The Alpha's Regret: Claiming The Runaway Luna.

CHAPTER FIVE: RAVEN

The starlight inside me was dying.

No — that wasn't right. It was still there, coiled somewhere deep beneath my skin like a second heartbeat, warm and vast and impossible. But the wild, blinding eruption that had torn through me only moments ago was fading, retreating back into whatever hidden well it had come from. The shadows of the Whispering Wastes were already creeping back in at the edges of the clearing, hungry and patient.

I had bought myself minutes, not victory.

My knees hit the cracked earth before I could stop them. My hands clawed at the soil, fingers trembling so violently I could barely feel the ground beneath them. Every breath scraped against my ribs like broken glass. I tried to rise. I tried to do something. But my body — my poor, broken, betrayed body — simply refused.

The Celestial Wolf was gone.

Astra.

The name surfaced in my mind like a bubble rising through dark water. That was her name. The wolf inside me. The wolf I had carried my entire life without ever knowing she was there. She had answered my near-death like a scream in the night, tearing through the hex that had chained her for twenty-two years, and now she was quiet again — exhausted, maybe. Or waiting.

Waiting for what, I had no idea.

I pressed my forehead against the cold dirt and tried not to cry.

"You have no wolf, no magic, and no place in my kingdom."

Kaelen's voice echoed in my skull, uninvited, cruel. Even now — even after everything — his words found a way to hurt. The irony was almost beautiful, in a sick, twisted way. I did have a wolf. I did have magic. I had more of both, apparently, than anyone in the Blood Moon Pack had ever seen in generations.

And it hadn't mattered.

It hadn't mattered because he had already chosen someone else before I even hit the ground.

A sound broke through the haze.

Sharp. Deliberate. The unmistakable crunch of a boot on shattered stone.

My head snapped up before I could think. My body moved on instinct — one hand braced against the ground, the other raised, fingers curled. Starlight flickered along my knuckles like a guttering candle, pale and uncertain. It wasn't much. It wasn't even close to the inferno that had saved me earlier. But it was something. And in the Whispering Wastes, I had learned in the last few hours that something was the difference between breathing and being bones.

"Show yourself," I said.

My voice came out rougher than I expected. Hoarse. Wrecked. But steady. I surprised myself with that steadiness. Some part of me — the Omega Elara, the Omega I had been my entire life — would have cowered. Would have lowered her eyes. Would have begged.

That Omega was dead.

She had died on the floor of the Binding Hall the moment Kaelen spoke the words of rejection. Whoever I was now was still figuring herself out, but she was not that girl anymore.

The footsteps stopped.

Then a figure emerged from the shadows between the twisted trees at the edge of the clearing.

A woman.

She moved the way a predator moved — unhurried, balanced, every step placed with the confidence of someone who had spent a lifetime being the most dangerous thing in any room. A long, tattered cloak the color of old blood hung from her shoulders, its edges frayed and stained. Beneath it, she wore fitted armor that had seen more battles than I could count — gouged, patched, re-patched again. A sword rode at her hip, its hilt wrapped in dark leather.

But it was her face that held me.

Her skin was weathered and sharp-angled, marked by a thin white scar that ran from her left temple down across her cheek and vanished into the collar of her cloak. Her hair was black, shorn close on one side and braided tightly on the other. Her mouth was set in a flat line, neither hostile nor friendly — simply watchful.

And her left eye was gone.

In its place was a smooth, scarred-over hollow, as though something had taken it cleanly and never bothered to heal. Her remaining eye — the right one — was a startling, pale green, and it fixed on me with an intensity that made the fine hairs on my arms rise.

I did not lower my hand.

"You're either very brave or very stupid," the woman said, "to be glowing in the middle of the Wastes."

Her voice was low and dry, like a blade being drawn across stone. There was no accent I recognized — not Blood Moon, not Winter Fang, not the southern territories. It was something older, rougher. The kind of voice that had learned to speak in places where silence was safer.

"Who are you?" I asked.

She tilted her head slightly, studying me the way a wolf studies a trap — careful, suspicious, looking for the catch.

"Name's Raven," she said. "And you, starlight, are a very long way from anywhere that still cares whether you live."

Starlight.

The word landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. She had seen it. She had seen her.

"You saw what I did," I said. It wasn't a question.

"I saw a Celestial wolf tear a hole through a nest of shadow-fiends and scatter them like leaves in a storm." Raven's pale eye never left mine. "I've been alive a long time, little wolf. I've seen a lot of things. I haven't seen that."

A strange, quiet reverence crept into her voice at the end — so faint I almost missed it. She masked it quickly, but I had caught it. Whatever I had become in that eruption of starlight, it meant something to her. Something old. Something important.

"How do you know that word?" I asked. "Celestial."

Raven's jaw tightened. Just slightly — just enough for me to notice. She reached up with one gloved hand and tugged her cloak tighter across her shoulders, though the night was not cold.

"I know a lot of words," she said. "Most of them got me exiled."

We stared at each other across the ten paces of cracked earth between us, and I realized, with a slow, sinking kind of clarity, that I was looking at the first person in my entire life who had not looked at me with pity, or disgust, or hunger, or use.

She was looking at me like I was real.

Like I was a person she was trying to figure out — not a problem to be solved, not a weapon to be claimed, not a mate to be kept or discarded.

The realization broke something open in my chest, and I had to swallow hard against the sudden sting in my eyes.

"Why are you here?" I asked, quieter now.

Raven glanced around the clearing — a quick, practiced sweep — before her gaze returned to me.

"I walk the Wastes," she said. "I walk them because people end up in them. Most of them are already dead by the time I find them. Some of them aren't." A pause. "You weren't."

"You walk the Wastes to save people."

"I walk the Wastes because the Wastes are where broken things end up." Her mouth twisted — not quite a smile, not quite a grimace. "And I'm good at finding broken things. I was one, once."

Something in her tone — the careful, practiced casualness of it — told me there was a story there. A bad one. I recognized it because I had lived one of my own for twenty-two years, and only tonight had I started climbing out of mine.

But this was not the moment for her story.

A shadow moved at the edge of the clearing. Then another. Then a third.

My head whipped toward the tree line. The starlight in my veins flared in answer — small, warning, like a struck match. Raven's hand moved in the same instant, settling on the hilt of her sword with the easy familiarity of long practice.

"They're coming back," I said.

"Yes," she said. "They always come back."

The shadows between the trees thickened, deepened, moved. Shapes — wrong shapes, too many limbs, too many eyes — pressed closer. The air in the clearing turned cold, and the hair on my neck lifted as a low, vibrating growl rolled in from the dark like thunder.

I raised my hand again. The starlight flickered weakly along my fingertips. Not enough. Not like before. The wild, roaring thing that had poured out of me earlier was buried deep now, resting or sleeping or simply gone, and I had no idea how to call it back.

Panic — cold and sharp — tried to climb up my throat.

"Can you do it again?" Raven asked, not looking at me. Her eyes were on the tree line. Her sword was half-drawn.

"I don't know," I whispered. The truth of it tasted like ash. "I don't know how."

Another beat of silence. The shadows crept closer.

Raven turned her head then, just enough to look at me from the corner of that pale, piercing eye. There was no judgment in her expression. No pity. Just a question — simple, direct, unsentimental.

"Do you want to live?"

The question hit me harder than it should have.

Do you want to live.

Kaelen had taken that from me. He had taken my name, my place, my future, my dignity. He had taken the bond I had believed was sacred, the mate I had believed was mine. But this — this small, stubborn, furious thing inside me that was still breathing, still standing, still here — that had been mine all along.

"Yes," I said. "I want to live."

Raven's mouth curved — just barely — into something that was almost a smile.

"Then come with me."

She drew her sword in one smooth motion. The steel sang in the dark air, bright and sharp.

"There's a place," she said, stepping closer, putting herself between me and the shadows without asking permission and without making it about me. "Past the ridge. It's called Silver Peak."

"I've never heard of it."

"You wouldn't have." Her pale eye flicked to me. "It's not on any Blood Moon map. It's not on any map, little wolf. It's a sanctuary. A place for exiles. Outcasts. Wolves who were thrown away by their packs, their mates, their families. People like you. People like me."

People like me.

The words sank into something raw and aching inside my chest. I wanted to ask her more. I wanted to ask her how she had ended up in the Wastes. What pack had cast her out. Who had broken her.

But the shadows were surging forward now, flowing between the trees like black water, and there was no time.

"Can you walk?" Raven asked.

I looked down at my trembling legs, my torn dress, my bare and bleeding feet. I looked at the starlight still flickering weakly at my fingertips — not a flame, not yet, but a spark.

And for the first time since the Binding Hall, since Kaelen's voice had split my world in two, I felt something I had not felt in a very long time.

Something I had not been allowed to feel.

Hope.

"Yes," I said, and this time, my voice did not shake.

Raven nodded once, sharp and decisive.

"Then walk," she said, turning her blade toward the dark. "Because Silver Peak is waiting, little wolf. And the queen who rules it has been looking for someone exactly like you."

I froze.

"The queen?"

But Raven was already moving, her cloak billowing behind her like a banner of old blood, and the shadows were screaming at her back, and somewhere — somewhere far beyond the Wastes, beyond the ridge, beyond everything I had ever known — a throne was waiting for a girl who had been told, just hours ago, that she had no place in any kingdom at all.

I took my first step forward.

And I did not look back.