My Rouge Luna

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

My Girls

Christa’s P.O.V.

The airport smelled like disinfectant and stale coffee. In the back of the cab I took my Glock apart with calm hands while the driver pretended not to stare in the rearview. He was more interested in the curve of my jacket than the click of metal, which made me smile; men always underestimated what they couldn’t see. I wrapped the parts in a napkin, dropped them in a trash can behind a newsstand, and stepped into the terminal with the practiced indifference of someone who lived in motion.

Ticket in hand, I bought a one-way to Atlanta, Georgia. The schedule fit: depart at noon, land around 2:30 — long enough to move from one bloodline to the next. From my back pocket I produced a scrap of paper with a locker number my father had given me for the drop. Locker 83 was tucked behind an employee stairwell; the combination opened with the quiet certainty of a taught muscle. I slid the duffel inside, shut the door, and pocketed a brand-new burner phone that blinked to life the moment the metal clicked.

“Is it done?” my father’s voice asked the second I answered.

“Yes, sir,” I said, keeping my tone steady. “The drop is made. The target has been eliminated.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll meet you tonight. Dinner at your place with the girls.”

“Okay, Daddy. I’ll see you then.” I closed the call and moved toward security. My stomach hummed with leftover adrenaline and an odd, flickering guilt that never lasted long enough to be useful.

On the flight my mind wandered to the women who made up the spine of my life — my girls, my pack by choice. We weren’t blood, but we were bound by better things: loyalty, shared danger, and late-night laughter that tasted like whiskey and victory.

Serenity—twenty-two, Afro-Latina, five-foot-seven—had olive-gold skin and hazel eyes that missed nothing. We’d met in Miami, a long job for the Haitian packs that went sideways until I’d smacked a drunk off her. She’d liked the way I fought and stayed. That was how our sisterhood began: fists first, contracts second.

Aaliyah was twenty-three and a witch whose temper and craft made men who messed with us regret the day they were born. Shorter than Serenity, with chocolate-brown eyes and fire-engine-red dreadlocks, she could dismantle a rival with a whisper and a hex. We’d crossed paths in the Virgin Islands on the same mark; we almost killed each other, then realized we were better together. Magic and muscle: a dangerous mix.

Normani — twenty-one, jet-black hair, green eyes — was our newest recruit. Full-blood Mexican, volatile, with a temper as quick as her hands. Two years ago Serenity and I, in wolf form, found her wandering the woods half-naked, smeared in blood and with no memory beyond a single name: Normani Rose. We brought her home. She’d stayed.

By the time the jet taxied to the gate, my mind had run through their faces a dozen times. I collected my luggage, found the garage, and swung a leg over the Kawasaki Ninja H2 R I kept under a third-party title. All black, mean, and fast — the fastest rig I’d ever owned. I laced my steel-toe boots, clipped the helmet, and slipped into the swarm of traffic, cutting between cabs and delivery trucks like a thread through fabric.

Home smelled of garlic and cilantro before I opened the door. My bike settled into the driveway next to Serenity’s green Ninja, Aaliyah’s red one, and Normani’s ridiculous hot-pink sportster. The sight made something at the base of my skull ease — the way you breathe easier when you find a familiar face in a crowd.

“Hey, hookers — I’m home,” I sung, throwing the door open.

Aaliyah and Serenity looked up from the living room, grins already forming. “Thought we lost you to the ‘Real Housewives of New York,’” Aaliyah teased.

“Yeah, that boy toy must’ve had you under a spell,” Serenity chimed. “Six months? Girl, you took your sweet time.”

I rolled my eyes and headed upstairs. Normani jumped from the couch and leapt into my arms the way a child does when she’s missed someone too much. Her laugh was bright and real. “I missed you so much,” she squealed.

“Hey, kid,” I said, hugging her back. She let go with a bright, wide smile.

“Okay, man-eaters,” I said, using the nickname we’d given ourselves. The pack instinct in the room shifted. “Daddy’s coming for dinner. We have a job to go over. Let’s get this place ready.”

Aaliyah’s fingers went to a string of beads at her throat. She murmured something low and soft — Latin syllables that made the hair along my arms lift. The house answered; it felt like watching a familiar magic come to life. Plates slid into place, the dishwasher sighed awake, candles lit themselves and arranged into clusters. A long table filled with steaming tamales, empanadas, and arroz con pollo arranged itself like an offering. Salsa music—old-school, crackling with history—bloomed from the stereo as if cued by an invisible hand.

“Damn, can you do my laundry while you’re at it?” Serenity asked, eyes wide with mock hope.

We laughed until we cried a little. The sound was home: messy, loud, and unconditional.

I went upstairs to change, feeling the weight of what tonight might bring settle like a stone in my gut. The house hummed around me, and for the first time that day the wolf beneath my skin growled — not for blood, but for warning.

A hot shower washed the flight off my skin and left me clean in ways I couldn’t explain. I dressed in a white sundress that softened an edge I rarely let show and put my hair up in a ponytail. Aaliyah had handcrafted dreamcatcher earrings for me — small, silver feathers and tiny turquoise beads — and they swung against my neck as I sat on the bed and opened the small ring box I’d taken from Collin’s safe.

He’d intended to propose. Collin had been kinder than most men in the business, but kindness rarely survives the ledger. I’d slipped the ring into a box with five others — trophies and regrets — and slid it under the bed where it would do less damage to my conscience.

The house downstairs was alive: candles, music, and the scent of food. When I descended the last step, I found my father — Enrique — dancing with Normani to the bright, insistent horns of Héctor Lavoe. He was six-foot-three, a presence even when he stood still, with dark brown skin and a long black braid down his back. He still favored his snake-skin cowboy boots and the black hat my mother had bought him when they married. Seeing him there, laughing and twirling Normani, made the room tilt toward safer ground for a moment.

“May I cut in?” I asked, and Normani smiled that warm, simple smile that came so easily to her.

Daddy took my hand. We moved to the music, and for an instant the world reduced itself to the rhythm between us. “Hi, Daddy,” I whispered, resting my head against his chest.

After the plates were cleared and the talk had slid from small things into the dangerous and necessary, he laid his briefcase on the table. The air in the room changed as he slit open a Manila envelope and spread its contents between us: photographs, documents, a press clipping edged in yellow.

“Christa,” he said, and the weight in his voice told me this was no ordinary briefing. “This is the job we’ve been waiting on for twenty-two years.”

My throat closed. The name of the night that had altered everything in our family — the night my mother died — had been a closed wound for longer than I could remember.

“I believe I have a real lead on who killed your mother,” he continued. He did not waste words. He was a man of action in a lineage that had no patience for sentiment.

He handed me a photograph. The man in it could have been carved from marble: curly brown hair, fair skin, golden-brown eyes, an Armani suit that made him look like he’d been born to command rooms. My wolf growled softly at the sight; she liked what she saw. My own pulse tapped a rhythm I didn’t want to examine.

“Carlos Santana Rivera,” Daddy said. “Current Alpha of the Dios del Sol pack.”

Normani, ever blunt, asked the question that had been pricking at the edges of my mind. “Isn’t this the pack you walked away from? Weren’t you the alpha?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I was their alpha. Carlos was my beta. He was young then — ruthless, and loyal. For a time I trusted him.” The memory tightened his mouth. “When Luna was killed, I couldn’t stand the betrayal. I left. I took Christa and we went away. For twenty-two years the wound has been a map I’ve kept folded up.”

Serenity and Aaliyah exchanged guarded looks. “How do you get to an Alpha of one of the most dangerous packs in the world?” Serenity asked. “This sounds crazy — dangerous.”

Aaliyah, who rarely spoke without some ritual meaning behind it, lifted her face and said what we all felt. “This job’s going to get somebody killed. I can feel it.”

Her voice dropped like a stone of warning into the food-lined air. When Aaliyah’s dread chimed like that, we listened, because she was rarely wrong.

Daddy spread another photograph on the table. “You won’t get Carlos directly,” he explained. “You’ll get him through his brother, Xavier Rivera — Carlos’s beta. Xavier is our target. Take him, hold him, ransom him. The Alpha will pay whatever price he sets. When Carlos comes to meet his brother, you will take him.”

Aaliyah’s fingers brushed the edge of the photo. “I’ll need to make two potions,” she said. “Potions strong enough to subdue an Alpha and his beta. Wolfsbane — in quantities that will put even a leader on his knees.”

“Do it,” Daddy said without hesitation. His face had settled into the iron I’d grown up watching wielded. “You leave in the morning. Here are plane tickets and burner phones. Do your research. Contact me once you have the targets — not before. And Christa…” He paused, and the quiet caught fire in my chest. He could see the fear in my eyes and the tear that threatened. “Make Daddy proud.”

He left without ceremony, the click of the front door like a period at the end of a sentence. We sat there for a long time after, the room a map of possibility and peril. The pictures of Carlos and Xavier lay on the table between us like invitations and indictments. I studied their faces until they blurred at the edges.

That night I slept with a heaviness that felt physical, as if someone had stationed a shadow at the foot of my bed. I could sense death circling somewhere close — not aimed yet, but patient. Whoever it came for, it would find resistance. We were not prey without teeth.