He Crowned Her Luna. The Moon Crowned Me. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Pass

Torben Roake shows Margo the refusal that turned his wolves away in the snow under the Luna's seal, which she never signed. When they nearly touch, both marks flare, and she realizes Heath held the key.

Torben Roake was taller than the doorway, and he took off his wool coat before he came into the kitchen.

He hung it on the back of Maisy's chair and wiped his boots on the mat first.

He was thirty or so, with black hair to his collar, dark stubble, and a pale scar through his right eyebrow.

His brown eyes went to my face and stopped there.

"You're the Luna of Ridgemoor," he said.

"I was until about an hour ago," I said. "I'm Margo Fontenay."

"Then you're who I came to see."

Maisy put a mug of tea in front of him without being asked.

He didn't touch it.

He took a folded paper from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table between us.

"Three winters ago, a fever went through my valley," he said. "Eleven of my people were sick enough to need a hospital. The only road to town runs through your land."

I looked at the paper but didn't pick it up.

"We asked for passage. Your border guards turned the trucks around at the line and handed my beta this."

The paper was a short note on pack letterhead.

Ridgemoor denies passage to Blackfern vehicles on the east road, by order of the Alpha and the Luna.

At the bottom was a stamped seal, a crescent moon over a pine.

I had seen that seal on a thousand letters.

It was on the face of my cuff.

"My people took the high road over the ridge on foot," Torben said. His voice stayed level. "It was January. Nine of them didn't come down."

Nobody spoke.

The tea steamed between us.

"One of them was my brother," he said. "He was nineteen."

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"I didn't come to hear that."

"I know." I made myself look at the paper again. "But I'm saying it anyway, and I'm saying something else. I never saw this."

He watched me for a long moment.

"The seal says you did."

"The seal is in my cuff," I said. "It's a plate on the front, and it was locked on my wrist, and I did not stamp this."

"Somebody did."

"Then somebody used my arm to do it."

I heard how it sounded.

Torben heard it too, and he didn't dismiss it, and I was grateful for that.

I turned my left hand over on the table, and the faint silver crescent on my wrist caught the lamplight.

Torben went still.

Slowly he pushed back the sleeve of his own shirt.

On the inside of his right wrist, in the same place, was the same thin crescent.

It had been dull until now, and it began to glow.

"I've had mine since I was eighteen," he said quietly. "It never did anything. The last five years my wolf hasn't slept, and I couldn't tell anyone why."

"Five years," I said.

"Since the spring you were married, give or take." He didn't look away. "I came to Ridgemoor tonight to refuse your Alpha's treaty and ask the Luna why she killed my brother. And then you walked into the doorway."

My heart was going very fast.

"I didn't kill him."

"I'm starting to believe that."

He reached across the table, probably to look at my wrist more closely, and I reached too, without thinking.

Our fingers were still an inch apart when both marks flared.

The heat went up my arm in a rush.

It was not pain, and it was worse than pain, because I wanted more of it.

Torben pulled his hand back and put it flat on his knee.

His jaw was tight.

"I don't want that," he said, "from a woman who's had her whole life taken apart tonight. Not like this."

"Neither do I," I said, and I wasn't sure it was true.

Maisy cleared her throat very loudly and began rinsing a clean cup.

I looked at the seal on the paper.

I thought about the winter three years ago.

I remembered the week after New Year's, when Verity brought me chamomile tea at bedtime because I'd been so tired.

I had slept twelve hours that night.

I had woken up late, with a red ring on my wrist where the cuff pressed.

Heath had been sitting on the edge of the bed, and he told me I'd rolled onto my arm in my sleep.

"Mags, you looked so tired," he had said. "I didn't want to wake you."

I looked down at my bare wrist and at the red ring that was no longer there.

"Heath kept the key to the cuff," I said.

Torben looked at me.

"Every night, for five years," I said. "He wore it on his watch chain, and I never touched it once."

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