The two scouts returned to Hellfang territory by mid-morning, and word of what they carried moved through the pack faster than either of them could outrun it.
Astra heard it directly from the guard who’d been sent to fetch her, and she made him repeat it twice before she let herself react at all — not because she doubted it, but because she needed the extra seconds to decide which face she was going to wear in front of him.
“She’s alive,” the guard said again.
“Found by Dreadmoon patrols. Their Alpha declared her under pack protection this morning, in front of the whole gathering. Word travels fast — half the border packs will know by nightfall.”
“Under whose protection?” Astra’s voice came out flat, controlled.
“Roman. The Dreadmoon Alpha’s father. Their patriarch.” The guard hesitated.
“Some of the scouts said there were rumors of something else too. Something about a mark. They wouldn’t say more than that.”
Astra dismissed him with a wave of her hand, and the moment the door closed behind him, the careful stillness she’d been holding cracked.
She sat down slowly, one hand pressed flat against the curve of her own stomach, the lie she’d built her entire position on suddenly feeling thinner than it had an hour ago.
Maeve wasn’t supposed to survive.
That had been the plan from the beginning, unspoken but understood by everyone who’d let her walk out weakened and bleeding into rogue territory — let the forest finish what the rejection started, and remove the one person who might someday contradict the story Astra had spent months constructing.
Instead Maeve was alive, protected, apparently significant enough that an entire rival pack had gathered to declare her one of their own.
Astra told herself it didn’t matter.
Whatever Maeve had found at Dreadmoon, she was still an exile, still cast off, still nothing next to a Luna carrying the Alpha’s heir.
She told herself that until the words started to feel true again, or true enough, and then she stood, smoothed her dress over her stomach, and went to find Darius before he heard it from someone else and had time to think about it alone.
Darius already knew.
He’d heard it from a border guard an hour before Astra ever reached him, the same secondhand report passed along by someone who didn’t fully understand what they were delivering.
He hadn’t reacted in front of the guard.
He’d simply nodded, dismissed him, and stood alone in his study for a long time afterward, staring at nothing, his hands curled into fists at his sides.
He’d told himself for four days that it didn’t matter either way, that the rejection had been necessary, that whatever happened to her afterward was no longer his responsibility to carry.
He’d almost believed it.
But standing there with the guard’s words still settling into him, he found himself doing something he hadn’t let himself do since the night he’d pushed her onto the stone floor — he pictured her.
Not the version who’d begged him in front of the pack, and not the version Astra kept insisting she’d been, weak and unworthy and better gone.
He pictured the version of her that used to fall asleep with her head against his chest, unguarded in a way she never was anywhere else, trusting him with the one part of herself she hid from everyone.
He wondered, and hated himself for wondering, whether she was safe now because Dreadmoon had done what he should have done and hadn’t.
Astra found him like that, still standing at the window, and something in his stillness must have warned her, because her voice when she spoke was careful in a way it rarely was with him.
“You heard.”
“I heard.” His voice gave nothing away.
“It doesn’t change anything.” Astra crossed the room, resting a hand on his arm, and he didn’t shake it off, though he didn’t lean into it either.
“She’s still exiled. Still cast out. Whatever she’s playing at with Dreadmoon, it doesn’t touch us here.”
“No,” Darius agreed.
“It doesn’t.”
He didn’t believe it, not fully, and something in the flatness of his own voice must have told her that too, because she didn’t push further.
She left him alone at the window, and he stood there long after she’d gone, turning over a question he didn’t have the courage yet to ask out loud, even to himself.
If Maeve was safe now because another pack had done for her what he never had, what did that make him.
I sat with Roman and my brothers that same evening, the four of them gathered in his study once the pack had quieted from the morning’s declaration, and I understood before anyone said a word that we were about to decide something that would shape the rest of my life.
“They’ll tell Darius everything,” I said.
“That I’m alive. That I’m here. Maybe about the mark, if the scouts saw enough to guess at it.”
“Probably,” Roman agreed.
“We can’t control what travels once it leaves our border. What we can control is what we do with the time between now and whatever comes next.” Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Meaning you have a choice,” Killian said, leaning forward.
“You could spend the coming months bracing for Hellfang to make a move, watching the border, living every day like a threat is standing at the gate. Or you could use this time to actually become what you are instead of just surviving the discovery of it.”
“I don’t know what that means yet. Becoming what I am.”
“Neither do we, fully.” Roman’s voice was steady, patient.
“But Damien believes your abilities as a Moon Goddess Chosen will need training, the same way any gift does. Your wolf, your instincts, whatever power lives under that mark. None of it will simply arrive fully formed.”
“And the child,” Bastian added quietly, glancing at where my hand had drifted, as it did now without thinking, to rest over my stomach.
“Whatever happens with Hellfang, that baby deserves a mother who had time to become strong before everything gets complicated. Not one who spent every day of the pregnancy afraid.”
I sat with that for a long moment, feeling the weight of what they were actually offering underneath the practical words — not just safety, but time.
Time to grieve what Hellfang had taken from me without an audience.
Time to learn whatever I was becoming without the added terror of an immediate threat.
Time to have this child in something that resembled peace, even if the peace was borrowed, even if it wouldn’t last forever.
“I don’t want Hellfang to know anything more than they already do,” I said finally.
“Not the mark. Not the pregnancy. Not until I decide I’m ready for them to know it.”
“Then that’s what we’ll protect,” Roman said.
“For as long as you need.”
I nodded, and something in my chest settled slightly, not peace exactly, but the shape of a plan where there had only been fear an hour ago.
I didn’t know yet how long I’d need.
I didn’t know what shape my strength would eventually take, or how much of it I’d have built by the time Hellfang came looking again.
But for the first time since the rejection, I had time to find out.
And I intended to use every day of it.