Chapter 18

I stood on the top step and looked at the door.

It was oak, studded with iron nails in rows. I had decided to stay. Not because he had begged—though he had, and well—but because he had held out his hand and waited, and because I had named my terms and he had said yes to every one of them. My wolf was satisfied. I wasn’t, entirely.

Once I went through that door, people would begin calling me Luna whether or not I had said yes to it. This might be my home. I might stand beside him for the rest of my life. Might. The word was mine, and I meant to hold on to it, and I was still afraid.

“Elowen,” Caspian said. He thought I was having second thoughts. He wasn’t wrong.

“Give me a moment.”

I took one breath, deep, the way you breathe before going down a cellar stair with no lamp. Then I put my hand on the iron ring and opened the door myself.

It was white.

Everything was white. The walls, the floor, the great beams across the ceiling, the ban