* Seven years ago *
The Moon Goddess Festival exists to manufacture a specific kind of amnesia. Rivals lower their weapons, enemies share food, and everyone pretends the ceasefires they've sworn will survive contact with Monday morning.
It's a theater. Beautiful, but necessary theater—and I've never been able to afford a ticket to the good seats.
The Moon Goddess Festival happens once a year. Today, our pack is hosting.
I found my spot an hour ago. Far enough to be left alone. Close enough that nobody can say I wasn't there.
Because even omegas and lowcasts nobodies have to show up.
Which in my case means honoring her with whatever I am—wolfless, nineteen, and barely tolerated in my own pack, in my own home.
That’s what you get when your father spends decades terrorizing others packs and ends up being killed by another Alpha, who takes in you and your mother for legitimacy of his rule.
I was six when he died, I don’t even remember his face. Still, everyone thinks that me and my mother should pay the blood debt for his infamous sins.
She was forced to mate with Alpha Thomas and gave birth to Kailani, and me… well.
Apparently, I'm pretty good at my scapegoat role.
"Terrible party, right?"
I flinch hard enough at the masculine voice beside me that my cup nearly goes off my knee. I catch it on reflex and look up.
There is a man sitting on the wall beside me who was absolutely not there two seconds ago.
He’s tall and dark-haired, watching the crowd with his warm amber eyes and a half-smile. The posture is relaxed like he never once needed to make himself smaller for a room.
When he finally turns to look at me the world does something strange. A sudden, quiet pull, deep in the center of my chest. My breath doesn't stop exactly, but it forgets its rhythm for a moment.
His eyes find mine, something in them catches and for a second neither of us says anything. Just looks at each other.
It lasts maybe a few seconds, but feels much longer.
Long enough to be faintly ridiculous.
He breaks it first—a small shift, easy grin settling into place, like he's deciding to let us both off the hook.
"Hiding? You were absolutely hiding," he says with no accusation, just a fact he found interesting. "It's fine, I was too. The guy from Iron Ridge keeps arm-wrestling everyone and I don't have the heart to embarrass him."
A laugh escapes me before I can catch it, and his grin softens into something quieter.
"I'm Silas." He offers his hand. "Enforcer. Pine Creek."
I take it, and then pause.
His hand is warm around mine and his eyes are still doing that thing with searching my face, and I know what happens next. I've run this sequence a hundred times.
I hold the pause perhaps a beat too long.
"Skyler." And then, because there's no version of this where it doesn't come out eventually: "Gray. Crescent Ridge."
I watch his face, waiting for the specific cooling when recognition lands.
Gray. Alpha Thomas's stepdaughter. The tyrant's girl. The wolfless one.
It happens every time. Without fail. I've timed it, it takes about two seconds. But his face does… nothing.
"So what's your excuse for sitting in the dark?" he asks then, like I've handed him the weather and not a bloodstained last name.
I blink, recalibrate. Wait another half-second for the delayed reaction. Still, it doesn't come. Okay… "Bad music," I say slowly, watching him still half-braced. "Bad company. Also, I don't dance."
He leans toward me. "Can't, or won't?"
"Does it matter?" I shoot back.
"Yeah." He leans back on one hand, easy as anything and his grin widens. "One is a skill problem. The other is a tragedy."
"And which one would you fix?" The question leaves my mouth bold and warm and entirely unlike me.
"Both. But I'd start with company, since you've admitted yours was bad until I showed up."
I look at him for a long moment, steady and uncomplicated.
"Dance with me," he says then.
"I told you. I don't—"
"I heard you." He's already standing, hand out. "Come anyway."
The music reaches without the crush of bodies, and his hand settles at my waist and we start moving, and that's how it begins.
We danced and talked for an hour. More than an hour, probably.
I stop tracking time somewhere in the middle of it.
We talk about everything and nothing, the easy kind of conversation that shouldn't exist between strangers but occasionally does, rare and a little disorienting. He asks questions like he actually wants the answers. I give them, which is the more disorienting part.
The whole time his hand warm at my waist and I am acutely aware of every inch between us.
Every time he dips his head toward me, my pulse does something embarrassing.
Every time his fingers shift slightly at my waist, the air in my lungs gets harder to move.
I've been around men before. I live in a pack house. I know what attraction is, in theory. This doesn't feel like theory. This feels like gravity—specific and patient and not particularly interested in whether I've consented to it.
Nobody ever was that effortlessly kind and reverent to me before.
It's late when he finally walks me back to my room.
The pack house corridors are half-dark and quiet, most people already in rooms or still at the celebration. Outside my door, I stop. He stops beside me.
Neither of us says anything for a moment—a silence charged with something that's been accumulating all night without either of us naming it. I reach for the door handle and then don't turn it.
"Skyler." I look at him. He's watching me with that same expression he's worn all night. "One sec, here…"
He reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a short length of wire. He works it between his fingers for a moment, bending and shaping, and then he holds out his hand.
A small, lopsided ring. Twisted metal, imperfect, worth nothing.
The words settle between us like an offering, and my throat does something complicated.
"So you remember tonight was real," he says quietly, sliding it onto my finger and the metal is warm from his skin. His hand doesn't let go. "I’ll be gone in the morning, but I’ll find you later. I mean… if that’s okay."
I look down at it, then up at him.
Something in my chest becomes too large for the space it's in.
I didn't really decide to kiss him, it just happens. A step forward and then my mouth is on his, my hand pressing to his chest, heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my ears. It lasts two seconds before I pull back, breathing unsteady.
"I'm sorry." The words come out before I can stop them, heat floods my face. "I don't… that wasn't…" I press my lips together. "That was my first kiss. So I don't… I'm not sure I did it right, and if it’s okay, and I—"
His hand comes up to cup my jaw and Silas kisses me. Not soft, not careful. Not the tentative thing I offered him—this is something else entirely. Strong fingers sliding into my hair, while his mouth moving hungrily against mine like he's been thinking about it for a long time and he's done being patient about it.
I make a small, startled sound against his lips and he swallows it. His other hand finds my waist and pulls me in and there is no air left between us and I stop thinking in any coherent language.
He kisses me until my fingers have twisted into his shirt, until my back meets the wall and I don't know when that happened, until the hand in my hair tilts my head back and he deepens it further and I feel it everywhere.
Throat, chest, the backs of my knees. Somewhere deep and molten at my core.
When he finally pulls back a fraction, his breathing is ragged. His forehead drops to mine.
"You did it right," he says quietly, voice low and rough at the edges. "For the record."
My heart is slamming so hard I'm certain he can hear it. "Right." My voice comes out barely above a whisper. "Good. That's… good to know."
His mouth almost smiles against my cheek. Then he pulls back enough to look at me—really look, the same way he has all night. Like he's decided I'm worth the full weight of his attention.
"Invite me in," he says.
Quiet. Steady. No pressure in it, just the question, just him.
My hand finds the door behind me and I finally turn the handle.