grew up in and I don't look back.

My wolf is silent the entire drive to the airport.

Good, I tell her, somewhere over the Atlantic. Stay that way.

She doesn't answer. But I feel her grief like a second heartbeat, steady and inconsolable, all the way across the ocean.