No Longer Luna novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Staff Door

Rhys opens the staff entrance Colton told Skye to use and gets her out past Lowell Drummond; at the loading dock he says Fernbank loses Saltmere's protection on Monday and he can stop it.

Nobody in that ballroom said a word, and the guards stayed where they were.

Colton came down off the dais and took my elbow.

"Skye, enough. You're overwrought."

I looked at his hand until he let go.

"I'm not overwrought," I said. "I'm leaving."

"She's had a shock," Calista said from the dais, her voice soft enough to make three hundred people lean in. "Please, somebody sit with her. It's so much, a day like this."

She hadn't moved her gloved hands from the front of her dress.

A woman near the front started to stand, ready to help me.

They were going to walk me to a chair and sit on me until I agreed.

Lowell Drummond folded his arms in front of the doors.

"The registry book is on the table," he said. "Sign it, take the mark tonight, and we'll call this nerves."

"No."

"Girl, your pack signed an alliance on the strength of this day."

"Then my pack can tell me so itself," I said. "Move."

He didn't.

Someone behind me cleared his throat.

"The door's blocked," Rhys Trelawney said, "but Colton told her to use the staff entrance."

He had crossed the room without me hearing him.

Up close he was bigger than he'd looked at the back wall.

He wore a gray work jacket over a black shirt, and the scar through his left eyebrow was white and old.

He wasn't dressed for a ceremony.

"Seems fair to let her," he said to the room. "Alpha?"

Every head turned to the front row.

Alpha Boyd looked at me for a long moment, then at his younger son, then at Rhys.

"The girl is free to go," he said.

Colton made a sound in his throat. "Father..."

"I said she's free."

Lowell Drummond stepped aside, slowly, with his eyes on his daughter.

Rhys didn't touch me. He just turned and walked, and I followed him through a door beside the dais, down a service hall that smelled of bleach and roses.

"You were smiling," I said to his back. "When I said no."

"I was."

"Why?"

"Because it was the first honest thing anyone's said in that room all day."

The hall ended in a steel door, and he pushed it open on the loading dock behind the hotel.

Rain had started. A gray pickup sat backed against the dock with its engine running.

I stood there in an ivory gown that cost more than my car and looked at the dumpsters.

"My pack," I said. "My father is in that room."

"Your father is sitting with the elders at table four, trying to work out how to fix this. He'll be out in a minute. Your mother is with him."

"You know where my family sits?"

"I'm the harbor warden. I know where everyone sits."

The steel door banged open before I could answer.

Colton came out first, with Lowell Drummond one step behind him.

"Skye." He was breathing hard. "Get in a car. Come home. We'll fix this privately."

"The ceremony was private enough," I said. "You made it a shared one."

His jaw tightened.

"I did one thing for a friend. One. And you walked in and humiliated me in front of both packs."

"You gave her my car."

"It was a car."

"It was my place."

"Skye." He lowered his voice, as if that made it kinder. "If you don't come back inside, I can't protect Fernbank. My father's guard was promised to my Luna. Nobody else."

There it was.

I felt my mother's hem against my ankles, and it steadied me.

"Then protect it from yourself," I said.

Rhys, who had said nothing, stepped between us without seeming to hurry.

"Protection is Boyd's to give," he said. "Not yours, Colt."

"It's my pack, Rhys."

"Not yet."

They looked at each other for a moment, and I saw something older than this day in it.

Then Lowell Drummond said, very pleasantly, "Fernbank's guard ends Monday, then. You can tell your father."

He went back inside, and Colton followed him.

The rain came harder.

Rhys opened the passenger door of the pickup and waited.

I got in, because the alternative was walking home in a Luna gown.

He climbed in beside me and sat with his hands on the wheel without starting the truck.

"He's not bluffing about Monday," he said. "Cinderfell has wanted your river for ten years. Without Saltmere's guard on the border, they'll take it by Christmas."

"Then why are you helping me?"

"I can stop it." He turned his head and looked at me for the first time without a trace of a smile. "You're not going to like the price."

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