Chapter 1: Bride of the Hollow Moon
The silver thread bites into my wrist, and I feel nothing.
Not joy. Not fate. Not the thunderous certainty the elders describe in their songs. Only a cold invasion, like lake water flooding a lung, and the sudden, sickening sense that I have just been claimed rather than chosen.
Lucas stands across from me, tall as a cathedral pillar, his black hair swept back to expose the pale, perfect architecture of his face. He is smiling. It is the smile of a man who has just locked a door and thrown the key into the sea.
“The Goddess sees you,” the High Elder intones, her voice trembling with theatrical reverence. “The Moon-Chosen bond is sealed. You are one path, one breath, one eternal—”
I want to scream.
The pack hall is crowded with witnesses—two hundred faces I have known since childhood, now transformed into a wall of approval. My father stands in the front row, his jaw tight with pride. My mother’s empty chair sits beside him, draped in blue cloth, mocking me. She died when I was twelve, and tonight, for the first time, I am glad she is not alive to see this.
Because I know, with a clarity that makes my teeth ache, that this is wrong.
The Moon-Chosen is supposed to feel like coming home. Like warmth and gravity and a voice in your blood saying yes, yes, finally. I have read the stories. I have sung the hymns. But when Lucas takes my hand, and the thread wraps our wrists together, binding my pulse to his, the voice in my blood does not say yes.
It says run.
“Sienna,” Lucas murmurs, and my name is a collar snapped shut. He leans in. His lips brush my temple, and the bond—the spell, the invisible chain the elders call divine—snaps into place with a sound only I can hear. A click. A lock.
The hall erupts in cheers.
I stand very still. I smile. I have learned to smile from my mother, who smiled through every ceremony, every binding, every full moon until the night she walked into the forest and never walked out.
Lucas lifts our bound wrists to the crowd. The silver thread catches the torchlight, beautiful and merciless. He is showing them his prize. He is showing me my cage.
And I am smiling, smiling, smiling, because if I stop, I will tear the thread out with my teeth and bleed all over the altar.
“Soon,” Lucas whispers against my ear, too soft for the crowd to hear. “You’ll feel it. The bond always wins. It’s only the first night that hurts.”
He thinks the hurt is doubt. He thinks doubt is a fever that will break.
He is wrong.
The celebration lasts until dawn. I drink nothing. I eat nothing. I let Lucas guide me through the receiving line, his hand possessive at the small of my back, and I memorise the exits. There are three. My father guards one. One is warded by elder magic. One leads to the kitchens and, beyond them, to the eastern ridge.
When the last guest leaves and Lucas releases me with a lazy, proprietary kiss against my throat, I climb the stairs to my new chambers. The door closes. I press my back against it and slide to the floor.
The bond hums in my chest, a frequency tuned to Lucas’s heartbeat three floors below. It is already digging in, threading through my ribs like ivy through brick. It wants me to want him. It wants me to crave his voice, his touch, his approval.
I press my palm over my sternum and whisper into the dark:
“You don’t own me. You just hold the leash.”
The room does not answer. But somewhere, far beyond the eastern ridge where the pine grows thick and wild, a wolf howls.
And for one traitorous second, the bond in my chest stutters.
I freeze. I hold my breath. The howl fades, but the stutter remains—a skip in the spell’s rhythm, a crack in its perfect surface.
I crawl to the window. The eastern ridge is a black silhouette against a star-scattered sky. The howl came from there. And something in my blood, something older than the Moon-Chosen, leans toward it.
I sleep with my shoes on.
I do not dream of Lucas.
I dream of thorns.
