Claimed by Alpha and Omega: Trash Luna

2: Trash Luna

MIA'S POV

The walk to Luna Academy should have calmed my nerves.

It did the opposite.

The world outside the front door was, quite simply, impossible.

People strolled the streets like it was any ordinary morning, except nothing about them was ordinary. A boy jogged past with unmistakably pointed ears. A woman crossing the road had eyes the color of molten gold, tracking us with unsettling precision. Someone laughed too loudly nearby, flashing teeth that were far too sharp to be human.

I stopped walking entirely. Lila turned, following my stare. "What?"

I pointed, hand trembling slightly. She glanced over, unbothered. "Him? Oh, he's a werewolf."

My face went completely, utterly blank.

She studied me for a second, then laughed, but it faded fast when she realized I wasn't joking.

"You're serious," she said slowly. I nodded. Her humor drained into something more careful. She lowered her voice. "Mira. What exactly do you remember? Like — really remember?"

I froze mid-step.

That question terrified me more than the ears, the eyes, the teeth, more than any of it, because I knew the honest answer, and it was almost nothing.

I looked away, toward the horizon, where enormous gates rose in the distance, a silver crest carved deep into ancient stone. Students in matching uniforms streamed through them, laughing, arguing, some balancing stacks of books, some with wolf ears twitching atop their heads like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I swallowed hard.

“Luna Academy.”

I didn't know what waited behind those gates. I didn't know who Mira Vale actually was, underneath the borrowed skin I now wore. And I definitely didn't understand why an entire household of strangers expected me to simply step into her life without so much as a stumble.

"Okay," Lila said, mostly to herself, tugging me forward again. "New rule. If you see something weird, you point, I explain, we keep walking. Deal?"

I nodded, grateful for the structure of it, a rule I could actually follow, when nothing else about this day made sense.

"Good." She glanced sideways at me. "Also, for the record, most people don't just casually forget werewolves exist. That's usually a 'concussion' or 'curse' situation, and I'm choosing to believe it's the second one, because it's more interesting."

I gave her a flat look. "What? I'm trying to keep morale up." She grinned. "You're welcome."

We passed a fountain carved into the shape of a howling wolf, water arcing silver in the morning light, and I nearly stopped walking again, not from fear this time, but from something closer to awe. This world was terrifying. It was also, infuriatingly, beautiful.

"Don't get distracted," Lila said, catching my expression. "The fountain bites. Metaphorically. Mostly."

Mostly was doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Closer to the gates, the crowd thickened, uniforms in every direction, blazers with different colored trim, some students trailing what looked unmistakably like tails, one boy with a full set of antlers arguing loudly with a girl who kept swatting them out of her face. Nobody blinked. Nobody stared. It was, apparently, Tuesday.

I clutched Lila's sleeve. "You're doing the death grip," she said without looking. "I can't feel my fingers."

I loosened it slightly. Slightly.

"Better." She squeezed back once, reassuring. "Look — I know none of this makes sense right now. I don't fully understand what's going on with you either. But whatever's happening, you're not doing it alone. I'm right here."

Something in my chest loosened, just a fraction, at that.

Then a voice cut through the crowd behind us, casual and cruel in the way only rehearsed cruelty can be.

"Is that her?"

Lila's spine went rigid beside me. "Yeah," a second voice answered, lower, delighted with itself.

I felt the pause before it landed — the particular silence that precedes something designed to wound.

Then the laugh.

"That's the Trash Luna."

My feet stopped moving entirely, like the ground itself had frozen beneath me.

Lila's hand clamped around mine, hard enough to hurt, her whole body coiling like she meant to turn and fight whoever had spoken.

I turned first, slow and unsteady, scanning the sea of uniforms, but the crowd had already swallowed the voices whole, leaving nothing behind but the echo and the heat crawling up my neck.

"Ignore them," Lila said, too fast, too tight. "They're idiots. All of them."

Trash Luna. The words sat in my chest like a stone. I didn't even know what a Luna was, not really, not with any certainty, but I understood trash just fine. That translated in every language, in every world, apparently, even this one.

I wanted to ask her what it meant. I wanted to demand an explanation, drag it out of her by force if I had to. Instead, I stood there, mute in every sense of the word, watching the gates loom closer.

"Mira." Lila stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the crowd, forcing my attention onto her instead. "Look at me. Whatever they call you, it's not true. You hear me?"

I didn't hear anything. I couldn't. But I read her lips, read the fierce certainty in her eyes, and something in me steadied, even if only barely.

I nodded.

"Good." She exhaled, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. "Because we've got exactly four minutes to get to the orientation hall, and I refuse to let Sable's little friends ruin your entrance by making you late on top of everything else."

That, at least, got a real reaction out of me — a short, silent huff that might have been a laugh in another life.

"There she is," Lila said, satisfied, tugging me forward again.

We passed beneath the outer arch, and the noise of the crowd swelled around us, a hundred conversations layered on top of each other, laughter and arguments and the occasional low growl that I chose, very deliberately, not to think too hard about.

A group of girls near the fountain turned to watch us pass, whispering behind cupped hands. One of them; golden-haired, immaculate, radiating the specific confidence of someone who had never once been laughed at in her life, met my eyes and smiled. It wasn't a kind smile.

I looked away at first.

"Don't," Lila muttered under her breath. "Don't give Selene the satisfaction. She feeds on exactly that."

I filed the name away. Selene. Apparently there was a hierarchy here already, and apparently I'd been slotted somewhere near the bottom of it before I'd even stepped inside a classroom.

The orientation hall rose ahead of us, its doors flung wide, students streaming in like a tide. Somewhere above the entrance, carved into the stone in letters taller than I was, a single line of text caught the light.

“Only the worthy rise. The rest remain in shadow.”

Comforting.

I must have made some kind of face, because Lila followed my gaze and winced. "Yeah. The Academy's real subtle about the whole ranking thing. You'll get used to it. Or you won't, and you'll spend four years quietly resenting the architecture. Both options are valid."

Despite everything; the whispers, the stares, the stone reminding me exactly where I stood in this world's pecking order, I found myself grateful, fiercely and unexpectedly, for the girl walking beside me. Whoever Mira had been before I woke up in her body, she'd at least had the good sense to have a friend like this.

We reached the doors. The noise inside was a wall of sound, hundreds of students, all talking at once, packed into rows beneath a vaulted ceiling painted with a full moon so large and silver it looked close enough to touch.

Lila's hand found mine again. "Ready?"

I stared into the crush of unfamiliar faces, throat tight, and slowly shook my head.

She smiled, small, crooked, entirely genuine. "Good. Because I'm terrified too."

I blinked at her, startled into something that almost passed for a laugh.

"Now come on," she said, pulling me forward, "before we're late and give them an even better reason to talk."

We stepped through the doors together, into the noise, into the stares, into whatever this new life had planned for me.

I didn't know yet how many eyes in that hall had already heard the whisper trailing us from the gates. I didn't know how far the name Trash Luna had already traveled, or how many people it had reached before I'd even taken my seat.

And I certainly didn't know that somewhere in that crowded hall, half-hidden in the shadow beneath the painted moon, someone was already watching me, someone whose attention would, before this day ended, upend absolutely everything I thought I understood about the life I'd woken up into.