Claimed by Alpha and Omega: The Fated Luna

CHAPTER 13: The First Blood

The festival square fell apart in seconds.

"Seal the gates!"

"Protect the civilians!"

Merchants abandoned their stalls. Parents screamed for their children through the smoke. Only minutes earlier, the square had been full of music and laughter. Now it held nothing but screaming and the acrid smell of burning canvas.

I searched the crowd for the hooded man, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. "He was right there," I muttered, pushing through the terrified villagers. But he was gone, as though he had never existed at all.

Cassian caught my wrist before I could go any farther, his grip firm but careful, the same restraint he always used when he touched me, as if he were afraid of holding on too tightly.

"Do not," he said.

"I have to find him."

"And if he is trying to lure you away?"

I stopped cold. That thought had not crossed my mind, and honestly, it frightened me more than the fire did. I looked up at him, and for one brief moment his amber eyes held mine with something that felt less like command and more like fear for me, quickly smoothed away before I could be certain of it.

Kael reached us then, his face unusually serious, all the easy warmth gone from it. Under different circumstances, I might have teased him about it. Not tonight.

"Cassian is right," Kael said, glancing between the two of us, his gaze catching for half a second on where Cassian's hand still circled my wrist before releasing it. "Whoever started this fire wanted confusion."

"So they could escape?" I asked.

"No," Kael said. "So someone else could move without being seen."

A chill passed through all three of us at once, and for a moment we simply stood together in the smoke, closer than the danger alone required.

I did not witness what happened on the northern road. I only pieced it together afterward, from shaking voices and half-finished sentences, though I have turned it over in my mind so many times since that it feels almost like my own memory.

A Born Wolf patrol had been escorting supply wagons north while a group of Omega traders traveled the opposite direction, their business at the festival finished. Neither side expected trouble. Then an arrow flew from the trees and struck one of the Born Wolves in the shoulder. Masked warriors in dark cloaks charged from both sides of the road, one wearing a stolen Omega cloak, another carrying the broken crest of a Born Wolf like a trophy. Nobody could tell who was attacking whom. By the time the attackers vanished back into the forest, wolves from both factions lay wounded in the dirt, and nobody had seen a single face beneath those hoods. Only a silver symbol, carved into black arm guards.

A wounded messenger staggered into the square as I stood catching my breath. "My Alpha," he gasped. "The northern convoy. It was attacked."

Cassian stepped forward at once. "By whom?"

The messenger hesitated, and that hesitation told me more than his words did.

"We do not know," he admitted. "They looked like Omegas. But they also killed Omegas."

Kael's eyes narrowed. "That makes no sense."

"It does not have to," Cassian said quietly, and something in the way he said it made my stomach drop. "It only has to make us blame each other."

I understood, in that moment, that he had already grasped something the rest of us had not caught up to yet, and watching the weight of it settle over his face, I wanted nothing more than to stand beside him and carry some part of it.

The fragile peace fell apart anyway. A furious Born Wolf captain rounded on Kael's escort. "Your people crossed our patrol route!"

An Omega warrior shot back, "We lost our own brothers!"

"Liar!"

Steel left its sheath before anyone could stop it. Within seconds, dozens of wolves were fighting. I threw myself toward the center of it.

"Stop!"

Nobody listened. Years of bitterness had exploded into fists, claws, and steel, and I was only one voice trying to shout down a war neither side had chosen.

Then I saw him. A little boy, frightened out of his mind, trapped beneath an overturned cart while the fighting spread around him like fire through dry grass. I did not think. I ran.

A loose spear flew through the smoke.

"Raye!"

Cassian's voice tore through the chaos, and then his arms closed around me, hauling me sideways just as the spear struck the ground exactly where I had been standing a heartbeat earlier. My ears rang. My knees hit the dirt, and his body curved protectively over mine, his heartbeat pounding hard enough that I could feel it against my back.

For one suspended second, neither of us moved. His breath came unsteady near my ear, and his arms did not loosen right away, as though letting go too quickly might undo whatever he had just prevented.

"Are you hurt," he asked, low, his voice rough in a way I had not heard from him before.

"No," I managed. "You caught me."

His eyes found mine, and something passed between us that had nothing to do with the war breaking out around us, something that made my chest ache in an entirely different way than fear.

Then a shadow moved behind him. A second attacker rose out of the smoke, a dagger aimed straight for Cassian's back.

I could not find my voice fast enough.

Kael reacted before I managed a single sound, blocking the strike with his own blade, the clash ringing out sharp and close. For one strange, suspended moment, the Alpha King and the Omega Commander stood back-to-back in the smoke, neither of them speaking, neither of them questioning why the other had appeared exactly when needed. They simply fought, side by side, against whatever enemy was hiding in the chaos around us.

I sat in the dirt, staring at the two of them, and thought that of everything I had expected to witness that night, this was not one of them. Somewhere beneath the fear still shaking through me, I felt something else entirely, a quiet, terrifying gratitude that both of them had reached for me before either had reached for the fight.

I did not see the man on the bell tower myself. I learned of him only later, secondhand, in fragments too precise to have been imagined, and I have wondered since who told it to me so exactly.

He had stood high above Moonfall, watching the square burn beneath him as though it were a performance arranged for his benefit alone, another cloaked figure beside him confirming that the first stage was complete, that the two factions had begun doubting each other again. When asked whether I still believed I could stop what was coming, he was said to have laughed, quiet and humorless, before turning his back on the fire below.

Whatever the truth of that account, it changed nothing about what came next.

As the sun sank behind the mountains, horns echoed from the northern hills. One horn. Then another. Then dozens.

Every Born Wolf warrior around me froze mid-motion, as though someone had stopped the entire fight with a single breath.

Cassian's face hardened, his hand finding my shoulder and drawing me instinctively closer to him.

"Those are not ours," he said.

Kael turned toward the ridge, and for the first time all night, I saw something close to fear cross his face. "They are not ours either."

Silhouettes began to rise against the fading light. Not ten. Not twenty. Hundreds, spreading across the ridge like ink soaking through paper, carrying no banners, no pack crests. Only black armor, and silver wolf symbols catching the last light of the dying sun.

I stood between the two of them in the wreckage, blood on my hands that was not mine, Cassian's fingers still curled protectively at my shoulder and Kael's stance angled instinctively to shield my other side, and understood, perhaps for the first time, that this was so much larger than a burning market stall.

For the first time in generations, the neutral town of Moonfall stood on the edge of a war that neither the Born Wolves nor the Bitten Wolves had actually started. And as the horns kept sounding, closer with every breath, I could not stop wondering which one of them, the King beside me or the Commander at my back, I would reach for first when that army finally came down the hill.