Not Your Luna Anymore: Claimed by the Rival Alpha

The Crowning Blow

The doors were still swinging shut behind me when the sound hit.

A gasp. Then applause, rolling like thunder through the wood and glass.

I should have kept walking. My feet didn't listen.

I turned back toward the doors instead, toward the narrow gap where they hadn't quite sealed, and I looked through it like an i***t who wanted to be hurt one more time before the night let her go.

The stage glowed gold under the chandeliers. Ryan stood at the center of it, chin up, shoulders back, wearing the posture he practiced in the mirror before every pack council meeting. Beside him, Krystal's crown caught the light and threw it back in sharp little flashes.

Elder Whitfield lowered the second crown onto her head with both hands, slow, ceremonial, like she was something precious instead of something borrowed.

The crowd roared.

My chest went tight, then tighter, like a fist closing around my ribs from the inside.

This was supposed to be us.

I'd pictured it a hundred times. Ryan reaching for my hand at the exact second they said his name. Me, in a dress he picked out, not one I'd borrowed. Us, together, the way we'd promised each other freshman year when none of this felt real yet.

Instead I was standing in a marble entryway in secondhand satin, watching my whole future get handed to someone else through a two-inch gap in the door.

"Did you see her face?"

The voice came from my left. Two girls from the sophomore pack line, phones still raised, replaying something on their screens.

"When he said Krystal's name? Oh my god. I thought she was going to cry right there."

"She basically did."

They laughed. Not cruel exactly. Worse than cruel. Careless. Like my whole life falling apart was just good content.

I stepped back from the door before they could turn and see me standing there listening.

My heel caught the edge of the runner rug and I stumbled, caught myself on the coat check counter, and the attendant behind it looked up with an expression I couldn't stand to read. Pity or amusement, I didn't wait to find out which.

I pushed through the outer doors into the night.

The cold hit my bare arms like a slap, sharp enough that for one second it cut through everything else. I stood on the top step of Hendricks Hall and just breathed, in and out, counting the way my therapist taught me back in high school before I stopped needing to count.

I needed to count now.

Behind me, muffled through the walls, the band started up again. Something bright and celebratory. A song for the new Alpha President and his Luna.

Not me.

Never going to be me.

I made it down the steps before the first tear actually fell, which felt like some kind of accomplishment, some tiny scrap of dignity I got to keep. My car was three lots over, but Madison had my keys, and Madison was somewhere inside dancing with her boyfriend and had no idea any of this had happened.

I didn't want to go back in and find her.

I didn't want anyone to see me like this.

So I walked.

Campus stretched out dark and quiet past the reach of the hall's floodlights, the kind of quiet that only happens once everyone worth watching is somewhere else, at somebody else's party. My heels clicked against the pavement, too loud, uneven, because one of them had a scuff now from the coat check counter and it threw off my whole stride.

I should have taken them off.

I didn't. I just kept walking, arms wrapped around myself, mascara doing whatever mascara does when a girl cries in October wind.

Six territories, he'd said. Like that explained everything. Like three years could get replaced by a spreadsheet.

I passed the library, dark and locked for the night. I passed the quad, empty benches, a trash can someone had knocked over near the fountain. My breath came out in short little clouds.

Somewhere behind me, a door slammed, distant, and instinct made my shoulders climb toward my ears.

I told myself it was nothing.

I told myself a lot of things that night that weren't true.

The path curved past the edge of the athletic fields, where the trees started getting thicker, where the streetlights got farther apart and dimmer, like the university had run out of budget right about the place where good decisions usually stopped too.

I knew I should turn back.

I kept going anyway, because turning back meant walking past Hendricks Hall again, meant maybe seeing them come out onto the steps together, Ryan's arm around Krystal's waist where mine used to be.

I couldn't do that tonight.

So I chose the dark path instead. The stupid one. The one my roommate would have yelled at me for taking alone, at night, in a dress that didn't even have pockets for my phone.

The wind picked up. Somewhere off in the trees, something rustled, quick and low, gone before I could turn my head toward it.

My skin prickled.

I picked up my pace, one broken heel and all, telling myself it was raccoons, telling myself campus security did rounds out here, telling myself a dozen small comfortable lies to keep my feet moving forward instead of running.

Then the shape stepped out of the shadow at the edge of the path.

Tall.

Too tall to be one of my friends. Too still to be anyone in a hurry.

I froze, heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat, and the only thought in my head, clear and cold above all the panic, was this.

I am alone out here.

And I have no idea who that is.