Page 49 of The Wolf Moon

Roman only removed his mouth from my chest to begin pulling the fabric of my shorts down from my waist over my legs. My heart was in my throat and my skin felt heated all over as I let him bare me completely. I kept my knees tightly pressed together, only allowing an inch of space when he undressed me before closing them again. I felt entirely… shy.

I didn’t know what it would be like; my first time with a man. But I definitely hadn’t expected it to be a deity shapeshifter under the stars among the trees. I trembled underneath his hungry stare, afraid but not wanting him to stop.

Roman moved forwa

Twenty One

Chapter 20

Iwas looking at a map. Only, it wasn’t a map like any I’d seen before. In my studies, I had only ever learned about one place and that was my village. The map for my village had been small. It did nothing more than identify buildings and areas immediately around the village. The rest of the map had been blotted out with images of trees and that had been the extent of our education in the matter.

This map was large enough to spread across a large table within a room I’d never been in before which was within a building I’d never been in before either. The King’s Corner, Roman had told me with a hint of amusement as though the name held a secret inside joke I wouldn’t understand. Apparently, it was where Roman spent much of his time when he wasn’t resting at home or patrolling the pack’s village. It also was where I would most likely end up spending much of my time once I’d learned what it was to be Queen Luna.

“What is this?” I asked aloud, looking at the detailed drawings of trees, mountains I’d never seen, rivers spiraling through the land, and several symbols, words, and other information that didn’t translate for me. Roman was resting a weight on the end of the map he had unrolled for me.

“You don’t recognize the world in which you live in?” He answered with a question curiously. There was something guarded in his words as he’d asked that told me he’d thought of something he didn’t want me to know. Still, I was very much distracted by the picture of this world before me and also by his own question.

I glanced from the map to him with interest.

“This is our world?” I inquired curiously, looking determinedly. “Where are we?”

Roman stepped closer to me, leaning forward to rest his fingertip on the symbol of the Triple Goddesses. It was obvious enough that I felt a bit silly for not noticing, but my embarrassment was overwhelmed by my curiosity as I looked at the land around the Trinity pack’s village.

Roman lifted his finger from the spot and gestured to the entire map.

“This is Moirai. It’s where lycans and humans have coexisted since before even my time,” He explained to me patiently. He pointed again to the Trinity pack before then pointing to another symbol not far off, “Each pack has its own village named after their pack. They have their own identifying symbol and their own hierarchy of Alphas and Lunas which all report to me… and soon you.” The symbols of the packs were etched in colors of gold, silver, and red. I noticed in between there were other symbols more like letters than drawings, smaller and colored in solid black.

I looked back to where Trinity was on the map, my eyes slowly following the surface under the village south, down until a small line of water had been drawn. I followed it east until it met with a larger, curved river. I stared at the river blankly, hesitant. Which way did it flow, I wondered? I followed it north, but it only passed by Trinity closely before traveling further into more pack land. My eyes darted back to where the creek met the river and I looked south. Not too far south, a letter ‘A’ in black was drawn, though I didn’t know what it meant.

“Did you find it, yet?” Roman asked me, having been watching me quietly. I looked from the map to him, my mind swarming with uncertainty.

“What?”

“Your human village,” He said simply. I paused, but then turned back to the map and lifted my finger to rest on that small, insignificant letter just to the west of the river. Then I looked at him for confirmation. He nodded, not appearing to be concerned that I could find it. “It’s called Alpha.”

I felt a jolt of surprise. I’d live my whole life in a nameless village, a citizen to a nameless town with an unimpressive map of our world, while the wolves lived in a vast land of plentiful resources and connections. It felt… unfair.

“I knew this would make you unhappy,” Roman sighed, frowning.

His words drew me out of my own head. I looked at him quickly.

“I just never knew it had a name,” I told him honestly, “Why Alpha?”

“Before I became King Alpha, things were different. Humans vastly outnumbered lycans. The largest pack, the first pack, was named Trinity after the Triple Goddess. Your human village came from the largest human city, named Hominidae back then. We were all children of the Goddesses, lycan and human together. We were at peace,” Roman explained, capturing my attention entirely. “When they attacked the packs, I became the King Alpha and led the war against them. We were outnumbered, but they were overpowered. After they surrendered, I relocated wolves and humans alike in masses.”

Roman pointed to the symbols once more, but immediately indicated to the small letter of what I was beginning to realize were other human villages. Not far from every single pack was a human village, to the point that it was obvious it couldn’t be a coincidence.

“I broke apart every human city, separated them into smaller populations. I broke apart packs, assigned new Alphas and Lunas to each of them, and posted them nearby. I implemented rules that would control the humans’ knowledge, resources, and population so that they could never harm us as they did before. And then I named those human villages’ by letter: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta…” Roman pointed to each of the villages in order as he said their names. I was staring at him openly now. He stated what he’d done as a passing fact, without any remorse.

“That’s horrible,” I said quietly, frowning.

“They intended to wipe us from existence back then, Milena. I could have done the same to them. It was a war,” He merely responded firmly, a heat of that familiar hatred rising within him at the memory. He subdued it rather quickly with a sigh. “I’m only going over this because as Queen Luna, you need to become familiar with the land, every single pack, and their leaders. I will give you a list so you can learn on your own, but in the future you will be meeting them as well… after you’ve shifted.”

I hadn’t truly realized that agreeing to being ‘groomed to be Queen Luna’ would mean learning an entirely new world, but I hadn’t expected it to be easy work either. Roman began to roll the map back up, placing it where he’d gotten it from behind the desk at the end of the room.

When he returned, he stood before me with his arms crossed. I felt suddenly nervous with his eyes on me, but I withstood the inspection without blushing.

“How much do you know about the hierarchy within the pack?” Roman asked me, lost in his own thoughts as he no doubt considered what all I would need to learn.

---