The Rouge Luna's Retribution

The Alpha's Doubt

KILLIAN

The pack hailed me as Alpha under a sky still bruised with the last light of the ascension moon, and I told myself the hollow feeling in my chest was relief.

Selene stood beside me through the second half of the ceremony, golden-eyed and radiant, exactly the Luna a pack like ours needed — strong bloodline, trained claws, a father whose alliance would keep our borders safe for a generation. She'd smiled at exactly the right moments, inclined her head to the elders with exactly the right measure of respect, played every note of the role flawlessly, the way a woman raised for this her entire life would. I told myself I should have felt lucky. Every calculation I'd made said this was the right choice. Every calculation except the one my wolf kept running, over and over, underneath everything else.

Where did she go. Where did she go. Where did she go.

I told my wolf to shut up. I'd made my decision in front of the whole pack. A Luna needed to be someone this pack could be proud of, and Aria — sweet, unshifted, powerless Aria — would have been a liability the first time another Alpha came testing our borders. Selene's father alone was worth more to Ashwood's future than every drop of blood in Aria's veins.

That was the truth. I believed it completely.

I believed it right up until the moment, three nights later, when I woke gasping in the dark beside my new mate, chest burning like something had been torn out of it — and found nothing there at all. No bond. No pull. Selene slept peacefully beside me, and I felt toward her exactly what I'd felt toward her the day before, and the day before that: respect. Alliance. Nothing that hummed under my skin the way the bond with Aria used to, before I'd killed it myself in front of three hundred witnesses.

I told myself that was normal. Arranged matches took time to deepen into something real. My father had told me as much, once, in one of the rare moments he spoke of my mother with something other than duty in his voice.

I didn't examine too closely why the thought made my stomach twist.

"You're distracted," Selene said over breakfast the next morning, watching me with the sharp, assessing eyes of a woman who'd been raised to read Alphas for a living, her fork resting untouched against her plate. "Second thoughts, husband?"

"No," I said, too quickly.

Selene's mouth curved, not quite warm. "Good. Because my father doesn't tolerate wasted alliances, and neither do I." She said it lightly, like a joke between mates. I didn't think it was a joke.

I spent that week the way I spent every week now — settling border disputes, listening to elders who still weren't quite sure how to address me as Alpha instead of Alpha-elect, pretending the ache in my chest was exhaustion and not something with a name I refused to say even inside my own head. My father, before he'd died, used to tell me an Alpha's first duty was to the pack's survival, not his own comfort. I'd taken that lesson and built my entire ascension around it. I hadn't expected the lesson to feel this much like carrying a stone lodged somewhere behind my ribs, one that grew heavier instead of lighter with each day that passed.

Selene noticed my distraction before anyone else dared to. She wasn't unkind about it — if anything, her sharpness was almost a relief after a lifetime of pack members too deferential to say what they actually thought to my face. But there was a coolness underneath her attention, an assessment running constantly behind her golden eyes, like she was still deciding whether the alliance she'd married into was worth what it had cost her.

It was my third cousin, young and thoughtless the way pups often were, who finally said Aria's name out loud in my hearing.

"Do you think she survived?" he asked one of the border scouts, not realizing I stood close enough to hear. "Darkwood, I mean. It's been a week. Nobody's ever come out of there once they went in."

The scout's answer, low and grim, didn't reach me before my wolf reacted on its own, a savage, possessive snarl building in my throat before I'd consciously decided to feel anything at all. Both wolves went silent and pale, bowing quickly and finding urgent business elsewhere.

I stood alone in the training yard, breathing hard, furious at myself for a reaction I hadn't authorized and couldn't explain.

She's not your problem anymore, I told the animal snarling beneath my skin. You rejected her. You chose Selene. That's done.

The wolf didn't answer. It rarely did, when it disagreed with me — it simply went quiet and sullen, the way it had every single day since the ascension ceremony, a silence that felt less like acceptance and more like waiting, patient in a way that unsettled me more than open defiance would have.

I told myself Darkwood had killed her days ago. Rogues without a shift, without claws, without a single soul willing to defend them — they didn't survive that forest. Nobody did. I'd grown up on stories of border patrols that crossed the tree line and never came back, grown men with years of combat training reduced to warnings other parents told their pups at bedtime. Aria had never so much as sparred in the training yard without flinching. There was no version of the math that ended with her alive, and I told myself that grief, not guilt, was the reason the thought made something in my chest curl inward like a wounded animal.

It would have been easier if I could hate her for it — for making me feel like this over a bond I'd severed on purpose, with my own voice, in front of everyone who mattered. I searched for that anger and came up empty every time. All I found underneath the guilt was the memory of her face in the pack circle, the way she'd held herself so carefully straight even as I destroyed her, like pride was the last thing she had left and she'd be damned before she let me take that too.

I told myself that, and some nights, lying awake beside a mate whose presence should have felt like coming home and instead felt like a well-made business arrangement, I almost believed it.

Almost.

Because underneath the belief, underneath the story I'd built to justify the worst thing I'd ever done, some small and traitorous part of me kept listening for a bond that no longer existed, the way you keep reaching for a missing tooth with your tongue, unable to stop checking the wound.

I had chosen power. I had chosen strength, bloodline, alliance — every cold calculation an Alpha was supposed to make.

I just hadn't expected choosing correctly to feel so much like losing something I would spend the rest of my life trying to name.

Somewhere past midnight, lying awake with Selene's steady breathing beside me, I let myself imagine, just once, what Aria's face might have looked like if I'd chosen differently. I shut the thought down before it could finish forming. There was no use in it. Whatever she'd been to me, whatever the bond might have grown into given time I'd refused to give it, that door had closed the moment I opened my mouth in front of the pack. I was Alpha now. Alphas didn't get to keep reaching for doors they'd shut themselves.

I told myself that, too, and eventually, exhaustion did what guilt couldn't, and pulled me down into a sleep with no dreams I could remember come morning.