Claimed by Alpha and Omega: The Fated Luna

"Leave her alone!" I woke to the sound of glass breaking downstairs, and then my mother screamed, and every second after that one is burned into me the way a brand burns into skin, permanent, and mine, whether I want it or not. I sat up so fast my head spun, and for a few seconds I just lay frozen under the blankets, staring at the ceiling, trying to talk myself into believing I'd imagined it. A vase, maybe. A window catching the wind wrong. My brother knocking something off a shelf on his way to the bathroom. Then I smelled it. Metallic. Heavy. Wrong in a way my body understood before my mind did. Blood. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it hurt. I threw the blanket off and ran for my bedroom door. The hallway was dark, but I could hear something downstairs — my father's voice, low, and then nothing at all. "Mom?" No answer. "Dad?" Still nothing, and the silence was worse than any sound could have been. Fear crawled up my spine like something with legs. There was a window beside my bed with a tree just outside it, the same tree I'd climbed down a hundred times to sneak out and meet friends my parents didn't know about. That night, I didn't use it. I ran downstairs instead, and I have regretted that decision every single day since, in the specific, useless way you regret things you can never undo. I won't describe everything I saw in the living room. Even now, years later, remembering it makes my stomach fold in on itself. My parents were gone. My little brother was gone. And standing in the middle of the wreckage was a man I had never seen before in my life. He was tall, broad-shouldered, unnervingly calm, and there was something almost beautiful about him that made him worse, not better — the kind of beauty that feels like it's watching you back. His clothes were spotless. Not a single drop of blood on them. He looked like he'd wandered into our home for an ordinary visit and simply hadn't left yet. Then his eyes found mine, and I forgot how to breathe. "You must be Raye," he said, my own name sounding foreign coming out of his mouth. "How do you know my name?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. He smiled, faint and unhurried, and didn't answer. Instead he started walking toward me. I stepped back. Then again. "Stay away from me," I said. He kept coming anyway, like the words hadn't registered as anything worth responding to. I turned to run, and his hand closed around my arm before I'd gotten a full step out. I gasped. His fingers were warm — too warm, feverish, wrong. "Let me go," I said, twisting against his grip, though it might as well have been a wall. He leaned down, close enough that his breath brushed my ear. "Survive this," he said, quiet, almost gentle. "What?" Pain exploded through my shoulder as his teeth broke the skin. I screamed. Fire poured through my body — not just pain, but something alive, something that had gotten into my blood and was racing through every part of me at once, burning as it went. My legs gave out from under me, and he caught me before I hit the floor, cradling me like something he intended to keep. "Survive this," he whispered again, that same terrible gentleness in his voice while everything in me burned. "And you will understand everything." I wanted to ask him what he meant. I wanted to ask him where my family had gone, what he'd done with them, whether any part of this had a reason behind it. I wanted to scream until someone came. Instead my vision blurred, the room tilted sideways, and the last thing I saw before the dark took me was his eyes — gold, steady, and utterly unbothered by what he'd just done. When I was six, my father checked every window in the house before bed. Every single night, no exceptions, like a ritual he couldn't skip even when he was exhausted. I never understood why, not then. One evening I watched him lock my bedroom window for the second time that hour. "Dad?" He turned around. "Yes, sweetheart?" "Why do you keep locking the windows?" He laughed, soft and easy, but something behind his eyes didn't match the sound at all. He crossed the room and sat on the edge of my bed. "Because the world has more in it than you know yet," he said. "Like what?" "Some of it is wonderful." His smile faded a little at the edges. "And some of it isn't." "So what do we do?" He brushed the hair back from my face, the way he always did when he was about to say something he meant completely. "We keep the wonderful close." "And the bad things?" "We keep them outside." I giggled, because I was six and none of it sounded real yet. "That's a strange answer." "Someday," he said quietly, "it won't be." At the time I thought he was just being mysterious, the way parents sometimes are for no reason at all. I didn't know he was afraid. I didn't know my mother was afraid too, in her own quieter way — that she sometimes stared out toward the tree line like she expected something to step out of it eventually. I didn't know they'd spent years looking over their shoulders, waiting for a night exactly like the one that finally came. I didn't know any of it, until I did, and by then it was too late to matter. When consciousness came back, I wasn't sure at first whether I was actually awake or just dreaming about being awake. My whole body felt like it was still burning from the inside. My fingers twitched before I could make them do anything else. Opening my eyes felt like an enormous effort, more than it had any right to. Somewhere close by, voices moved in and out of focus. "Her pulse is stabilizing." "That can't be right." "She lost too much blood." "Then explain how she's still alive." I wanted to speak and couldn't. The voices drifted further away, and then something cold touched my skin — a hand, checking my pulse at the wrist. The instant their fingers made contact, I heard it: a heartbeat, loud and clear, far too loud to be my own alone. Thump. My eyes snapped open. White ceiling. Lights so bright they burned. A hospital. I tried to move and pain lanced through my whole body at once. A nurse leaned over me, her hand settling light on my shoulder. "Easy," she said. "You're safe." Safe. The word almost made me laugh out loud, and not because it was funny. My family was dead. My home was gone. I had no idea what had happened to me in that living room, only that something had. And underneath the pain, something else had started — I could hear footsteps out in the hallway, someone coughing three rooms down, a machine beeping somewhere far off, rain tapping against a window I couldn't even see. All of it, all at once, layered on top of each other like the world had turned its volume up only for me. My breathing sped up. The nurse's expression shifted, careful now, watching me differently. "Raye?" I looked at her. "Why can I hear everyone's heartbeat?" Her mouth opened like she meant to answer that, like there was actually an answer she could give me. She never got the chance. A low growl rolled through my mind before she could speak — not from outside me. From inside. Run. My blood went cold. I looked around the room. Nobody else had reacted at all, like I was the only one who'd heard it, because I was. They are already here. My heart started pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. Then, over it, I heard footsteps in the hallway — slow, heavy, deliberate, the kind of footsteps that aren't in a hurry because they already know exactly where they're going. They stopped just outside my door. The handle turned. And in the half-second before the door swung open, I understood something that settled into my chest like a stone: whatever had happened to me that night hadn't ended when I lost consciousness in my parents' living room. It had only just started.