Shattered Sanctuary: The First Luna's Severance novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fateful Mating Ball
The Goddess lights a second mate's mark on Dalton's wrist in front of four hundred wolves, and Rosalind finds him in her bed with Jessamy that night. She says nothing and decides to give them everything, then take it all back.
The music stopped in the middle of the first waltz, and four hundred wolves turned to look at their Alpha.
Dalton stood frozen on the ballroom floor with one hand still at Rosalind's waist.
He was staring at the inside of his own wrist.
A silver crescent had lit under his skin, bright as a new moon.
Rosalind knew what it meant before anyone said a word.
Every wolf in Echo Hall knew.
Her own crescent had lit on this same floor twenty years ago, when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one.
The Moon Goddess gave a wolf one mate.
Once in a long while, she gave a second.
Dalton looked up and searched the crowd.
An hour earlier, a young woman in a pale green gown had picked a fallen earring off the marble and handed it back to Rosalind.
She had asked, wide-eyed, whether it was true that Rosalind signed every treaty herself.
Now that same woman stood by the crystal punch bowl with her wrist held out and her green eyes full of tears.
Jessamy Ashling had come as a guest of the southern delegation.
Dalton let go of Rosalind's waist and crossed the floor.
The crowd opened for him.
He stopped in front of Jessamy, and the two crescents lit brighter.
The old she-wolf beside the fireplace pressed a hand to her mouth.
Rosalind stayed where she was.
She kept her face still, because four hundred people were watching it.
Dalton came back to her.
He did not look at the crescent now. He looked only at her.
"Rose," he said quietly. "Before I speak to the hall, I need your hand."
It was what he did before every address.
She had never asked him why.
His fingers were shaking, hard enough that the rings on them clicked.
She closed her hand around his, and the shaking stopped.
He turned to the ballroom and his voice came out steady and deep.
"The Goddess has shown me a second mate," he said. "Rosalind remains my First Luna. Nothing in this pack changes tonight."
A murmur ran through the room, and the music started again, thin and uncertain.
He walked her out onto the terrace, away from the crowd.
The cold air smelled of pine and woodsmoke.
"Listen to me," he said. "I never asked for this. The Goddess made a mistake, and I will let her have her mistake."
"Dalton."
"Our bed is ours. I swore it the night I claimed you, and I meant it."
He kissed her forehead.
"Go up and rest. I'll see the southern delegation out and I'll be an hour."
She looked at his amber eyes, the ones she had loved since she was a girl.
"Of course," she said.
She went up the back stairs alone.
The Alpha wing was dark at the top of the house.
She was pulling the pins from her hair when she heard it through the bedroom door.
A woman's breath, high and quick.
Then her husband's voice, low and rough, saying a name that was not hers.
Rosalind opened the door.
The lamp was on.
Jessamy was astride him in the middle of the bed, the pale green gown puddled on the floor beside the dresser.
Dalton's hands were on her hips.
Her mother's quilt, the blue one with the sewn-in stars, had been kicked down to the foot of the mattress.
Dalton saw her first.
He went white.
"Rose." He tried to sit up and Jessamy didn't move off him. "It's the pull. I couldn't fight it. Rose, wait."
Rosalind said nothing.
At the back of her mind, where the bond had hummed warm for twenty years, something went quiet.
It did not snap.
It simply stopped, the way a clock stops, and the silence stayed.
She waited for the scream to come.
It never did.
She crossed the room, picked the quilt up off the floor and folded it over her arm.
Jessamy finally slid off him and drew the sheet to her chin.
Her voice was as warm as it had been at the punch bowl, and nothing else about her was.
"Don't cry, Rosalind. You've held the title long enough to be tired of it."
Dalton said, "Jess, don't."
Jessamy ignored him.
"In the morning," she said, "leave the keys to the Luna's office on the council table. Both sets."
Rosalind looked at her husband.
He opened his mouth, and his hand lifted toward her, trembling again.
She did not take it.
"Yes," she said. "I'll leave them."
She walked out with the quilt against her chest and shut the door softly behind her.
In the dark hallway she stood very still.
Four hundred wolves had watched her smile tonight.
She decided she would give them everything they asked for.
Then she would take it all back in one night, in front of every pack.
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