My Rouge Luna

Chapter 11

Answers and Questions

Christa’s P.O.V.

The garden lanterns blurred into a ring of soft gold as I followed my cousin in law down the hallway. Her steps were steady, her fingers curled around the handle like a talisman. When she paused and pushed the door open, he was there — my father’s former second-in-command, impeccably dressed in black silk and Prada, cufflinks catching the light like eyes. For a beat we simply regarded one another as if two histories had collided.

Then it hit me the question I was supposed to ask!

“What do you mean, ‘the former Alpha’?” I asked the woman at my side, the question sharper than I intended.

She looked at me, pity and fatigue folding her face. “You really don’t know,” she said softly.

The sentence lodged in me like a splinter. “Know what? What don’t I know? What have you kept from me?” My voice vibrated with equal parts anger and dread.

Before she could answer, the man in black — Carlos — appeared he said nothing. He watched me as if measuring wind. I pinched the bridge of my nose, dizzy with a hundred half-truths. Everything I’d thought I knew about my life felt suddenly like a costume I’d been wearing in someone else’s play.

I left them standing there and drifted through the house until the noise of the family reached me: laughter, the clink of forks, a ribbon of music. The long table in the garden was full — cousins, aunts and uncles, children chasing each other beneath the lights. For a moment it looked like a scene from some life that wasn’t mine: easy and domestic, ordinary and impossible.

I slipped into the seat between my sisters and tried to fold myself into the scene. Plates were passed; stories were told. Carlos moved among them with the careful ease of a man who belonged. From time to time he looked my way, and I returned his glance once, twice, like a test.

When the children were dismissed and the servants left, only adults remained — the twins, Aunt Maggie and Pablo, and Carlos. Ramiro produced a joint and passed it around; by the time it came to me, the smoke felt like a small permission to breathe. I inhaled, let the world blur at the edges, and met my aunt’s eyes.

“All right,” I said, and my voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Tell me. Start at the beginning.”

She folded her hands in her lap and let out a slow breath. “Your father, Enrique, was once a different man. He was a leader — strong, strict, and for a time, he kept the peace. Your mother came to us as part of a pact, a union meant to secure a future for both our bloodlines. She loved him. He loved her. But ambition is a greedy thing.”

Aunt Maggie’s hands tightened. “As the years passed, Enrique wanted more. Territory. Wolves. Influence. He started taking packs — justifying slaughter as prevention. He convinced some that he protected them from plots, and slowly he consumed whole bloodlines. Families were torn apart. Children were taken. It became a reign of fear.”

My throat closed around a question I couldn’t bring myself to voice. She continued, voice low and steady as a confession. “When your mother discovered she was pregnant, she knew things had gone too far. She came to us with a plan — not because she wanted to betray him for power, but because she wanted you to live. We tried to be careful. We hired help that night to remove Enrique.”

A tremor passed through her shoulders. “But things went wrong. It stormed. Shots were fired. In the chaos, your mother was hit. Your father came back to the room to find your mother bleeding and you already being born. He took you and vanished. He had an inside man — someone who warned him an attempt was coming. We don’t know how he vanished. We didn’t see your body. We believed you dead. We mourned you.”

She looked at me as if searching for a seam where the story might be sewn together. “The council met and, in his absence, chose a leader. They chose Carlos — steady, capable. He held the pack while we waited for Enrique to return. Then, on your eighteenth birthday, when you shifted, the mantle passed to you. By law, the Alpha’s heir assumes leadership. This — all of this — is yours.”

I felt the floor tilt. “So my father engineered this? He stole me away so he could control the pack through me?” My voice came out thin and incredulous.

Maggie nodded. “We think he left to protect you and to buy time. Some of us believed he might return as Alpha. Others feared he’d build a power base and bend everyone to his will. Not everyone agreed with him — and that’s why your mother had allies. She wanted you safe. We wanted you safe.”

María stepped forward then, placing a steadying hand on my aunt’s shoulder. Her voice was tight with memory. “When I was young, Enrique came to my people. He demanded we submit, to give up our land, to join him. Our Alpha refused. That night he returned with fire and men. They burned our village; they took our children; they killed our warriors. We survived, but the cost was high. That is why we remember him as a monster.”

Ricardo moved closer and stood protectively by María. Her words were small, but they landed with the force of evidence. I stared at the faces around me — some open with grief, some set like stone — and tried to connect those faces to the father who’d raised me in secrecy and steel.

It was too much — too sudden. I fled before the next confession could land, and my sisters followed without asking. We walked until the house lights shimmered across the lake and the moon hung like a silver scythe above the water. The night smelled of cedar and distant smoke.

I sat on the dock, feet in the cold water, and the stars watched us as if the sky itself waited for our verdict. Serenity leaned against me; Aaliyah settled on the other side. For a long time none of us spoke. We were three bodies tethered to the same shock, each trying to map it in the dark.

Finally Serenity asked, soft and blunt as she always was, “Do you believe them?”

I looked at the tiny ripples spreading from my toes. “I do.”

Aaliyah’s voice found us in the stillness. “So what are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. My chest felt raw, exposed. “I have to think.”

“Then I have an idea,” Aaliyah said, the hint of a plan brightening her eyes. “We walk. We burn it down — the lies, the politics, the conspiracy. Pack, mate, all of it. We leave this place and go somewhere clean.”

I didn’t look up. “I can’t leave.”

“Christa,” Serenity said, quiet but fierce, “we lost Normani. There’s nothing pulling us back here except blood and ghosts. You can reject this. Reject him. Pack your things. Come with us.”

Aaliyah’s chest tightened with impatience. “Don’t waste time thinking about what-ifs. Choose your life. Your sisters are ready.”

I stood, and the water slapped cold against my calves. “You can leave if you want to,” I told Aaliyah. “I’ve run my whole life. I’m done running.”

My voice surprised me with its steadiness. I walked back up the path toward the house, toward words not yet spoken and a reckoning I could not escape.

At the top of the steps I paused and looked back at my sisters — at the two faces that had been my anchor through every broken thing I’d ever done. “Stay,” I said simply. “If we’re doing this — we do it together.”

They nodded. We were a small, stubborn pack in our own right. The lake caught the moon and held it as if daring us to make a choice. We would not run blind. We would not flee into oblivion. Whatever came next — justice, revenge, truth — we would meet it shoulder to shoulder.