When the Luna Walked Away novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Moonflower
A forged note sends eight-months-pregnant Ilsa to a ridge lodge where her mate rejects her and her pup and shuts the door while rogues close in, and the wolf who saves her is the Lycan King.
The note was pinned to my greenhouse door with one of my own seed pins.
"Tarran's poisoned. Old ranger lodge on Cutbank Ridge. Bring the moonflower. Now, or he dies."
No name.
I reached for him through the mate link and hit the same wall I'd hit all week.
He had closed it eight days ago and told me I was too loud.
I was eight months pregnant.
I put the last moonflower in a glass vial, zipped it inside my coat and walked out into the dark.
Cutbank Ridge was three miles of switchbacks.
I couldn't shift this late, so I climbed it on two feet with one hand under my belly.
The pup kicked the whole way, hard.
At the top, the lodge windows were lit gold.
There was music playing inside.
I stopped at the tree line.
Through the front window I could see the fireplace, a bottle of wine and my mate on the couch.
He wasn't poisoned.
He was laughing.
My half-sister Raine was sitting in his lap in a silk slip, her hand on the round of her own belly.
His hand was on top of hers.
Something moved in the trees behind me.
Then something moved to my left.
I smelled them before I saw them, wet fur and old blood.
Rogues.
Five of them, coming out of the dark in a slow half-circle, still in human skin and grinning.
"Tarran!"
I screamed it out loud and in my head at the same time.
The music stopped.
The lodge door opened and Tarran stepped onto the porch with Raine tucked under his arm.
He looked at the rogues.
Then he looked at me.
"Ilsa," he said, like I was a bill that had come in the mail. "What are you doing here?"
"There was a note. It said you were dying."
Raine laughed into his shoulder.
"Oh, she actually came. In that coat."
"Tarran, there are five rogues in the trees."
"I can see that."
He didn't move off the step.
Raine lifted her chin at me.
"He never loved you, you know. He was stuck with you. Fate handed the Alpha of Redfern an omega who smells like compost, and he's had to stand next to you at every feast for three years."
"Raine."
"What? She embarrasses you. She embarrasses all of us."
I held my belly with both hands.
"This is your son," I told him.
Tarran's lip curled.
"That pup isn't mine."
The rogues stopped grinning and listened.
"I don't know where you've been crawling all winter," he said. "But you're not putting a bastard on my seat."
He said the rest in the old words, loud and clear, so the bond would hear them.
"I, Tarran Crale, Alpha of Redfern, reject you, Ilsa Hollen, as my mate and my Luna."
Then he turned around and walked my sister back inside and shut the door.
The music started up again.
I stood there in the snow with the vial heavy against my ribs.
Six weeks of my nights had gone into that flower.
I unzipped my coat, walked up to his porch and smashed the vial on his top step.
White petals and glass skidded under the door.
"Find your own cure," I said.
The first rogue hit me from behind.
I went down on my hip, not my belly, and came up with my knife.
I'd gutted deer with that knife.
I opened his forearm to the bone and he howled and fell back.
The second one got a fistful of my braid.
I drove my heel into his knee and felt it go.
The other three shifted.
Fur ripped out of skin, all at once, and three gray wolves came at me low and fast.
I put my back to the porch rail.
I put my free arm over my belly.
I thought, very clearly, I'm sorry, baby.
Then the night split open.
A black wolf came over the roof of the lodge and landed in the snow between me and them.
He was the size of a horse.
He took the first gray wolf by the neck and shook it once and it stopped moving.
The second ran into his shoulder and bounced.
The third one turned and fled down the ridge with its tail between its legs.
It took him only moments.
Then the black wolf turned and looked at me.
That was when the rejection hit.
It felt like a hand closing around my heart and pulling.
I folded over the porch rail.
My chest locked.
Inside me, the pup went very, very still.
The black wolf shifted.
The man who stood up out of the snow was enormous, naked and steaming in the cold, with a white scar across his collarbone.
He crouched in front of me and took my chin in his hand.
"He spoke the words," he said. "Your bond's tearing. It'll stop your heart or the pup's inside the hour."
"Then do something."
"Another wolf's mark can hold it. Mine. You'd carry it for life."
I looked at the lit window.
Tarran was standing in it with a glass of wine, watching.
He didn't come out.
I pulled my collar down off my shoulder.
"Do it."
The man's teeth sank into the curve where my neck met my shoulder.
It burned going in.
Then it held.
My heart caught, stumbled and started beating again, steady and loud.
The pup kicked me so hard I gasped.
The man lifted his head with my blood on his mouth.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
He picked me up.
"Your Alpha kneels to me twice a year," he said. "My name is Thane Trevelyan."
Every wolf in the North knew that name.
The Lycan King had just marked me on the porch of the man who threw me away.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend