Chapter 3: My Wife Is Well-Behaved Tonight

Rune's POV

The sky was just beginning to pale when the Moon Run ended.

I stood at the riverbank for a while, waiting for my body to ease itself back from wolf form. The bones settled into place one by one—a process I'd been through a thousand times and had long since stopped feeling. Tonight had gone smoothly. I ran through the tally in my head: both patrol groups had returned, the border was clear, the three young ones from the western slope had finished their first full run without falling behind, and Ironfang's scouts hadn't shown their faces.

And Cassia had come back.

I saved that one for last. No particular reason—just habit. The things that matter, I've always thought through at the end, because that's the only way to think them through properly.

When she stood beside me on that ridge, something inside my chest clicked back into place. Like a window that had been shut for five years finally being pushed open, and the wind coming through at last.

Five years.

I had always known she would come back. The year she left, she'd said only that she needed to go take care of herself, and I hadn't stopped her—I should have. But I had barely survived Silverbane. I could hardly stay on my feet, let alone hold onto someone else.

Things were different now.

Greystone Pack ranked third in the North. I had six hundred people under my roof, four trade routes, two iron deposits. Now I could hold onto anyone.

A dull ache pressed against my chest, sudden and brief—not sharp, just that familiar blunt weight driving inward. I pressed my hand against it. An old thing. It had started the year of the poisoning and grown more frequent with each passing year. The pack's healers could never make sense of it, calling it residual damage from old wounds. I'd never bothered to chase the answer myself—measured against everything I had gained from surviving that poison, the pain was nothing.

Because I had come out of it unreasonably strong. I'd taken over the pack at nineteen as the weakest Alpha in the entire North. At twenty-three, Silverbane nearly killed me. Then I woke up, and within a year I had put an Alpha three times my size on the ground.

The pack said it was the Moon God's gift.

I never took that line. I knew it hadn't come from the Moon God. It had come from someone who'd paid for it with their life.

That was why I'd married Nessa.

I turned it over as I walked back, the way I had many times over these five years, always arriving at the same conclusion: I had done the right thing. She had been there that night. She had lost her Wolf Spirit because of me. A girl barely past twenty, left without her wolf—her life was as good as over. No one married a wolfless woman. She would have struggled to remain in the pack at all.

I couldn't let her be cast out.

So I gave her the position of Luna. I gave her the best room in the main house, gave her an allowance, gave her a standing that kept anyone from insulting her to her face.

I had done enough. I really had.

I stopped walking and lifted my shoulder to my nose. The faint trace of iris. Cassia had leaned against me earlier and left it there. I frowned slightly. I would need to change before going in. Not out of guilt—there was nothing to feel guilty about. Whatever existed between Cassia and me was clean, and the whole pack had eyes. It was just that Nessa couldn't smell, but she could read faces. Maeve's expression, the housemaids' expressions, anyone's expression at all. Those eyes of hers were too sharp; five years had shown me she could extract entire stories from a single look. There was no reason to give her anything to read.

Simpler that way.

I pushed open the study door—and stopped.

The desk was covered in jars. My first impression was simply of fullness, a dense arrangement that left no surface bare. I stepped closer. Cedar Ash. White ceramic jars, every one identical, lined up in six rows of ten, their lids all facing the same direction.

Sixty jars in total.

I stood before the desk for the better part of half a minute. My first thought was that she was organizing. My second was that organizing didn't require spreading everything across my desk. My third thought—the one that finally settled—was that she must be running low.

Something loosened in me. That was all it was. Simple enough: I'd have someone place an order from Silverhollow tomorrow, enough for two years at once, so she wouldn't have to wait each time. I picked up the leftmost jar in the front row and turned it over. A year was marked on the bottom. The first year.

She had sorted them by year.

My wife—whatever else might be said—was meticulous about everything she did.

"Nessa?"

She came out from the inner room, a pen still in her hand. She looked poorly today—shadows beneath her eyes, her hair wound up carelessly, her cloak carrying a thin film of ash. Cellar ash. I knew that shade. She probably hadn't slept. Full moon nights in the cellar were hard, I knew that.

"You're back," she said.

"Yeah." I nodded toward the desk. "What is all this?"

She glanced at the sixty jars and then back at me. Her expression was entirely calm—calm in a way that pressed against that same old sore place in my chest.

"I counted them," she said. "Exactly five years."

"Right." I nodded. "Are you running out? I'll have more ordered."

She didn't answer. She just looked at me—three seconds, maybe. Three seconds is nothing. And yet, for no reason I could name, I almost looked away.

"No need," she said.

"Sorry?"

"I have enough."

"All right."

I walked over and took the jar from the far right end of the nearest row, pressing it into her hand the way I had every month for five years, the motion worn smooth with repetition.

"Nessa," I said.

"Yes."

I took a moment to settle on the right words. I'd worked out what I wanted to say on the walk back—I was sure this was the best arrangement for her.

"Next month's Moon Rite," I said, keeping my voice easy, "you don't need to come out. Just rest in your room. I know it's difficult for you, being there while the whole pack is in the Mind Link and you're standing outside it alone. I don't want you to have to go through that."

She didn't answer right away. I half expected her to argue—she did, occasionally, once or twice a year, and when she did her voice tended to shake. Instead, she gave a small smile.

"All right," she said.

"All right?"

"All right." She set the jar on the desk. "Let's leave it at that."

The tension I'd been carrying finally eased. Easier than I'd anticipated—far easier. Whatever else one might say about my wife, she had always been sensible. Five years, and she had never caused me a moment's trouble. No outbursts, no demands, no need for managing. Whatever I proposed, she agreed to. I made a quiet mental note: once things with Cassia were settled, I ought to give her something. Silverhollow had a new shipment of paper in. She had always liked fine paper.

Which reminded me—I had decided on the walk back to hold Cassia's Claiming at the next Moon Rite. She had saved my life. She'd spent five years adrift, and now she was back; I owed her a proper standing, not as a mate, but as a full member of Greystone Pack, with a place no one could question. That debt was mine to honor.

I remembered that night clearly. I remembered lying in the snow, my vision gone to white, and a pale shape dropping to its knees beside me, hands soaked red. Cassia. When I woke, she was the first to reach me, weeping. As for Nessa—the elders told me she had been found unconscious beneath a tree not far off, her Wolf Spirit already gone.

I had always assumed she had tried to reach me and hadn't made it in time. A girl who had just come of age, panicking, going wrong somewhere, losing her Wolf Spirit in the attempt. It was pitiable. It made me feel the weight of what I owed. So I married her.

Both debts, I would carry for the rest of my life.

I turned toward the door. I was nearly through it when the pain hit—far worse than before, a savage bite deep inside my ribs that buckled my knees. I caught the doorframe and pressed the sound down to a low grunt.

At the same moment, the melody came back.

No words, barely a sound, as though someone on the other side of a thick wall was humming. I had heard it every full moon for five years without fail. But tonight it was different. Tonight it wasn't humming.

Tonight it was calling—note after note, sharp and urgent and crashing upward, rattling through the whole of my chest, as though something inside me was clawing at the walls to get out.

I turned and looked back into the room.

Nessa sat with her back to me at the desk, writing something. Her spine was straight. Her hand was steady. The left side of her neck—where it had always been bare for five years—was bare still.

The sound came again, louder.

I stood there frowning, my hand pressed hard against my chest, and waited for it to pass. It took a long time. When it finally faded, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and walked out.

It wasn't the first time, after all.

Just an old wound.