Aftermath
1630 Words
Nobody moved for what felt like a very long time.
Luna was still on her knees when the silence finally broke, and it broke badly — a rush of voices all at once, someone shouting for the elders, someone else shouting for the Alpha, a child somewhere near the door starting to cry because the adults around her were clearly, obviously afraid. Luna stayed where she was, palms flat against the cold stone floor, and tried to remember how to make her lungs work properly.
Mine. Mine. Two voices, layered on top of each other like a chord that shouldn't exist. She could still feel the echo of them behind her sternum, foreign and enormous, like something had moved into a room inside her chest that she hadn't known was empty.
"Get her up." Alpha Draven's voice cut through the noise, and it wasn't kind. It was the voice of a man doing arithmetic in real time, trying to figure out what an omega girl marked by two Alpha Kings meant for his pack's survival, and not liking any of the answers he was coming up with. "Someone get her off the floor before the whole hall starts asking questions I can't answer."
Hands closed around her arms — not gentle, dragging more than helping — and Luna found herself upright, swaying, surrounded by faces she'd known her whole life wearing expressions she'd never seen on them before. Not the familiar contempt. Something closer to fear. Bree, of all people, had gone pale and was staring at Luna like she'd never actually looked at her before tonight.
"That's not possible," someone was saying, over and over, like repetition might undo it. "Omegas don't get marked. It's never — there's no record of an omega—"
"She's not an omega." That was one of the elders, a stooped, ancient woman named Iris who ran the pack archives and rarely spoke at gatherings at all. She'd pushed her way to the front, and her voice, when it came, was strange — not frightened like everyone else's, but grim, like she'd been waiting a long time for something she'd hoped would never actually arrive. "Or she wasn't born one, at least. Something's been suppressing her wolf. I'd wager my life on it."
"Suppressing—" Draven turned on her. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the fact that no omega has ever triggered the sacred stone in three hundred years of ceremonies, and this girl just triggered it hard enough to summon two Alpha Kings at once." Iris's eyes found Luna's across the hall, and there was something in them Luna couldn't name — pity, maybe, or recognition. "That's not weakness, Alpha. That's the opposite of weakness. Something's been keeping the lid on for a very long time."
The hall erupted again. Luna barely heard it. She was staring at Iris, chest tight, thinking about seven years of being told she was worthless, seven years of Bree's sneers and Wesley's guilty silences and her own quiet conviction that she must simply be broken somewhere the doctors couldn't find — and wondering, with a kind of vertigo she didn't have words for, whether none of it had ever been true at all.
"Take her to the healer's cabin," Draven said finally, rubbing a hand over his face. "Keep her there. Nobody talks to outsiders about this until I understand what we're dealing with." His eyes cut to Luna, and there was calculation in them now, cold and fast. "And nobody touches her. Not until we know exactly what she is and exactly what those two kings are going to do about it."
Mabel was the one who walked her out, arm looped through Luna's, murmuring something soft and steady the way you'd talk to a spooked animal. Luna let herself be led. Her legs weren't entirely convinced they belonged to her.
"I don't understand," she said finally, once they were outside, the cold night air doing more to clear her head than anything else had. "I don't understand what just happened to me."
"I don't think anyone does, sweetheart." Mabel's grip tightened, gentle and firm at once. "But whatever you are, whatever's underneath all those years of people telling you what you weren't — it's real. It's yours. Nobody can take that back now."
Luna looked up at the sky, at the full moon still hanging heavy and bright above the pines, and felt something shift inside her that had nothing to do with mate bonds or Alpha Kings. For seven years she'd built her entire sense of herself around being nothing. Around being the girl nobody wanted, the girl who didn't matter enough to keep, the girl whose own mother's death hadn't even warranted a real investigation.
And in one single night, all of that had turned out to be a story someone else had written for her. She just didn't know yet who, or why, or what they'd been trying to hide.
"They'll come for me," she said quietly. It wasn't a question. "The two of them. The Alphas."
"Probably by morning," Mabel admitted. "Word like this doesn't stay contained. Not with a mating this strong."
Luna wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold despite the mild night air, and thought about the two voices still humming faintly behind her ribs — one sharp and commanding, one warmer, gentler, both equally unfamiliar, both equally hers now whether she'd asked for it or not.
"I don't even know their names," she whispered.
"You will," Mabel said. "Soon enough, I expect you'll know a great deal more than their names."
Behind them, the pack house lights burned late into the night, voices still rising and falling in argument, and somewhere above the mountains two kingdoms' worth of trackers were already closing in on Silver Claw territory, carrying word of a girl neither king intended to lose.
- Writer
- chap_listContents
- likeADD