The Alpha's Regret: Claiming The Runaway Luna.

Chapter Three: Silver Peak

The journey to Silver Peak took three days.

Elara did not remember most of it.

She remembered fragments — the crunch of snow beneath Raven's boots, the bitter wind cutting through her borrowed cloak, the strange comfort of Astra's presence humming beneath her ribs like a second heartbeat. She remembered waking twice in the shelter of frozen caves, wrapped in furs that smelled of pine smoke and unfamiliar hands.

Mostly, she remembered the silence.

Raven did not talk unless necessary, and Elara found she had nothing to say. Every word felt too heavy to lift. Every thought circled back to the same broken center — Kaelen's empty eyes, the red light of the Severing, the crack of her own soul splitting in two.

She was grateful for the silence.

It gave her room to disappear inside herself.

"We're close," Raven said on the third evening, breaking the quiet as they crested a ridge of black stone.

Elara lifted her head.

Below them, nestled in a valley ringed by jagged mountains the color of old iron, sat a city unlike anything Elara had ever imagined. It was not grand like Blood Moon Citadel, all polished stone and banners. It was carved *into* the mountain itself — a warren of caves, bridges, and towers that seemed to grow organically from the rock, lit by hundreds of floating blue lanterns that bobbed gently in the wind like captured stars.

"Silver Peak," Raven said.

"It's beautiful," Elara whispered.

"It's a ruin held together by desperation and spite." Raven's mouth curved, almost fond. "But it's ours."

They descended the ridge as the sun sank behind the mountains, painting the sky in bruised purples and reds. As they drew closer, Elara began to notice the people — moving between the towers, gathered around cookfires, training in wide stone courtyards. They were not like the polished warriors of Blood Moon. Their armor was mismatched, scavenged, patched with whatever materials they'd found. Scars marked nearly every face she passed. Some had missing limbs replaced with metal or wood. Others bore the telltale black veins of old curses, faded but never fully healed.

They were broken.

And yet they moved with purpose. With pride.

"Who are they?" Elara asked.

"Exiles," Raven said. "Oathbreakers. Half-bloods no pack would claim. Widows of wars fought for masters who never cared if they lived or died." She glanced sideways at Elara. "The unwanted, as I told you. We do not turn anyone away who is willing to fight for a place here."

As they walked deeper into the city, heads began to turn. Whispers rippled through the crowd — not cruel, not mocking, but curious. Wary.

"Is that—"

"The light in the Wastes, three nights past—"

"They say the temple opened for her—"

Elara's shoulders tensed. She had spent her whole life shrinking from attention, from whispers, from the particular cruelty of being noticed and found wanting. But these voices held something different.

Not contempt.

Something closer to hope.

"Don't mind them," Raven said. "They've been waiting a long time for something to believe in."

"I'm not something to believe in," Elara said quietly. "I don't even know what I am."

Raven's expression didn't change, but her voice softened slightly. "Neither did I, once. Give it time."

---

They led her to a modest chamber carved into the mountainside — small, but warm, with a real bed and a fire already crackling in the hearth. An older woman with kind eyes and flour-dusted hands brought a bowl of stew and refused to leave until Elara had eaten every bite.

"You're too thin," the woman muttered. "Wastes'll do that. Eat."

Elara ate. It was the first real meal she'd had in days, and her body seemed to remember how to want things again — warmth, food, rest. Small mercies.

That night, alone for the first time since the Severing, Elara finally let herself break.

She curled beneath the furs and wept — for Kaelen, for the girl she used to be, for the future she'd spent six years imagining that had turned to ash in a single hour. She wept until her throat was raw and her pillow soaked through, and even then, the ache in her chest did not lessen.

**You are grieving,** Astra said gently, her voice a low hum beneath the pain. **That is not weakness.**

"It feels like weakness," Elara choked out.

**No.** The wolf's presence wrapped around her, warm and vast. **Weakness would be pretending it doesn't hurt. You have survived a wound that should have killed you. That is not weakness, little sister. That is the beginning of something else.**

"What?"

**Strength that has been tested. Strength that knows exactly what it costs to keep standing.**

Elara didn't answer. But somewhere in the long hours before dawn, exhaustion finally won, and she slept without dreaming.

---

She woke to sunlight and the sound of steel striking steel.

Elara rose stiffly and made her way to the window. Below, in a wide courtyard, dozens of warriors sparred in organized drills — some with swords, some with claws bared in half-shift, some with magic crackling between their palms. Raven stood at the center, barking corrections, her voice carrying easily across the yard.

Elara watched for a long moment.

Then, almost without deciding to, she found herself dressing and making her way down.

Raven spotted her immediately. "Couldn't sleep?"

"I slept," Elara said. "I just... wanted to see."

Raven studied her, then jerked her chin toward an empty space at the edge of the courtyard. "Then come see properly. Can't learn anything from a window."

For the next hour, Elara simply watched. She had never seen magic like this — raw, practical, born of necessity rather than court ceremony. A young man conjured small blades of ice between his fingers. A woman with burn scars covering half her face called fire from nothing and shaped it into a whip. None of it was elegant. All of it was *real*.

"They're all like me," Elara murmured. "Different. Unwanted."

"They're all like *us*," Raven corrected. "There's a difference between being unwanted and being unworthy. Took me a long time to learn that. Might take you longer, given what was done to you."

Elara's hand drifted unconsciously to her stomach.

Raven noticed.

"You've done that three times since yesterday," she said quietly.

Elara froze. "Done what?"

"Touched your belly like you're checking something's still there."

Heat crept up Elara's neck. "I don't know why I keep doing it."

Raven's expression shifted — something careful, something knowing. "Elara. When did you last bleed?"

The question landed like a stone dropped into still water.

Elara opened her mouth to answer automatically — and then stopped. Actually thought about it. Counted backward through the weeks, through the ceremony preparations, through the exhaustion she'd assumed was grief and nothing more.

Her blood ran cold.

"I don't—" She swallowed hard. "It's been over a month."

Raven set down the practice blade she'd been holding. "Come with me."

---

The healer Silver Peak kept was an ancient woman named Bethys, half-blind and entirely unbothered by rank or ceremony. She pressed gnarled hands to Elara's stomach, closed her cloudy eyes, and hummed a low note that seemed to vibrate in Elara's bones.

For a long moment, nobody spoke.

Then Bethys's eyes snapped open.

"Well," she said. "Two lives, not one."

Elara's heart stopped. "What?"

"You're carrying, girl." Bethys sat back, studying her with new interest. "Six weeks along, maybe seven. And whatever magic woke in you out in those Wastes—" her gaze flicked, unerringly, to the faint constellation marks still visible at Elara's wrist "—it's woken something in the child too. I've never felt magic like this in an unborn pup. Not in eighty years of catching them."

Elara sat frozen on the edge of the healer's table, one hand pressed flat against her stomach, the world tilting slowly beneath her.

*Kaelen's child.*

*Growing inside her, even as he stood in that hall and told the entire pack she was worthless.*

Fury and grief and something achingly tender warred inside her chest all at once.

"Does he need to know?" Raven asked quietly, watching Elara's face.

"No." The word came out before Elara had even finished thinking it, hard and immediate. "He gave up any right to know the moment he chose her over me."

Bethys made a small, thoughtful sound but said nothing.

Raven's one eye studied Elara for a long moment. Then she nodded slowly. "Then we protect this secret the same way we protect everything else in Silver Peak."

"How?"

"With teeth," Raven said simply. "And walls nobody can climb."

---

That night, Elara stood alone on the highest balcony of Silver Peak, looking out over the lantern-lit valley, one hand resting on the place where new life was quietly, stubbornly taking root.

**A child of starlight and shadow,** Astra murmured within her. **Rare. Precious. Dangerous to those who would use him.**

"Him?" Elara whispered.

**A son,** Astra said, with the quiet certainty of something ancient. **I can feel it. He will carry pieces of us both — light and dark, woven together. The world has not seen his kind in a thousand years.**

Elara closed her eyes, tears sliding silently down her cheeks — though this time, they were not entirely made of grief.

"I don't know how to do this alone," she admitted.

**You are not alone,** Astra said. **You have never been less alone in your life.**

Below, the lanterns of Silver Peak glowed like a hundred captured stars, and somewhere among the exiles and oathbreakers and unwanted things of the realm, Elara Veldris finally allowed herself to imagine a future.

Not the one she had planned.

Something else. Something entirely her own.

She placed both hands over her stomach and made a silent vow to the child growing there.

*Whatever comes,* she thought, *whatever this world tries to make of you — you will never doubt that you are wanted. Not for one single day of your life.*

Far to the south, in a citadel of black stone, Alpha Kaelen Ashford stared at the crack of dead veins spreading slowly across his chest and felt, for the first time in five years, the terrible weight of everything he did not yet know he had lost.