The Sealed Luna: Claimed by Five Alphas

Chapter 3

Odessa's POV

"Nearly there, miss," the driver said, and since it was the first thing he'd said in hours, it landed like a warning. My fingers found the locket without asking me. I sat up straighter, smoothed my hair with a hand that refused to stop shaking, and watched the trees break apart ahead of us. I felt it before I saw it, a pressure against the windshield, a weight in the air, as if the whole night had leaned forward to get a better look at me. Halloran Crest rose out of the dark like something built to intimidate, black stone, spires, banners snapping in a wind that felt colder than the drive here.

The car dropped me at the edge of a courtyard lit gold by hanging lanterns, and the driver was gone before I could ask a single one of the hundred questions I'd been saving.

Students moved across the stones in crimson and silver uniforms, laughing, shoving each other, existing like people who'd never once had to wonder if they belonged somewhere. Every one of them turned to look at me the second I stepped out of the car, duffel bag on one shoulder, still wearing the clothes I'd left Larkspur Falls in.

"Wolfless," someone whispered, loud enough to carry across half the courtyard.

"That's her? The one all five of them stopped for?"

"No way. Look at her. She's nobody."

A girl in a perfectly pressed uniform bumped my shoulder hard enough to spin me half around. She didn't apologize. She just smiled and kept walking like I'd already stopped existing.

I stood there a moment longer than I needed to, duffel strap cutting into my shoulder, telling myself the whispering was just weather. Something to walk through, not something to answer.

A girl with a clipboard finally pointed me toward the administration building, where a bored looking woman handed me a room key, a folded uniform, and a campus map without once making eye contact. Pinned to the collar of the uniform was a badge, and mine was blank.

"Garnet Hall," she announced flatly. "Room 412. Curfew's at ten. Don't be late for orientation tomorrow." She tapped the blank badge. "Gold for heirs, silver for royal bloodlines, bronze for everyone else. Yours means unranked. The Crown Trials at the end of term decide the rest."

"Is there anything else I should know?" I asked. "About any of this?"

She looked up at me for the first time, something almost like pity crossing her face before it vanished again. "You'll figure it out. Everyone does, one way or another."

I found the hall, tall and draped in ivy, and let myself into a room barely big enough for the narrow bed and battered desk crammed inside it. I dropped my bag on the mattress, sat down hard enough to make the springs creak, and let myself have exactly thirty seconds of feeling completely out of my depth. Then my stomach growled loud enough to embarrass me in an empty room, and I made my way to the dining hall.

The hall was enormous, all stone arches and long tables and candlelight. I'd barely made it three steps inside before a blonde girl detached herself from a cluster of friends and crossed toward me, arm already looping through Rafferty's before I'd registered he was there too.

"So you're the wolfless girl everyone's talking about." Her eyes went over me slow, head to shoes. "I'm Thessaly. Rafferty's cousin." She delivered it like a warning label. "Rafferty, don't waste your time. She won't last a week."

"She's standing right here," I said. "You can talk to me instead of about me."

Thessaly's smile didn't waver. "I am talking to you, sweetheart. I just didn't expect you to talk back."

Rafferty didn't answer her. He was watching me from across the table with an intensity that made the back of my neck heat up.

"I don't need anyone to protect me," I told him, sliding into an empty seat as far from Thessaly as the table allowed.

"I know." He almost smiled, and it did something unfair to his whole face. "I still might."

"Don't bother." I kept my voice level, loud enough for the closest tables to hear whether I liked it or not. "I'm not interested in being anybody's fated anything. Not tonight. Maybe not ever."

The whole hall went quiet, forks pausing halfway to mouths. Thessaly's smile widened like I'd just handed her exactly the ammunition she'd been hoping for.

Across the room, near a raised dais, an older woman in dark green robes watched me over the rim of her glass, unmoved by the sudden silence.

"The Lost Luna has finally returned," she murmured, to no one, or maybe to everyone, her voice carrying just far enough for me to catch it and no farther.

I had no idea what that meant.

Thessaly followed my gaze toward the dais and gave a short, humorless laugh. "Headmistress Perpetua. She talks like that sometimes. Old riddles, old prophecies. Nobody pays attention to it anymore." She delivered it lightly, but her fingers tightened around Rafferty's arm, and she didn't look at the dais again for the rest of the meal.

I picked at my food, aware of every eye still flicking my way.

Idris had appeared without my noticing, a book open beside his plate, though he wasn't reading it.

"You're not eating," he observed.

"I'm not exactly relaxed."

"Understandable." He closed the book. "Most of what happens here in the first few weeks won't make sense yet. I'd focus on getting through tonight before worrying about the rest of it."

"That's supposed to be comforting?"

"It's supposed to be honest." He almost smiled. "I find people appreciate honesty more than comfort, in the long run."

"Then be honest about something else," I said. "What did that woman mean? The Lost Luna."

"I don't know yet," he admitted. "But I intend to find out. So, I suspect, do you."

I finished the rest of my meal in a silence that felt, for the first time all night, almost bearable.

************

Odessa's POV

Coach Ruskin ran me into the ground for a week straight. He was built like something carved out of granite, all scars and silence, and from the first morning of combat training he looked at me like I was a problem someone else should have solved before dumping me on his roster.

"Again," he barked, the fourth morning in a row I collapsed in the dirt instead of shifting. "You cannot fight like this is optional, Winslow."

"I can't shift." I dragged myself back to my feet, palms stinging. "There's nothing to shift into."

"Then you'd better learn to fight without it, because the wolves you'll be up against someday won't care that you're running short."

"So what, I just keep falling down until it magically works?"

"You keep falling down," he said, "until falling down stops scaring you more than the wolf does."

I couldn't sense a wolf. No pull, no ache, no matter how hard I reached for it. But I refused to quit, because quitting was exactly what half the academy expected of me.

Rafferty showed up to watch more mornings than not, leaning against the fence. Lachlan avoided the training yard entirely, which felt like its own kind of statement. Idris sent me articles about combat theory I never asked for, slipped under my door before sunrise. Dashiell made jokes I mostly ignored, though a few landed well enough that I had to bite down a laugh in front of Coach Ruskin. Emeric just watched, silver eyes tracking every move.

By the third day, whispers about me had shifted shape. It wasn't just wolfless girl anymore. It was the one all five of them want, murmured with a mix of jealousy and suspicion. Thessaly made a point of walking past every practice, arms crossed, enjoying every second of me failing to shift.

"You'd think," she called out one morning, loud enough for half the yard to hear, "that a girl worth five mates could manage a single shift."

"You'd think," I called back, not bothering to look up from the dirt, "that a girl with a whole pack behind her would find better ways to spend her mornings than watching mine."

That earned a ripple of laughter from a few of the students at the fence, and Thessaly's smile went thin and brittle before she turned on her heel and walked off.

The Moonrun championship landed on the night of the Blood Moon, exactly a week after I'd arrived, the sky bruised deep red above the stadium. The whole academy packed the stands like it was a coronation, chanting Rafferty's name before the game had even started. Moonrun was the Academy's oldest tradition, a full-contact game played half in human form and half in wolf, where the only goal was to carry the moonstone across the other team's line.

I sat near the back, wedged between strangers who didn't bother lowering their voices when they talked about me.

Rafferty played like the field belonged to him. In the final seconds, down by three, he broke through a wall of defenders and scored the winning point.

The crowd roared loud enough to hurt my ears.

When he turned, mid celebration, and looked directly at me in the stands, something inside my chest snapped into place so violently I nearly went to my knees right there in the bleachers. The entire stadium felt it. Every head turned toward me at once.

"Mine," Rafferty announced, voice carrying across the whole field.

I didn't wait to hear anything else. I ran.

I pushed through the crowd and didn't stop until I'd made it back to my room, shaking, my back pressed against the door like that would keep the whole night outside where it belonged.

There was a white rose on my pillow.

No note attached at first glance, just the rose, pale and perfect against the sheets. But underneath it, tucked where I'd have to lift the flower to find it, sat a folded scrap of paper.

I read it once, and my stomach turned to ice.

YOU SHOULD HAVE NEVER COME TO HALLORAN CREST.

I turned the paper over, expecting a name, a signature, anything. There was nothing. Just handwriting, sharp and slanted, pressed hard enough that I could feel the indent under my thumb.

I checked the window. Locked. I checked the door. Locked, same as I'd left it. Whoever had gotten in here had done it without leaving a single trace, which was somehow worse than a broken window would have been.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, rose in one hand, note in the other, listening to the celebration still going on somewhere out on the field, and wondering if it had been someone in that crowd who'd slipped up here in the dark to leave this waiting for me.

I locked the note in my desk drawer, turned off the lights, and lay awake wondering how many more roses were waiting for me before whoever sent this one decided a warning wasn't enough anymore.