The Luna's Goodbye

In the dead of night, under the shadows of the ancient Blackwood Forest, I lay gasping for breath, bloodied and broken. While my husband, Elias, was busy celebrating a moonlit reunion with his pack’s former alpha, Lena—his first love. They were marking ten years since they'd met, with him howling in delight and toasting to old memories.

I tried to send him a desperate howl through our mental link, my voice barely a whimper in his mind. But his cold response echoed back: "Save it, kyra. Your tricks won’t drag me away from Lena tonight. I’m not coming back for you."

Oddly enough, I was relieved when he didn’t rush to my side. Knowing Elias, he'd probably have made things worse. With him, the savagery was always just below the surface.

Three days later, I was gone from his world. Yet there he was, standing in the middle of a crime scene, playing the role of the sharp investigator, a top wolf tracker for the Crescent Moon Pack, analyzing the latest death that had stirred the entire territory. He was describing the victim’s last agonizing moments, how she fought to survive the attack of a rogue. But Elias had no clue he was unraveling the mystery behind the death of his own mate—me, Kyra, the mate he loathed.

My body had been tossed into the depths of the Blackwood River like unwanted prey. The river’s current carried me to the outskirts of a small human village where I was found by a local fisherman and his dog. At first, he thought it was just a pile of animal remains, until his dog unearthed a hand—a hand that once bore the mark of the Crescent Moon Pack.

Soon enough, the entire village was swarming with Crescent Moon enforcers and wolves from rival packs, trying to piece together what had happened. The trail of bodies they began to find? It was like something from a dark prophecy.

Who was brought in to lead the investigation? None other than Elias, the Crescent Moon’s best tracker. My mate. Of course, they’d call him. No one else in the pack could dissect a crime scene the way he could. They used to say he could follow a trail through a blizzard or find a single drop of blood in a river. I had seen it firsthand, time and again—his relentless precision, his uncanny ability to read the world like it was laid bare just for him.

Even now, as he walked among the remains, his sharp eyes scanned every corner, every disturbance in the dirt. He knelt by the bloodstains, running his fingers through the drying pool as if it could whisper secrets only he could hear. His nostrils flared ever so slightly, picking up scents the rest of the team couldn’t even begin to detect. I watched him, a ghost in the shadows, wondering what he would find here—wondering if he’d know that I was right in front of him all along.

He was treating this place, my final resting spot, like a puzzle he had to solve. His focus was so intense, so clinical, that it almost hurt to watch. I remember when that attention had been turned toward me, when I was the one thing he couldn’t get enough of. Now, all his energy, all his instincts, were wrapped up in finding the person responsible for this carnage. The irony, of course, was that the person he was hunting had already been in his bed the night I was killed. Would he ever put it together?

Elias’s movements were careful, precise, as he worked through the scene. He’d always had this quiet power about him, this strength that didn’t need to boast or roar. In our world, wolves like that were rare. Most relied on brute force, on intimidation, but not Elias. His mind was his greatest weapon. He didn’t need to chase his prey into exhaustion; he just needed to know where they would be before they even got there. And now he was here, the great Crescent Moon tracker, standing over the body of his mate, completely unaware.

I couldn’t help but wonder what went through his head as he worked. Did he suspect? Did something about this scene feel familiar to him? Maybe there was a fleeting thought, a nagging tug in his mind that something was off, but he hadn’t acknowledged it yet. He didn’t even realize what he was truly looking at—who he was trying to find. Or maybe he did, and he was just that good at hiding it.

He knelt again, this time by a fragment of bone, studying it as if the marrow inside could offer him some kind of insight. His sharp senses, honed from years of hunting and tracking, were in overdrive. He’d catch the faintest scent of something familiar, something he couldn’t quite place, and I watched as his brow furrowed in thought. But still, nothing clicked. He was so focused, so intent on solving the mystery that he couldn’t see the truth staring back at him.

A part of me wanted to scream at him, to make him realize that the body he was studying, the scene he was dissecting with such careful detachment, belonged to me. His mate. But another part of me held back. I wanted to see just how long it would take for him to figure it out. Would he put the pieces together on his own? Or would he need someone else to tell him?

Even Elias, with all his years of experience, was rattled by the violence. “This is more than a rogue attack. This...this is a calculated slaughter,” he murmured to Cyrus, his second-in-command and a former rival for Lena’s affections.

Cyrus, who was now leading the investigation, glanced at the wreckage, eyes dark with concern. “According to the trail, this was no ordinary rogue. Whoever did this had an intimate knowledge of pack dynamics.”

Elias nodded, his eyes narrowing. “There’s a pattern here. Someone’s sending a message. A deep grudge. And they won’t stop with one victim.”

He was right. His instincts, as usual, were razor-sharp. Little did he know, the victim who started it all was me, his very own Luna.

Then they found something significant—a silver pendant tangled in the bloodstained roots by the riverbank. It was unmistakable, an emblem of the Crescent Moon Pack, one that only high-ranking members possessed.

Cyrus's face tightened as he turned the pendant over in his hand, his expression shifting to disbelief. “Elias, doesn’t this pendant look just like the one you gave Kyra?”

Elias snatched the pendant from him, inspecting it carefully. His eyes flicked to the engraved crescent moon at the back. He hesitated, but only for a second. “It’s probably just a similar design. These pendants have been passed down through the pack for generations.”

But as he stood there, staring at the crime scene, something gnawed at him. He walked away, stepping into the forest for a moment of solitude, his brow furrowed in thought. His fingers hovered over the pendant once more before he finally dialed my number.

The phone rang once, twice, then cut off. He hung up with a sneer. “She’s ignoring me again. Stubborn, like always. I’ll deal with her later.”

Oh, Elias. For someone so skilled in tracking, you should have known. I made sure that pendant was indistinguishable from the others, taking me time to scrape off the last trace of our bond—the bond you thought could never break.