MARKED BY THE MOON

The true Alpha

Kian POV

The words hang in the room long after Sable slips into unconsciousness, and I feel the floor tilt under me in a way it hasn't since the night my father died and left this pack in my hands at twenty-two.

The true Alpha is coming home.

"That doesn't make sense," I say, pacing the small healer's room, my mind refusing to settle on any explanation that isn't terrifying. "I am the true Alpha. I've held this title for three years. There's no rival claim, no contested bloodline"

"Unless there is," Luna says quietly, "and nobody's told you."

I stop pacing and look at her. Her face has gone carefully blank, the way it does when she's protecting herself from a thought too painful to let show.

"Elena," she says. "My mother. If she was your father's sister, and if she had a child before me a child born to carry the Voss bloodline directly instead of hidden away through adoption"

"Then there could be an older claim to this pack than mine," I finish, the words tasting like poison. "A sibling of yours. Someone with a stronger bloodline claims to be a Blackthorn than I have."

The implications crash over both of us at once. Everything Cassia orchestrated the border attacks, the framing of Ashwood, the war she was trying to provoke, none of it was really about politics or land or old grudges. It was about clearing a path. Weakening both packs so badly that when this true Alpha finally revealed themselves, there'd be nothing left strong enough to resist a takeover.

"We need to find Declan," I say. "He's the only lead we have to whoever's actually running this."

"And Cassia," Luna adds. "She's still in the holding cell. She knows more than she's saying."

I nod, but my mind is already three steps ahead, cataloging every resource I have, every ally I can call, every version of the coming days that doesn't end in Blackthorn burning to the ground the way its records room did tonight.

"There's something else," Luna says, and something in her voice makes me stop entirely.

"What?"

She hesitates, one hand pressed flat against her stomach in a gesture so small I almost miss it, so unconscious I don't think she even realizes she's doing it.

"I haven't been feeling right the last few days," she says slowly. "I thought it was stress. The mission, seeing you again, everything happening so fast. But now, with everything else falling apart around us, I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually think before you answer."

"Anything."

"Mate bonds," she says carefully. "The kind that get severed by rejection and then reignite years later when the pair reunites. Is there any chance at all that a bond like that could have consequences neither of us expected the very first time we touched again?"

I stare at her, and slowly, horribly, I understand exactly what she's asking me.

"Luna," I say slowly, my heart hammering somewhere near my throat, "are you asking me if it's possible you're pregnant?"

She doesn't answer. She doesn't have to. The look on her face tells me everything, and somewhere behind us, Sable stirs in her sleep, murmuring Declan's name like a

warning neither of us is ready to hear.