Smelling Like Nothing for My Alpha

Every wolf in Ironridge had called me Luna for three years. I'd been with Knox Harlan for eight. In all that time, he'd never once put his mark on my neck.

Tonight the pack was celebrating the end of a war. Three years, forty-one fights on our borders, and Knox hadn't lost a single acre. Tonight was also supposed to be the night he finally took me up to the Moonstone.

Eighteen times I'd asked him when. Eighteen times he'd given me the same answer.

When the war's over.

The first time he said it, the night after our Luna ceremony, he held my face in both hands. "Not in wartime, Maren. Once I mark you, you feel every wound I take. If I go down on the line, you go down with me. And every rogue out there would know exactly where to aim."

I thought it was the most loving thing anyone had ever said to me.

Now the war was over.

The great hall of the pack house was packed wall to wall. Alphas from four allied territories had come to toast the wolf who'd held Ironridge, and every one of them raised a glass of wolfsbane whiskey to Knox.

He couldn't drink. He was leading the dawn patrol to hunt down the last of the rogues. So I did what Lunas have always done. I took his cup.

Wolfsbane whiskey is the only thing strong enough to get a wolf drunk, and it goes down like swallowing a lit match. After the fourth, I couldn't feel my throat anymore. I lost count somewhere after that, around the time the floor started tilting.

Knox didn't look over once. He was by the fireplace with Brielle Sutton, the youngest warrior he trained himself, the two of them bent over a map of the east line for tomorrow's patrol. My map. I'd drawn it two nights ago at our kitchen table.

She said something and laughed. He filled her water glass before she'd even reached for it.

The wolves at my table had gone quiet. One of the older she-wolves slid a glass of water toward me without a word. Nobody else would meet my eyes. Half the pack knew exactly why I was drinking, and the other half had seen it before.

By the time the feast broke up, snow was coming down outside. The first of the year.

Knox pulled his truck around to the front steps. I went down to meet it, holding the railing the whole way. He got out and stood between me and the passenger door.

"Brielle can't hold her liquor. I'm going to drive her home." He was already looking past me, up the steps. "Grady's still inside, he'll give you a ride. We'll go up to the Moonstone tomorrow. That's okay, right?"

He didn't wait for me to answer.

There was a time I would have made a scene. I'd fought with him over less, in the truck, in our kitchen, once in front of the whole war council. I'd asked him over and over what I was to him if I wasn't worth one night. None of it ever changed anything.

Tonight I just said, "Okay. Watch the ice on the pass."

Knox stopped on the bottom step and looked at me. Really looked, for the first time all night, like he'd braced for a fight and didn't know what to do without one.

Then he shook it off. "I'll pick you up something on the way back," he said, and went up the steps.

He came back down with Brielle in his arms.

He carried her straight across the lot, in front of every wolf spilling out of the hall. He settled her in the passenger seat, shrugged out of his jacket, and tucked it around her shoulders.

Every wolf on those steps could smell what that meant. His scent, wrapped all over her.

I knew how it went when it was me. Every time I drank his share at some alliance dinner, I'd reach for his arm on the way out, just to stay upright. And every time, he'd step away.

Not in front of the pack, Maren. A Luna stands on her own feet.

So I stood. Even when the floor was spinning. Even the night I got sick behind the hall and walked the three miles home alone.

The truck pulled out of the lot. Snow kept falling on the place where it had been.

I put my hand in my coat pocket and found the moonstone. Elder Hollis had pressed it into my palm at our Luna ceremony. I was supposed to set it on the Moonstone myself, the night Knox marked me. I'd carried it every day for three years.

There was a trash can by the pack house door. I dropped it in.