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Alpha Rylan produces a small silver ritual blade. “Each of you will prick your finger and place a drop of blood in the bowl. Then you’ll take the oath. The ritual does the rest.”

“Even us?” Darlene asks, eyes wide.

“Even you, little one,” Luna Selena says, smiling. “You’re part of the pack too.”

Alpha Rylan goes first. He draws the blade across his palm, not his finger, and lets his blood fall into the bowl. It hits the silver surface and doesn’t spread the way blood should. It pools, luminous, almost glowing.

“Lycan Alpha blood,” he explains, catching my look. “Stronger connection.”

Luna Selena follows, then Darian. I watch his face as the blade bites into his skin...the slight tightening of his jaw, the way his eyes flick to me before returning to the bowl. His blood joins the theirs.

My turn. The blade is cool against my skin. I press, and the pain is sharp but brief. My blood… red but I think I saw a silver glint for a brief moment… hmmm that’s different… something else for me to look into later… falls into the bowl and is absorbed immediately, as if the silver is drinking it.

“Now the pups,” Alpha Rylan says. Damian steps forward first, chin raised. “Does it hurt?”

“Like a pinch,” I tell him. “Quick, then done.”

He holds out his finger. Alpha Rylan makes the cut, tiny, precise, and Damian’s blood joins ours. He doesn’t flinch. That’s my little alpha pup.

Darlene hesitates. “I don’t want to.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I say.

“You don’t have to if you’re scared.” Damian taunts.

“I’m not scared,” she says. She closes her eyes and gives her finger. The prick is fast and her blood too joins ours.

“Now the oath,” Alpha Rylan says. He places his hand over the bowl, palm down. “Repeat after me. I swear my blood, my bond, and my loyalty to Silver Moon Pack.”

I step forward. Darian steps with me. His hand finds mine, and I feel the heat of his palm through the bandage where the blade bit.

“I swear my blood, my bond, and my loyalty to Silver Moon Pack.”

Our voices blend. Damian’s small voice joins ours, clear and steady. Darlene’s comes last, thin but certain, and the words leave her mouth and hit the air and something in the room shifts, the charged feeling intensifies, presses against my skin like a hand, and then...

The bowl ignites.

Not fire. Light. Silver white, pouring upward from the blood like a fountain running in reverse, and it hits the domed ceiling and spreads across the painted stars until the whole room is washed in it. My wolf surges forward inside me, not in fear, in recognition, and I feel the bond snap into place like a cable being pulled taut. Not just Darian’s bond. Not just the pups’. Something wider. Something that reaches outward and connects to every wolf in this territory, every heartbeat, every breath, a vast humming network that I’m suddenly standing at the center of. Our eyes change from the rogue red to our natural colors. Darian and Damian’s eyes are a deep, luxurious brown, and Darlene has my eyes, a glimmering green. I missed those eyes; I haven’t seen since they were pups.

“Oh,” I breathe.

Darian’s hand tightens on mine. His eyes are wide, amber glowing bright, and I can feel his wolf through the bond... awake, alert, pressing against the new connection with something that feels almost like wonder.

“It’s loud,” Damian whispers.

“It settles,” Alpha Rylan says. His voice carries a warmth I haven’t heard from him before, something almost paternal, the voice of an Alpha welcoming new members home. “Give it a few minutes. The bond learns you. You learn it. By tomorrow it’ll feel like it’s always been there.”

The light fades. The bowl goes dark. The room returns to normal, stone walls, painted ceiling, the quiet hum of the Pack House around us, but I’m different. I can feel it. The bond sits behind my sternum like a second heartbeat, steady and warm, pulsing with the rhythm of a hundred other hearts.

“So we’re Silver Moon wolves now?” Damian asks. He’s looking up at Alpha Rylan with that particular intensity he gets when he’s decided something is important and needs to be catalogued properly.

“You are,” Darian says. He crouches down to Damian’s level, one hand on his shoulder. “All of us. Officially.”

“Every pack has a bond like this?” Damian presses.

“Every pack,” I confirm. “It’s how wolves stay connected. How we know when someone needs help, when there’s danger, when...”

“Can every wolf talk to us now?” Darlene interrupts. She’s got her arms crossed, her small face scrunched with suspicion. “Like in our heads? Because I don’t want everybody in my head. That’s weird.”