Not Your Luna Anymore: Claimed by the Rival Alpha

The quartet hit the last note of the song Ryan and I always danced to, and I made myself walk toward him anyway. My heels sank into the ballroom rug with every step. Three years I'd loved this song. Three years I'd loved him louder than I ever said out loud. Tonight I was going to say it. The Hendricks Hall chandelier threw gold light over everything, over the pack elders in their dark suits along the back wall, over the seniors clustered near the stage waiting for the announcement. My dress felt too tight across the ribs. I'd borrowed it from my roommate. It didn't feel like mine. Ryan stood near the trophy case in his navy jacket, laughing at something one of his frat brothers said. He looked good. He always looked good. That was half the problem. I stopped a few feet away. "Hey." He turned, and for a second his smile was real. The kind I used to fall asleep thinking about. "Kayla." He glanced past me at the crowd building near the stage. "You look nice." Nice. Not beautiful. Not mine. Nice. I swallowed that down. "Can we talk? Before the announcement." "Kind of a bad time." "It's important." Something flickered across his face. Annoyance, maybe. Or nerves. I used to be able to read him like weather. Lately I couldn't read him at all. "Fine." He checked his watch. "Quick." My hands were sweating inside my gloves. I'd rehearsed this in the bathroom mirror a hundred times and every version sounded braver than this one felt. "I know you haven't said anything," I started. "About tonight. About who you're bringing up when they call the vote." "Kayla." "I just want to know." My voice cracked on the last word and I hated it. "Am I your Luna tonight, Ryan? Are we doing this together?" The music behind us shifted into something slower. A few heads turned our way. Not many yet. Enough. Ryan's jaw tightened. "Now isn't the time for this conversation." "Then when is?" I stepped closer, dropped my voice. "We've been together three years. I supported your campaign. I stood in the freezing cold handing out flyers with your face on them. I skipped my own sister's birthday for your fundraiser." "I know what you did." "Then why won't you answer me?" He looked at me for a long second. Something behind his eyes went flat and cold, like a door shutting. "Because I already asked Krystal." The room didn't go quiet. The music kept playing. People kept laughing near the punch table. But everything in my chest went still. "What?" "Krystal Vance." He said it like I should already know, like I was slow for not knowing. "I asked her last week." "You're joking." "I'm not." My ears started ringing. I looked past him and there she was, weaving through the crowd in a dress the color of dried blood, her hair pinned up like a crown that hadn't been given to her yet. She saw us looking. She smiled. Not a nice smile. "Ryan." My voice came out small. I hated how small. "You can't be serious." "Her family runs six territories, Kayla." He said it fast now, like he'd been waiting weeks to get it out. "Six. Do you know what that means for the vote? The Alpha seat isn't a popularity contest, it's math. I need her name next to mine on that ballot or I lose to Marcus Webb by a landslide." "So I'm math too? Something you subtracted?" "Don't make this into something it's not." "You're standing here telling me you replaced me for votes." "I'm telling you this is bigger than us." Bigger than us. Three years and that's what we'd become. A rounding error. More people were watching now. I felt it crawling up the back of my neck, that specific heat of being looked at by a room that already knows the ending before you do. Someone near the stage laughed at something unrelated and it still felt aimed at me. Krystal reached us. Up close her perfume was sharp, expensive, deliberate. "Everything okay over here?" Her eyes moved over my dress, my hair, my face, cataloguing every single thing wrong with me. "Kayla, right? Ryan's talked about you." Past tense. She said it in past tense on purpose. "We're fine," Ryan said, too fast. "Good." She slid her hand into the crook of his elbow like it belonged there. Like it had always belonged there. "Because they're calling candidates to the stage in five minutes and I still need to fix my lipstick." I stood there while she looked at me one more time, slow, from my shoes to my eyes, and something ugly and satisfied moved behind her expression before she turned away. Ryan didn't apologize. He didn't even try. "I have to go," he said instead. "This is happening whether you're okay with it or not." Do you love me, I wanted to ask. Did you ever. I didn't ask it. I already knew I wouldn't like the answer, and some things you can't unhear once they're said out loud in a room full of people who'll repeat them tomorrow. "Go," I said. "Go be Alpha." He hesitated. For one second I thought I saw something c***k in his face, something that almost looked like guilt. Then the stage lights brightened, and someone called his name over the speakers, and whatever it was disappeared behind the smile he saved for cameras. He walked away from me without looking back. I stood alone in the middle of the floor while the crowd rearranged itself around me like water around a rock, everyone finding somewhere else to look, nobody quite meeting my eyes. Krystal took Ryan's arm at the base of the stage. The emcee's voice rang out over the microphone, announcing the final two names for Alpha President and Luna of Thornridge Pack Council. His name came first. Then hers. The crowd started clapping, and somewhere in that applause I understood that whatever we'd built over three years had just been rezoned, appraised, and sold to someone with better connections. I turned before the crowning started. I didn't wait to see him take the crown. I walked straight for the doors at the back of the hall, my heels catching on the rug, my throat too tight to swallow, and behind me I heard the emcee's voice rise into the microphone. "Please welcome your new Alpha President and Luna of Thornridge University!" The doors shut behind me before I heard the rest.