The White Luna: She Was Rejected. Now She Is The Prophecy

The blood had already dried by the time they gave her the bucket.

Mara knelt on the packhouse floor with her sleeves pushed to her elbows and her knees burning through her jeans. The water in the bucket was grey. The rag in her hand was grey. Her hands were grey up to the wrists. She had been scrubbing the same three floorboards for twenty minutes and the stain kept coming back, dark at the edges, like the wood had drunk it and did not want to let go.

It was not her blood. That was the rule. If it had been hers, someone would have made her clean it faster.

Her back ached. Her shoulder ached where she had slept on it wrong. The medicine for her sister was in her pocket, wrapped in a torn receipt. Two pills left. She had counted them three times this morning. Two pills would get June through tonight. Tomorrow she would need more. Tomorrow she had no money for more.

That was the clock. Not the moon. Not the ceremony. The pills.

"You're missing a spot."

Mara did not look up. She knew the voice. Tessa. Beta's daughter. Clean boots, clean nails, clean conscience.

"I'm on it," Mara said.

"You've been on it since dawn." Tessa stepped closer, just close enough that her shadow fell across the floor Mara had just cleaned. "Father says if the floor isn't clean by the time the elders arrive, you can do it again. With your tongue."

Mara kept scrubbing. She did not answer. Answering was how girls like her got hit.

Tessa laughed anyway, soft, bored. Then she tipped her cup. It was not an accident. Mara watched the coffee go — dark, hot — spill across the boards she had just made clean. It ran into the bloodstain and made it worse, brown and sticky and impossible.

"Oops," Tessa said.

Mara's hands stopped. For one second, just one, she thought about standing up. She thought about what her hands would feel like around Tessa's throat. She thought about how good it would feel to stop being the girl on her knees.

Then she thought about June. June coughing in the back room of the shed they lived in. June asking if the medicine was coming. June trusting her.

So Mara did not stand. She picked up the rag. She wrung it out over the bucket. She started again.

That was the difference between a victim and a survivor. A victim waited for someone to stop it. A survivor cleaned the floor and kept the pills safe.

"Good girl," Tessa said, and walked away, her boots clicking on the clean part of the floor.

Mara waited until the door shut. Then she let her breath out. Her hands were shaking. Not from fear. From holding it in.

She had a plan. She had had it for six days. There was a fence on the north side of the territory, where the wire was loose and the patrols got lazy after midnight. Beyond it was the old human town. Beyond that was a clinic that did not ask for pack papers. If she could get June out for two nights, just two, she could get the medicine refilled. She had fourteen dollars folded inside her sock. She needed forty. She was going to steal the rest from the kitchen tonight after everyone left for the ceremony.

She was not going to the ceremony. Girls like her were not invited. Girls like her were not even allowed to look at the fire.

The packhouse door banged open.

Not Tessa. Worse.

Two enforcers came in, men in black jackets with the pack mark on their shoulders. They did not look at the floor. They looked at her, on her knees, with a bucket.

"Mara Voss," one said. He did not say it like a name. He said it like a chore.

She stood up slowly, her knees popping. She kept the rag in her hand because she did not know what else to do with it. "Yes?"

"Alpha wants you."

The words did not make sense at first. The Alpha did not want girls like her. The Alpha did not know girls like her existed, except as the names on the cleaning rota.

"Which Alpha?" she said, stupidly.

The enforcer's eyes narrowed. "There is only one Alpha in this pack. Darius Kane. He wants you at the Moon Ceremony tonight."

Mara felt her stomach drop. "I'm not — I'm not allowed at the Moon Ceremony. I'm forbidden. The elders said—"

"The elders changed their minds," the other one said. "You will be there. Cleaned up. Presentable. Eight o'clock. If you are late, we come back for you."

She thought of the fence. She thought of the fourteen dollars in her sock. She thought of the kitchen money she was going to steal. All of it was gone now. If she was at the ceremony, she could not be at the fence. If she was at the ceremony, she could not get June's medicine.

"Why?" she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to be. "Why me?"

The first enforcer smiled, but it was not a smile. "You can ask him yourself. Tonight. In front of everyone."

They left. The door banged shut behind them.

Mara stood alone in the packhouse with a bucket of grey water and a floor that was dirty again. Her hands were still shaking. The pills in her pocket felt heavier than they should have.

She had spent the whole day trying to stay invisible. Now the most dangerous man in the territory had said her name out loud.

And she had no idea if he wanted to punish her, use her, or kill her.

But she knew one thing. If she did not go to the Moon Ceremony tonight, they would drag her there. And if she did go, June would be alone in the shed with two pills and no one to count them for her.

She picked up the bucket. She poured the dirty water out. She filled it again, clean.

She had eight hours to figure out how to survive tonight.