Moon Light Bound The Cursed Luna

Chapter One

They were all watching me.

The whole pack. Every single one of them standing and looking up at me like they had been waiting their entire lives for this moment. Some of them had. Some of these people had been whispering my name since the night I was born, building me up into something I was not sure I could ever be.

I stood in the center of the ritual circle and tried to breathe.

The stone beneath my bare feet was cold. Elder Rowan had drawn the marks himself, kneeling in the dirt for over an hour, muttering prayers I was not allowed to hear. The circle glowed faintly in the dark. A soft silver light, like moonlight trapped in the ground.

It was my eighteenth birthday.

It was supposed to be the night everything changed.

I could see my father at the front of the crowd. Alpha Damon Blackwood. Tall, broad, with silver threading through his dark hair that had not been there two years ago. He was watching me with that look he always wore when he was trying not to show how much something mattered to him. Tight jaw. Soft eyes. Like he was praying and terrified at the same time.

I looked away from him.

If I kept looking at my father I was going to fall apart before anything even started.

Kael was standing just behind him. My brother. The eldest son, the one who had been groomed for leadership since the day he could walk. He had his arms folded across his chest and his expression was perfectly neutral, which somehow felt worse than if he had been sneering. Kael had a way of making his indifference feel like a verdict.

He did not believe tonight was going to work.

He never had.

Seer Maren stepped into the circle with me.

She was old in a way that had nothing to do with age. Her eyes were pale, nearly white, and she moved like someone who had already seen every version of this night play out in her mind a hundred times. She stopped in front of me and placed both hands on my shoulders.

Her grip was stronger than it should be for an old woman like her.

"Close your eyes," she said.

I closed them.

"You are not here to perform for them," she said quietly, just for me to hear. "You are here for yourself. Whatever happens tonight, it happens for you. Remember that."

I nodded. I did not trust my voice.

She stepped back and began the rite.

The words she said were old. Older than the pack itself, older than the territory, older than any history I had been taught. They were the words of the Moon Goddess herself, passed down through every seer the Ironblood line had ever known. I had heard them described. I had never heard them spoken until tonight.

The air shifted.

I felt it first in my chest. A pressure, like something pressing outward from the inside. My breath caught. My fingers curled at my sides. The crowd went completely silent.

I waited.

I waited for the fire I had heard other wolves describe, the explosion of heat and bone and power that meant your wolf was rising. I waited for the connection, that voice in the back of your mind that was not quite yours, the animal part of a werewolf finally waking up and saying I am here.

But Nothing came.

The pressure faded. The air settled. The silver light in the circle dimmed and went out.

I opened my eyes.

The silence was the worst part.

The kind that means everyone has already decided and no one wants to be the first to say it out loud.

I looked at my father. He had not moved. His jaw was still tight. But his eyes were different now. The prayer was gone from them. What was left behind looked a lot like grief.

Someone in the crowd coughed. Then someone else started talking in a low voice, and someone else answered, and just like that the silence broke apart and the whispers rushed in to fill the space.

I heard my name. With the words false moon. I heard someone say I knew it, followed by a sound that might have been agreed from more than one person.

I stood in the middle of the circle and did not move.

I had spent eighteen years preparing myself for a lot of possibilities. I had told myself that if tonight did not go the way everyone hoped I would hold my head up. I would not let them see it break me. I was Alpha blood. I had been told my whole life what I was meant to be.

I had not prepared for the way it would feel to watch my father grieve in front of two hundred people.

Kael reached our father before I did.

I watched him lean in close and say something I could not hear. My father nodded once, slowly, the way he nodded when he was accepting something he did not want to accept. Kael straightened up. He glanced at me across the clearing and for just a second something moved behind his eyes.

Not cruelty. Not satisfaction.

Relief.

That was the moment I understood that my brother had never been hoping I would fail tonight. He had been counting on it.

I did not sleep that night.

I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and my knees pulled to my chest and I let myself feel it for exactly one hour. The shame. The confusion. The anger that I did not know where to point. I let all of it move through me the way Seer Maren had taught me years ago when I was small and afraid of what I was supposed to become.

Feel it. Do not feed it. Let it pass.

When the hour was done I got up. I washed my face. I stood at my window and looked out at the pack village below, at the lights in the houses going dark one by one as people settled in for the night.

My pack. My people.

Whatever anyone said about me, whatever they called me now, that part had not changed. These were still my people and something was killing them slowly. Wolves dying mid-shift. Families leaving. The pack getting smaller and weaker every season.

The prophecy said I would save them.

The prophecy had also said I might be the thing that finished them off.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and stared at the moon and made myself a promise. I was not going to wait for a ritual circle and a crowd of witnesses to tell me who I was. If the wolf inside me existed, I was going to find her myself.

And if she did not exist

, I was going to figure out another way.

End of Chapter One