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THIRTY-EIGHT

SELENE

T hey didn’t do it for spectacle.

There were no trumpets. No gold banners.

No cheering crowds or silk-cloaked nobles clapping politely behind ceremonial masks.

Only the wind.

The stars.

And the twin moons, hanging full and low like silver eyes carved into the dark—bearing witness to something older than tradition and truer than fate.

And Kael.

Kael, who stood beside her like a storm forged into shape.

He was every inch the wolf-king his people would one day name him—broad-shouldered, tall and hard-edged, the raw muscle of his body wrapped in ritual armor that looked more like war than wedding.

His ash-blond hair had been trimmed—purposefully—but that one damn rogue curl still refused to fall in line. Just like him.

His sharp features were shadowed by the stubble lining his jaw, and though his eyes were the color of frostbite and fury—icy, calculating blue—tonight, they held nothing but reverence.

Selene could feel the tremor in his hands as he took hers.

And she wasn’t afraid.

She stood barefoot in the sacred circle, the night air cool against her skin, a gown of Veil-threaded silk flowing around her like moonlight spun into fabric—stitched by Nyra’s own hands, woven with strands of silver and symbols old as the blood in their veins. No corsets. No crowns.

Her obsidian hair hung wild down her back, long and unbound, catching the moonlight with every movement. There was power in it— her power. In the sharp slant of her dark brows, the determined line of her jaw, the warmth and steel woven into her dusk-gray eyes.

Her father had once called her porcelain.

He’d been wrong.

She was obsidian. Shaped by pressure. Tempered in fire.

Tonight, she looked it.

Kael’s cloak was lined in both their house colors—his: the deep, glacial black of Fenrir’s northern stronghold; hers: the red-tinged dusk of the Morwen line. A new sigil had been stitched beneath the clasp where his chest met hers.

Not the fang.

Not the flame.

Something entirely new: a crescent moon entwined with a wolf’s eye.

Their bond.

Not of dominion.

Of unity.

“You sure about this?” he asked her softly as he took her hands in his.

His fingers were rough, calloused, still healing from battle. But his touch was gentle. Steady.

Selene smiled. “You asked me that once before,” she said. “Back when I stood in this same circle and you wouldn’t even look at me.”

He looked at her now.

Gods, did he look at her. Like she wasn’t just the woman he’d bonded to. But the woman he’d chosen. And who’d chosen him back.

“No prophecy?” he asked.

“No prophecy,” she confirmed.

“No court expectation?”

“Burned with the last of the blood rites.”

“And the bond?”

She stepped closer. Pressed her palm to his chest. “It’s ours.”

They didn’t need a priest. The Veil bore witness.

They didn’t need vows read from old scrolls. Their hearts had already made them. But they spoke anyway—because words mattered. Because this moment was theirs.

“I don’t bind you to me out of tradition,” Selene said, her voice carrying through the silent trees. “Or duty. I bind you because in every moment I was meant to be something for someone else—you reminded me I could be mine first.”

Kael’s jaw clenched, emotion flashing behind those storm-blue eyes.

“I bind you,” he said lowly, “because the only thing more terrifying than losing myself to you… was never letting myself have you.”

Their hands glowed softly between them as their marks reappeared—burned into their skin anew, not from ritual, not from blood.

But from choice.

The bond wasn’t angry anymore. It was radiant.

It shimmered like moonlight on still water, dancing from her wrist to his, a pulse of life that said:

You are mine. And I am yours.

Not fate.

Love.

When Kael kissed her beneath the twin moons, Selene didn’t feel like she was giving something away.

She felt whole. Claimed. Chosen. And finally , home.

They said no name for Ruarc Fenrir during the ceremony.

There was no body.

No crown to pass.

Just rumor.

Some whispered the old alpha had fallen in the battle’s chaos, carried off by the Veil or lost to wounds no healer could trace. Others claimed he had fled, unable to face the legacy he’d tried so hard to control unraveling at the hands of his son.

Kael hadn’t spoken of it since.

He hadn’t needed to.

He stood in his father’s place now, not because he’d claimed it.

Because the Court had given it.

And Selene had stood beside him not as the human envoy sent to negotiate peace.

But as his equal.