The Cursed Luna

She is done being decided for. She says it out loud, in a room where four people have just finished deciding, and the latch clicks shut behind her like a rifle bolt. Smoke from the hearth curls through the lamplight carrying cedar and something sour. Fear, maybe, or the whiskey her father has been nursing since sundown. Rosalind slams the pack-house door hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames, and four heads turn. Duncan sits at the head of the long oak table, backlit by the fire, grey beard shadowing his collar. Meredith stands at his right hand with her arms crossed and a diamond-shaped scar catching the light like a brand. Pearl Blackwood occupies the far corner with her gloved hands folded on the tabletop, watching with the stillness of somebody who learned a long time ago not to flinch. *You weren't at the watch rotation. You were here. Deciding things.* *Close the door, Rosie.* *No.* *I'm going to the grove. Tomorrow. Alone.* She has spent her whole life as a line item in other people's plans: a daughter to be married off, a wolf to be posted on a rotation, a name to be traded when the traded thing needs to be a name. The grove is the first thing she has ever claimed outright, and she is not asking anybody's permission for it. What follows: cider and thorns, a trap she sets for both of them, an antidote handed over by a stranger, the price of being considered equal, a rival's whisper doing more damage than a rival's fist, and a failure she has been carrying since long before any of this started. *You said the bond would split it. You said—* *I lied. I've been lying for fifty years. Why would I stop now?* *Not without you.* There is a scar running from her collarbone to her wrist and a man who has stopped pretending he has not memorised it. He has the bond. He has the pack. He has the truth about what was done to both of them and by whom. Now he just has to convince a woman who has been decided for her entire life that this particular decision is genuinely hers to make.