The Sacred Wolf Statue Had Not Moved in 1000 Years — It Turned to Face Her When She Walked Through

Chapter 3

Two days before the coronation, Mira was kneeling in the east gallery, polishing the baseboards, when Isolde swept past with her attendants, her gown whispering over the stone Mira had just wiped clean.

“The ceremony is in two days,” Isolde was saying, her voice carrying that particular music of someone who had never known hunger. “Two days until I become Luna. Until that cold, gray-eyed bastard on the throne is finally mine to steer.”

Her attendants laughed, bright and careless.

Mira made herself small. She had practiced the skill the way other people practiced swords — how to breathe quietly, how to angle her body toward the wall, how to exist in the spaces between their attention. It was the only weapon an orphan Omega in a palace full of wolves had ever needed.

“Should we worry about the wolf?” one attendant asked, half-joking. “The legends say it chooses the true mate. What if it — ”

“Legends.” Isolde’s laugh was sharp as cut glass. “A statue is a statue. It has not moved in a thousand years. It will not suddenly grow opinions about who deserves a crown.” She paused near Mira, and Mira felt her gaze like a cold hand on the back of her neck. “Besides. The king chose me. His word is law — not some fairy tale about stone wolves blessing true mates.”

The word she used for the wolf’s blessing was a curse.

Mira stayed perfectly still until the silk and laughter had faded down the corridor. Then she let out a breath she had been holding since she was twelve, and she thought about the flicker she had seen in the wolf’s eyes that morning.

She had told no one. She kept telling herself it had been a trick of the light.

That night, scrubbing the corridor outside the throne room, she overheard two guards speaking in low voices.

“The king doesn’t believe in the mate bond,” one said. “Says it’s a weakness. A ruler who can be unmade by his own heart is a ruler who can be broken.”

“Then why the Elderhall?” the other asked. “Why the old ceremony at all, if he’s going to marry for politics?”

“Because the people expect it. And he’s too smart to ignore tradition when tradition keeps them loyal.” A pause. “They say his father’s death broke something in him. Five years on the throne and he’s never once let anyone close. Lady Isolde is safe for him — she means nothing. That’s the point.”

Mira pressed her rag to the marble and thought about the king she had only ever seen at a distance.

King Caelen was young for a ruler — twenty-eight, dark-haired, with eyes the color of silver knives and a face too hard to call handsome. He had taken the crown at twenty-three, after his father’s sudden death, and he had ruled with absolute control ever since. Fair, the servants whispered. Cold as winter stone, but fair. He weighed every judgment with the same flat patience, and he never once looked at a woman the way men looked at Isolde.

They said he did not believe in the mate bond. They said he had chosen Isolde because she would be useful, not because of some mystical connection. They said a king could not afford to love.

On the morning of the coronation, Mira stood in the Elderhall and looked up at the Moonwatcher, bathed in the pale gold of the crystal windows. The hall had been prepared to perfection — flowers at the altar, candles fat as a man’s wrist, the names of the Lunas gleaming on the walls.

“Please,” she whispered, polishing the base of the pedestal until her reflection swam in the marble. “If you’re real. If any of the legends are true. Please don’t let her win. She’ll hurt him. She’ll use him and gut him and call it love.”

The obsidian eyes stared past her, dark and changeless.

Then the first nobles arrived, and she scrambled to her feet, pressing herself against the wall as the hall filled with silk and jewels and the low thunder of two hundred voices.

She did not know, yet, that she would be the one to cross that hall.