Chapter Two: The Border

Three days. That was how long it took Luna to pack the life she’d built in the Ashford territory into two duffel bags.

She hadn’t seen Kane. She hadn’t wanted to. The pack bond still connected her to every wolf in the territory a dull static hum of shared awareness and she could feel Kane’s guilt sitting somewhere in the back of it like a stone in a shoe, but guilt wasn’t an apology, and it definitely wasn’t a reason to stay.

“You don’t have to go,” Rhea said, arms crossed, leaning in the doorway of Luna’s cabin like she could physically block the exit through sheer stubbornness. “You have a life here. A job. Me, unfortunately.”

“I have a rejection mark and a pack that watched it happen.” Luna zipped the second bag. “I can’t heal wolves who look at me like I’m something breakable. I need out.”

“Out to where? You have no pack out there, Lu. A lone wolf doesn’t survive a season without “

“I know what a lone wolf is, Rhea.” Luna’s voice cracked sharper than she meant it to. Rhea’s mouth closed. “I’m sorry. I just I need to not be here. I need to not be his.”

Elena appeared in the doorway behind Rhea, nineteen and furious in the particular way only a little sister can be. “I’m coming with you.”

“You are not.” Luna crossed the room and gripped her sister’s shoulders. “You have a mate bond forming with Torin. You have a life here. I won’t let you throw it away because mine fell apart.”

“Then don’t leave,” Elena said, eyes wet. “Make him regret it from inside the territory.”

Luna almost laughed. Almost. “I’m not staying to be the pack’s cautionary tale, El.”

She hugged them both, hard, and walked out before she could change her mind.

The territory border was a two-hour run through pine forest that Luna knew like the back of her hand she’d patrolled it a hundred times as the pack’s healer, treating scraped knees and training injuries at the checkpoint station. Tonight it felt different. Tonight every tree looked like something she was losing.

She smelled him before she saw him.

Cedar and rain and something darker underneath an alpha’s scent so concentrated it made her wolf’s hackles rise, not in fear, but in something far more complicated.

Magnus Ashford was standing directly in the middle of the border road, arms crossed, moonlight carving hard lines into a face that had clearly been waiting.

“You’re blocking my exit,” Luna said, stopping ten feet away, refusing to let her voice shake.

“I’m aware.”

“I have every right to leave, Alpha. Rejected mates aren’t bound to stay in the territory that broke them.”

“No,” Magnus agreed. “They’re not.”

He didn’t move. Neither did she. The silence stretched, thick and charged, and Luna’s wolf bruised, humiliated, still raw from Kane’s rejection did something that made absolutely no sense.

It leaned toward him.

“Then move,” she said, quieter now, less certain.

Magnus took one step closer. Just one. But it closed enough distance that she had to tip her head back to hold his eyes, and the movement felt dangerously, unbearably intimate.

“I’ll make you a deal, Luna Reyes.” His voice dropped lower, rougher, and it did something to her spine that she refused to examine. “Walk past me right now, and I will never stop you again. You’ll be free. No pack, no ties, no Ashford name attached to you ever.”

“And if I don’t walk past you?”

Magnus’s amber eyes held hers, unblinking, ancient with a certainty that made her breath catch.

“Then you stay,” he said. “And I claim what my son was too much of a fool to keep.”

The forest went silent. Even the wind seemed to stop.

Luna’s heart slammed once, hard, against her ribs.

“You’re insane,” she whispered. “You’re his father.”

“I’m aware of that too.”

She should have walked past him. Every rational part of her screamed to walk past him.

Her feet didn’t move.