TRAGEDY OF THE ALPHA’S LUNA

Mara's POV The trees blurred past me, but Jonah's scent kept slipping through my fingers like smoke. "Jonah!" I shouted into the dark. No answer. Just the wind dragging through the pines and my own heartbeat hammering in my throat. He'd promised to meet me at the ridge an hour ago. This wasn't the first time he'd vanished without a word but something about tonight felt different. My wolf paced beneath my skin, restless, refusing to accept my excuses. *He's probably dealing with Alpha business,* I told myself. *He's fine.* My wolf didn't believe it. Neither did I. Then I heard it, a low, ragged breath ahead, cutting through the silence like a blade. I slowed, pushing through a wall of brush into the clearing. And there he was. Not pacing. Not waiting for me with that half-smile he always wore when he knew he was late. He stood in the middle of the clearing, his shirt torn open, blood smeared across his knuckles and dripping down his forearm. "Jonah." I ran toward him. "Stay back." His voice cracked, low and strangled, nothing like the steady command I was used to hearing from him. I froze. "What happened? Who did this to you?" "Nobody." He wouldn't look at me. "Mara, just go. Please." "Not until you tell me what's going on." His head snapped up, and that was when I saw it, his eyes flickering, gold bleeding into brown and back again, like his wolf was fighting for the wheel. "I'm not asking," he said. "I'm warning you. Leave. Now." "You've never been afraid of losing control around me." My voice shook more than I wanted it to. "Why now?" "Because this isn't the same." He pressed the heel of his hand against his temple like he was trying to hold his skull together. "Something's wrong with him. With… me. I don't…" He didn't finish. His spine arched, and a sound tore out of him that wasn't human. Claws split through his fingertips, dark and curved, glinting even in the dim moonlight. Every instinct told me to run. I didn't move. "Mara." His voice dropped an octave, layered with something ancient and rough. "Run." "No." He took a step toward me, and I braced myself for teeth, for claws, for the version of him I'd only heard about in the stories elders told to frighten pups into obedience. Instead, my wolf went utterly still. Not terrified. Not defensive. She bowed. I felt it happen inside me, some deep instinctive part of my body lowering itself before he'd even closed the distance between us. It made no sense. Every nerve screamed *danger*, but my wolf pressed forward against my ribs like she wanted to close the gap herself. Jonah's wolf stopped an arm's length away. His altered eyes locked onto mine, and for one endless second, neither of us breathed. Then he growled; low, guttural, deliberate. Not an attack. A warning. I didn't understand the words, not exactly, but I felt them settle into my chest like a stone dropped into still water. Something ancient. Something aimed at *me*. "Jonah?" My voice barely made it past my lips. His wolf tilted its head, studying me the way a predator studies something it isn't sure whether to protect or devour. Then, without warning, he flinched hard, violent, like something inside him had been struck. "No." Jonah's own voice tore back through, ragged with effort. "No, get away from her." He was talking to himself. Fighting himself. His hands flew to his skull, claws still out, and he staggered back a step, then another, his whole body shaking like he was trying to hold two men inside one skin. "Jonah, look at me." I stepped closer instead of farther away. "Whatever this is, I'm not leaving." "You don't understand." His eyes were his own again, wide and terrified in a way I'd never seen on him, not during territory disputes, not during his father's illness, not even the night the elders first threatened to block our mating. "It wants you." "What does?" He didn't answer. His whole body convulsed, and this time when the wolf surged back, it didn't hesitate. It turned on him. Claws that had been raised toward me a moment ago tore instead into his own chest, raking down through fabric and skin. Jonah screamed, a broken, human sound buried under a growl that didn't belong to him. "Jonah!" I lunged forward. "Stay back!" This time it was pain, not warning. He staggered, gouging himself again, fighting his own hands like they belonged to someone else. Blood soaked through what was left of his shirt. "Stop… please, stop!" I grabbed his arm, and he flinched so hard I thought he might throw me off. Instead, he froze, breathing like something wild caught in a trap, staring down at me as though my touch had short-circuited whatever was tearing through him. "Why won't it hurt me?" I whispered. "Why does it only want to hurt you?" "Because I'm the one standing in its way." His words came out broken, half growl, half sob. "Mara, if it ever, if I ever come at you and it's not me anymore, you run. You don't look back. You don't try to save me." "I'm not promising that." "Mara..." "I said no." Something like relief and devastation crossed his face at the same time, like he'd expected me to refuse and hated that I had anyway. Then his knees buckled. I caught him or tried to. He was too heavy, too far gone, and we both went down into the dirt together, his blood soaking warm through my sleeve. His breathing turned shallow, uneven, each inhale dragging like it cost him something. "Jonah. Jonah, stay with me." I pressed my hand over the worst of the wounds, for all the good it did. Werewolf healing should have already started closing them. It wasn't. His eyes fluttered, fighting to stay open, fixed on me with an intensity that scared me more than his wolf had. "Whatever happens." His hand found my wrist, gripping hard enough to bruise. "Never let them make you my Luna." I went cold. "What? Jonah, you've spent months planning your coronation. You asked me to stand beside you. You *chose* me." "I know." His voice cracked on the words, barely more than breath now. "That's why you have to promise me." "Why?" Panic sharpened my voice into something I barely recognized. "Why would you ask me that now, of all times? After everything…" But his eyes were already closing, his grip loosening around my wrist, his chest rising in smaller and smaller movements beneath my hand. "Jonah!" I shook him, smearing blood across both of us. "Don't you dare, stay awake. Stay with me!" He didn't answer. I pressed my ear to his chest and found his heartbeat, slow but steady, and something in me unclenched just enough to breathe again. Unconscious. Not gone. Not yet. I knelt there in the dirt, holding the man who was supposed to become Alpha in three days, whose blood covered my hands, whose last words to me made less sense the longer I turned them over in my mind. *Never let them make you my Luna.* He'd wanted this. He'd fought the elders for weeks to have this. So why, in the one moment his body was tearing itself apart, was that the warning he chose to give me? I brushed the hair back from his forehead, my hands shaking, and tried to convince myself I'd imagined the whole thing, the growl that sounded like a warning meant only for me, the way his wolf had looked at me like it *knew* something I didn't. Then his eyes opened. Too fast. Too sudden, for a man who should have been unconscious. Gold swallowed the brown before I could even flinch back, and his mouth curved into something that wasn't Jonah's smile at all. A whisper slid out of him, low and certain, wrapping around me like it had been waiting its whole existence to say it. "She is the one.”