The Luna They Buried Is Awake

The shovel hit the earth above my head. One. Two. Three. I counted each thud as dirt fell onto the wooden lid of the box they put me in. I could still smell his scent on my skin. Kael. My mate. My Alpha. The man I was supposed to marry tonight. "Aria, don't make this harder than it has to be." His voice came from above. Cold. Detached. As if he was not burying his fated mate alive. I pounded on the lid. "Kael! Kael please! I'm still breathing!" "You are wolfless, Aria." That was Luna Mara, his mother. I could hear the smile in her voice. "A pack cannot have a Luna who cannot shift. You should be grateful we gave you a beautiful coffin instead of throwing you to the rogues." My throat was raw. I had been screaming since they dragged me from the dressing room. My white dress, the one I saved three years to buy, was torn and covered in mud. Three years. Three years I waited for Kael to mark me. Three years of whispers - "the Alpha's pet," "the wolfless orphan," "she must be good in bed since she can't be good in anything else." I endured it because he promised. On the night of my eighteenth birthday, under the Blood Moon, he held my face and said, "You are my Luna, Aria. Wolf or not." Liar. "Kael, you promised!" I screamed until blood filled my mouth. "The Moon Goddess -" "The Moon Goddess made a mistake," Kael interrupted. His voice was closer now, right above the coffin. For a second I thought he would open it. "My true mate is here, Aria. My second chance." A second chance. So I was the mistake to be erased. Then I heard her. A soft, sweet laugh I knew too well. "Kael, darling, she's scaring the pups. Just finish it." Lena. My cousin. My best friend. The one who helped me zip my dress tonight. Lena, who was wolfless like me until two weeks ago when she suddenly shifted into a pure white wolf. A blessed wolf. A Luna wolf. Lena, who was now standing on my grave in my wedding shoes. The dirt came faster. My little air hole was closing. Panic is a strange thing. It makes you calm. I stopped screaming. I pressed my hand to my flat belly. The secret I had been saving for tonight. For him. I was two weeks late. The healer had confirmed it yesterday. I was carrying the Alpha heir. An heir who would have been wolfless too, probably. An heir they would never want. "You will regret this," I whispered, not to them, but to the darkness. "I swear on my life and my child's life, I will make you all regret this." The last speck of moonlight disappeared. And then, silence. I thought death would be quiet. It wasn't. The earth was heavy. So heavy it cracked my ribs. I couldn't breathe. I clawed at the wood until my nails bled. I prayed to the Moon Goddess I no longer believed in. Then... I heard it. _Thump._ Not from above. From _below_. _Thump. Thump._ Something was beating under the dirt. A heartbeat that was not mine. The ground under my coffin gave way, and I fell. I fell into cold water and ancient hands. I woke up to a pair of silver eyes. "Well," an old woman's voice cackled, her face inches from mine. Her eyes glowed like the moon itself. "The buried Luna is still warm. The prophecy was right." I tried to move. I was no longer in a coffin. I was on a stone altar, deep in a cave that pulsed with blue light. The water around me was black, and it smelled like blood and centuries. "Where- where am I?" My voice was broken glass. "The Hollow. Where all rejected things go to become powerful," she said. She pressed a wrinkled hand to my chest, right over my heart. "He buried you on sacred ground, silly Alpha. He buried a Luna on the Grave of the First Wolf. Did he not teach you history?" Pain exploded. Not the pain of suffocation. A different pain. Like my bones were breaking and reforming. Like something was tearing me open from the inside. I screamed. This time, no one could hear me. "Shift, little wolfless girl," the old woman whispered. "Show me what you really are." My spine arched. My skin burned. And for the first time in twenty years of emptiness, I felt her. A wolf. Not a normal wolf. Massive, black as the abyss, with eyes like molten gold. She had been sleeping inside me my whole life, chained. She rose. And when I opened my mouth, it was not a scream that came out. It was a howl that made the entire mountain bleed. Outside, in the pack house where my cousin was wearing my dress and drinking my champagne, every wolf in the North dropped to their knees. Including Alpha Kael. His eyes went black. He clutched his chest. Because for the first time since he rejected me, he felt our bond again. Only now, it was not begging. It was burning him alive. ---