My Alpha Chose His Fake Luna Over Me

I made it back to my quarters before the shaking got worse.

The antidote had pulled me back from the edge, but my body remembered. My muscles twitched. My hands wouldn't stay still. I sat on the edge of my cot and pressed my palms flat against my thighs, trying to force them steady.

They wouldn't stop.

I closed my eyes. Breathed. Counted.

And then something inside my chest moved.

Not a pulse this time. Not heat. This was different—slower, heavier, like a massive shape turning over in deep water. My breath caught. My ribs felt too small. The thing pressed outward from the inside, testing the edges of the cage the wolfsbane had built around it.

For three seconds, I felt her.

Not words. Not a voice. Just a presence—vast and cold and utterly certain. She didn't speak, but I heard her anyway, the way you hear thunder before it breaks: *Enough.*

My wolf.

Eleven years of chemical silence, and she was still there. Still alive. Still furious.

Then the wolfsbane clamped down again. The presence receded like a tide pulling back. My ribs settled. My breath came shallow and fast.

I sat alone in the dark and stared at my hands.

They were still shaking.

I did not sleep.

---

The next morning, I went to find Kairo.

He was in his quarters, sitting at the small table near the window with his hands folded in front of him. He didn't turn when I came in. He knew my footsteps.

"You didn't have to come," he said quietly.

I closed the door behind me. "Yes, I did."

He was silent for a moment. Then: "They're going to announce her. Winter Solstice. Formal ceremony. I heard it from three different wolves this morning."

I leaned against the doorframe. My shoulder—the arrow scar—ached in the cold.

"I know," I said.

Kairo's jaw tightened. "And you're going to stand there and watch it happen."

"What else am I supposed to do?"

"Leave."

The word hung in the air between us.

I didn't answer.

Kairo turned his head toward me. His blind eyes were fixed somewhere past my shoulder, but I felt the weight of his attention anyway.

"He blacklisted me from every healer on the continent," Kairo said. His voice was flat. "Permanent. Signed by his seal. Do you understand what that means?"

"Yes."

"Then you understand that staying here is killing us both."

I pushed off the doorframe. Crossed to the window. Outside, the pack grounds were busy—wolves moving between the training yard and the main hall, preparing for the evening meal. Normal. Routine. As if nothing had happened.

"I made an oath," I said.

Kairo laughed. It was a bitter sound. "To a man who watched you convulse on the floor and walked away."

I didn't answer.

He stood. His cane tapped once against the floor.

"When this breaks, Diana—"

"It won't."

"—you need to let me go."

I turned. "No."

"You need to—"

"No."

We stood there, three feet apart, and neither of us moved.

Finally, Kairo sat back down. His hands folded again on the table.

"Then we're both going to die here," he said quietly.

I didn't tell him he was wrong.

---

I heard the Luna announcement confirmed that afternoon in the supply corridor.

Two warriors—Marcus and another Gamma whose name I didn't bother remembering—were standing near the grain stores, talking in low voices. They saw me coming. They didn't stop.

"Winter Solstice," Marcus said. "Full ceremony. The whole pack."

"About time," the other one said. "She's good for him. You can see it."

Marcus nodded. "His wolf's been stronger since she got here. More stable."

They glanced at me.

I kept walking. I picked up the supply manifest from the shelf. I carried it to the end of the corridor and set it down with slow, deliberate hands. I stood with my back to them and waited.

They left.

I stood there alone.

My hand drifted—without meaning to—to the scar on my left shoulder. The silver arrow. Fifteen years old. The night I carved him the amulet.

My wolf was quiet.

I left the corridor and went to find Kairo.

---

Nicolas saw it happen.

I didn't know he was watching until later—until after everything broke and I found the letter he'd left in the vault—but he told me in the letter that he'd been standing in the corridor outside the strategy room that afternoon. There was a formal session inside. Border security. I wasn't invited.

Aidan was at the head of the table. Hanna was beside him. The ranked wolves were listening to something the Beta was saying about patrol rotations.

Nicolas watched through the half-open door.

Aidan reached up—mid-conversation, unconscious—and touched something beneath his shirt. His fingers pressed against the fabric over his chest for just a second. Then his hand dropped.

Nicolas knew what it was.

The bone amulet.

The one I'd carved eleven years ago from the silver arrow shaft. The one Aidan had carried every day since, worn under his shirt at every formal event, touched in moments of decision when he thought no one was looking.

Nicolas filed the observation carefully.

That evening, he wrote the final lines of his blood-sealed letter.

---

The next morning, Nicolas requested a private audience with Aidan.

Hanna intercepted it.

I wasn't there, but I heard about it later from one of the omegas who cleaned the main hall. Nicolas had gone to Aidan's office. Hanna was in the corridor outside. She smiled. She told him the Alpha was unavailable and did not wish to be disturbed regarding "private matters."

Nicolas looked at her for a long moment.

Then he left.

But he didn't go back to his quarters.

He went to his old den—the one he'd lived in before he retired from the Alpha position, the one on the edge of the territory that most wolves had forgotten existed. He went inside. He locked the door.

And he finished preparing the vault.

I didn't know any of this yet.

I was in my quarters, staring at the ceiling, feeling the faint press of something enormous and silent turning over in the dark behind my ribs.

Waiting.