The Alpha's Tutor: His Forbidden Luna

Lara The teddy bear's ear was almost gone. I'd chewed it down to a nub of gray fluff sometime around my sixth birthday, and now, at eight, I still couldn't sleep without pressing my thumb into that worn little scrap of fabric. Mom used to tease me about it. “You'll bring that bear to your wedding, won't you.” She said it like a joke, but her eyes always went soft when she said it, like she meant something else entirely. I didn't know, that afternoon, that I would need him more than I ever had. We were supposed to stay on the trail. Dad's rule, Mom's rule, the ranger's rule painted on a splintering wooden sign at the mouth of the woods — but the trail curved wrong that day, or maybe I did, chasing a blue butterfly that seemed to know exactly how far I'd follow it before it vanished into the trees. By the time I stopped running, the trail was gone. The light was gone too, most of it, swallowed by branches knitted so tight overhead that the sky came through only in coin-sized pieces. "Hello?" My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. The woods didn't answer. Woods never do. I hugged the bear tighter and started walking, because standing still felt worse, felt like waiting for something to notice me. Every snap of a twig under some unseen weight sent my heart slamming against my ribs. I remember thinking, with the strange, matter-of-fact logic of an eight-year-old, that if I could just find the big rock — the one shaped like a sleeping turtle, the one we always passed near the trailhead — I would know which way was home. I never found the rock. What I found instead was a growl. It came from everywhere and nowhere, low and rolling like thunder that had learned patience. I froze. The bear slipped from my fingers and hit the dirt, and I didn't even reach for it, because right then, stepping out from a wall of ferns not ten feet away, was something that broke every rule I understood about the world. It was massive — a wolf, but wrong in scale, wrong in the way its eyes caught the dim light and held it, amber and unblinking and far too aware. I didn't scream. I wanted to. My throat had simply forgotten how. I don't know how long we stared at each other. Long enough for my legs to give out, dropping me hard onto the damp earth. Long enough for the tears to come, hot and silent, because some part of me had already decided this was how it ended, lost in the dark with a monster instead of my mother. Then the wolf changed. I didn't understand it then — couldn't have — but I watched fur fold into skin, watched four legs become two, watched a boy rise out of the shadow the wolf had been standing in. He couldn't have been much older than me. Ten, maybe. His hair was dark and damp, sticking to his forehead, and his eyes — I'd know those eyes anywhere, even fifteen years later, even after I'd convinced myself I imagined all of it — his eyes were the same amber, softened now, worried, entirely human in their concern even though nothing else about him was. "Don't cry," he said. His voice cracked on the second word, still finding itself. "I'm not going to hurt you." "You're a wolf," I managed, which was a stupid thing to say, but it was the only true thing my brain could produce. "I'm a lot of things." He crouched a few feet away, close enough to reach me, far enough not to crowd me, and something about that careful distance made me trust him before I understood why. "You're lost." I nodded. The bear was still lying in the dirt between us. He picked it up — gently, like it might break, like he understood exactly how much it mattered — and held it out to me. "What's your name?" I whispered. "Doesn't matter." He said it fast, like the words had been trained into him. Then, quieter, like it slipped out before he could stop it: "Alex." "I'm Lara." Something shifted in his face when I said it. I didn't know, at eight years old, that a name could land on someone like a verdict. I know now. I've felt it happen to me since, in reverse. He walked me until the trees started thinning, until I could hear, faint and impossible and wonderful, the sound of my mother's voice calling my name somewhere beyond the tree line. He stopped where the light changed, like there was a line drawn in the dirt he wasn't allowed to cross. "Go," he said. "Straight that way. Your mom's close." "Thank you." I clutched the bear to my chest. "I don't — I don't have anything to give you. For helping me." He was quiet for a moment, studying me with an intensity that felt too old for his face. "You don't owe me anything now." "Now?" "There's always a later." He said it like a fact, like gravity, like something that had already been decided somewhere far above either of our heads. "Someday I'm going to need something from you. And you're going to remember this. That's enough." I didn't understand him. I was eight, and cold, and desperate for my mother, and the strange boy with amber eyes was already stepping back into the shadow of the trees, already dissolving into something that moved on four legs instead of two. "Wait—" I called, but he was gone, and my mother's voice was closer now, frantic, and the woods let me go as easily as they'd taken me. I told her I got turned around chasing a butterfly. I never mentioned the wolf, or the boy, or the debt he said I owed him. Some things, even at eight, you know better than to say out loud. I told myself, for fifteen years, that I'd imagined the whole thing. I was wrong.