Luna to No One

Chapter 7

The herb garden is the one place nobody thinks to look for me anymore. It used to be mine—the raised beds I built with Lira, the lavender rows planted in the pattern that keeps aphids off the chamomile. Since Hilda streamlined my duties, nobody has watered the thyme. You can tell.

I slip through the kitchen passage and out the low door at the back of the compound. The guards are doubled everywhere else—corridors, gates, the eastern wall that keeps taking hits—but nobody storms a castle through the chamomile.

The air out here smells like crushed rosemary and frost and the absence of anyone's opinion about my womb.

The cold hits my face like a slap I needed. Three days confined to the healer's wing and the guest room and the six feet of hallway between them, three days of siege drums and Neve's careful hands and the silence of a compound that knows what I am and hasn't decided what to do about it.

He is already there.

My feet stop before my mind catches up—a full-body recognition of wrong that roots me to the flagstone. A man crouched beside the far wall where the comfrey grows thick enough to hide the drainage gap. Scarred hands. Dark eyes. A face that belongs to no one I have ever seen inside these walls.

He sees me, and his whole body goes still. Not the stillness of someone caught—no flinch, no calculation. The stillness of a man who just found something he wasn't sure existed.

I should scream. My mouth opens and nothing comes out, because the way he's looking at me has short-circuited whatever operates the alarm system. His eyes move over my face like he's checking it against something he's carried for a long time.

"You should probably run." My voice comes out remarkably steady for a woman whose legs have turned into a material she doesn't trust. "I should probably scream. We seem to be at an impasse."

"You won't scream." He straightens slowly—tall, lean, built like someone who has spent years moving through spaces that don't want him. A scar runs from his left temple to his jaw, white and old.

"Confident for a man standing in enemy territory next to my dying thyme." I don't move. My hand drifts to my stomach beneath the cloak. "Who are you?"

He doesn't answer that. Instead he takes one step closer—not aggressive, not cautious, just direct—and his voice drops to something meant only for the distance between us. The goosebumps cover my whole treacherous body. “What's your name?"

"You broke into a besieged compound and you don't know whose garden you're standing in?" I hold my ground, though my pulse has decided to operate independently.

"I know whose garden." His eyes haven't left mine, not once, not even briefly. "I need to hear you say it."

Something about the way he asks—no demand, no authority, just a raw and specific need—makes me answer before the smarter parts of me can intervene. "Agatha. Agatha Solvane."

His jaw works once. His hand, hanging at his side, closes into a fist and opens again, like something just unlatched inside his chest.

"How long have you been in Moonveil?" He asks it the way someone checks the last line of a map they've been following for years.

"Three years." I watch his face for the reaction, cataloging every micro-shift. "Why does that matter?"

"Before that. The pack that raised you—" His voice roughens. "Do you remember anything before them?"

My spine straightens. These are not the questions of a rogue scout or an assassin or anyone whose presence in this garden makes tactical sense. These are the questions of someone looking for a specific person and running out of time.

"I was an orphan placed with a minor pack. I don't remember anything before the age of four." My throat tightens around words I haven't said aloud in years. "Why are you asking me this?"

He exhales—a long, controlled breath that moves through his entire frame. His eyes close for one second, and when they open, they are brighter than they were.

"You don't know." He says it quietly—not a question. A confirmation of something he suspected and wished were not true. "They never told you."

"Told me what?" I step forward, which is the opposite of what a rational person does when confronted with an unknown wolf during lockdown, but rational left my vocabulary somewhere around the rejection rite. "Who are you? What do you want?"

"Everything I need is standing in front of me." His voice drops on the last word and my ribcage collapse inwards—or it only feels like it. "You called the garden yours."

"It is mine. I planted every single row." My chin lifts, and something in the gesture makes his expression shift—the scar along his jaw catching torchlight. "Answer the question."

He watches me for a beat that stretches past comfortable and into something I can't categorize—warm and steady and entirely without pretense. No one has looked at me like this in three years. Like I am not a problem to be managed or a position to be filled, but a fixed point.

"I can't answer yet." His voice is low, rough at the edges, and the sound of it hits straight to the base of my spine with heat I am choosing to ignore. "Not here. Not with what's coming."

"That is spectacularly unhelpful." My pulse is spiking, and my hand presses harder against my stomach. "You break through a siege line, crouch in my comfrey, ask about my childhood, and then—"

The shout splits the garden open. "THERE! By the wall!" Two guards, three, weapons drawn, boots hitting flagstones at a run.

His head turns toward them and back to me. In that half-second his eyes say everything his mouth wouldn't—a whole sentence compressed into a single look I will not be able to stop replaying.

They hit him low and hard. He goes down without fighting—knees on stone, arms wrenched behind his back, a guard's forearm across his throat. Every line of his body says he could fight, could break the arm on his windpipe without changing his breathing. He chooses not to.

"Rogue infiltrator—found approaching the woman carrying the Alpha's heir." The lead guard's voice is tight, performative. "Get him to the hall."

"He wasn't approaching me." The words leave before strategy catches up. "He was already here when I arrived."

Nobody listens. They haul him upright and his eyes find mine over the guard's shoulder—steady, certain, the gaze of a man who has just finished a search that cost him longer than anyone should survive.

They drag him through the kitchen passage. His eyes hold mine until the wall takes them. The herb garden settles into silence—frost, crushed rosemary, the comfrey bent where his knees hit soil.

My hand is on my stomach. My pulse won't quiet. The place where his gaze held mine still burns like a brand pressed to skin I forgot I had—and they are taking him to the great hall, where Vesper is waiting, where every question he wouldn't answer will be answered for the entire pack.

I straighten my cloak. My feet are already moving toward the door.