Chapter 38: My Little Scary Luna
Zaliver’s POV
I’ve seen enough terrified faces to last me lifetimes. Young women, eyes wide with fear, trembling from the unknown. Each time, I’d search for something, anything, that might stir recognition in my soul, the kind that only a mate could bring. But nothing. Not a flicker of warmth. Not even a whisper of connection. I looked into their eyes one after another and felt the same hollow silence every time. So I did what needed to be done. Wiped their memories clean, made sure they were returned safely to their packs, none the wiser. And each time, I felt the loneliness settle back in a little heavier than before.
And then came the mission. The one that changed everything.
It was Albericus’s assignment, the Blue Moon raid, when I noticed something strange in him. His wolf looked off. Not dangerous, not disobedient, just different. I’ve always had a sixth sense with wolves, especially the ones we trained, so I picked up on it immediately. But I brushed it off. A flicker in the wind, maybe.
That was my mistake.
I let my guard drop. One heartbeat of distraction, and Albericus lunged at me. He’d never dared use his gifted strength before, not in combat, not against me. He’d always been more brawn than mind, thriving on destruction. But this time, it wasn’t rage that drove him, it was something else. Something magnetic.
I moved through the chaos of the raid myself, pulling my attention back just in time to see what he’d found. Small and delicate, brown eyes wide with confusion, yet calm, too calm for someone in the middle of a pack attack. She didn’t flinch. And when my gaze landed on hers, I felt it before my mind could process it. The shift. The pull. Something ancient and unmistakable cracking open in my chest after centuries of silence.
Shock. Wonder. Then, unmistakably, a deep, primal certainty that settled into my bones like something coming home.
That’s when I knew.
She was mine.
Vivian.
Shaking my head, I pulled myself out of the memory and stared out at the night sky. The moon was high, a soft glow veiled behind drifting clouds. I tapped my fingers rhythmically against my thigh, trying to stay grounded. The silver edge of the cloud still let the moon’s light peek through, casting eerie shadows across the room.
Watching it, I felt an odd sense of recognition. Maybe I was the moon, distant, cold, and untouchable. And Vivian was the cloud, hovering close enough to dim me, but never truly hiding me. Persistent. Soft. Utterly unaware of how much she was already changing the quality of my light, and how strange it felt to notice that I didn’t mind. I was tethering her to me, terrified she might drift out of reach, which was an irony I wasn’t entirely ready to sit with. Me. Afraid of losing something.
"My little cloud," I muttered under my breath, lips twitching at the absurdity.
Who would’ve thought that the feared Lupus Deus, leader of all, harbinger of wrath, would turn into a hopeless sap over a five-foot-four, brown-eyed she-wolf currently chained to my bed, probably plotting my gruesome death?
She could plan all she wanted. There wasn’t a force on this earth that could take her from me. And she most certainly couldn’t kill me.
But that stray thought, kill, erased my momentary warmth. The humor faded, replaced by something darker. Something colder. Like a switch flipping inside me, the air in the room dropped, frost creeping in from the corners, as the ever-present shadow within stirred. I didn’t need to look in a mirror to know my eyes were glowing.
The thought of Jedadiah laying so much as a finger on her sent my wolf into a frenzy. I knew rationally that nothing happened. A touch. That’s all it was. Harmless. Innocent. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of her giving anything, even a glance, to another male.
Jealousy? No. Jealousy was a tame word for what I felt.
It was volcanic.
My jaw tightened, canines slipping past my lips. My chest rose and fell rapidly as images flashed in my mind, bones snapping, flesh tearing, blood painting the ground. My wolf fed me those images like a balm to soothe the roaring in my head. Anyone who touched her would pay. With blood. With breath. With life.
I let out a laugh, but there was no amusement in it. Just disbelief. How the hell did a sweet, delicate creature like Vivian end up being the perfect counterpart to this? To me.
She was my opposite in every way, and yet she fit so seamlessly into my chaos. It baffled me. She should be terrified. Maybe she was, I could catch her fear now and then, faint but sharp, like a pinch of citrus on the wind. Whenever I acted out, whenever the beast surfaced, her scent would shift, spike, then vanish like it never happened. She didn’t run from it. She absorbed it, steadied herself, and came back with that chin lifted.
And instead of that scaring me, it did something else.
It excited me.
Did I like her fear?
Did I feed off it?
No. No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t fear I wanted from her. It was everything. Her anger. Her defiance. Her fire. Even her silence. I craved it all. I wanted to drown in her, to drag her down into the abyss I lived in and see if she could survive there with me.
Maybe she could.
Maybe she already was.
And that, more than anything, terrified me.
Because I had lived for six centuries without anything worth losing. And now, chained to my bed and furious at me and still somehow burrowing her way beneath every wall I had ever built, she was becoming exactly that.
Something worth losing.
Something I would not survive losing. Something I had not had in six hundred long years and had long ago stopped believing I deserved.
I turned back to the window and let the cold, brilliant, completely indifferent moon look at me, and thought that perhaps the cloud had more power than it knew. Enough to change absolutely everything, if it chose to stay long enough to try. She was mine.
I just had to make sure she knew it too.
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