The Alpha's Contracted Luna

What We Bury

Lila went down before I even realised she was falling.

One second she was beside me bleeding silver out of her eyes after the strange light and the next, she fell in a twinkle of an eye.

"Lila" . I caught her a second too late, her head rolling against my arm, her pulse was reducing fast under my fingers. "Lila. Lila."

Nothing. Her lashes didn't move, her breath was becoming shallow and uneven.

"Elara!" My voice cracked in grief. "Someone get Elara, now—"

She was already moving before I finished shouting, shoving through wolves too stunned to get out of her way fast enough, and knelt beside us.Her hands moved over Lila's face. She held her hands checking her pulse murmuring words too fast to understand.

"She's alive," Elara said. Something lifted from my chest enough to let me breathe again. "Her body simply gave everything it had. She'll be awake in a few hours. Just let her rest."

"What happened to her?" I was still holding her, unwilling to let go."That light — I've never seen anything like that. Was she attacked by a strange wolf spirit?".

Elara lifted her eyes to mine. "That wasn't a wolf, Damien. That was moon-touched. A power some bloodlines carry buried so deep it never surfaces until grief or terror or love stimulates it. Tonight did all three at once." She smoothed a strand of hair off Lila's forehead, gentle as a mother. "It's rare. It's old. And it will cost her, every time she uses it, until she learns to carry it instead of it carrying her."

I didn't have room in me to ask more. Not with Lila unconscious in my arms and my father's blood still drying on my hands.

Elara seemed to understand that. She turned from Lila to my father's body, and her expression changed into something I recognized , the same stillness she wore over every Blackwood death I'd ever watched her preside over.

Except this time, she didn't speak right away.

She simply knelt across from me, her hands moving an inch above his chest, and went still in a way that made the hair on my arms rise. Elara the healer had presided over deaths than anyone living.

"Something's wrong," she said with furrowed grey brows.

"He's dead." My voice came out flat. "I watched it happen."

"I know what I'm looking at, Damien." Her eyes lifted to mine, sharp despite the tears still drying on her cheeks. "The body isn't decaying the way it should. The Alpha aura..." She shook her head slowly. "Hasn't faded."

The chapel went very quiet.

She turned to the handful of wolves still lingering near the broken doors and asked them, gently but without room for argument, to leave. When it was just the four of us — Elara, Marcus, Rowan, and me she said the words that would keep me awake for thirty nights straight.

"Do not bury him yet.".

When the news got to the elders of the pack, they protested against it. "Blackwood tradition demanded cremation before the next sunrise, the body must be released to fire before it could be defiled, an enemy could use it against the pack." Elara didn't budge." If you don't, you cease to be out leader Damien".

"Give me thirty days," she told them. "If nothing changes in that time, I will perform the final rites myself, with my own hands. You have my word."

They still objected against it.

I agreed before anyone could argue further. Hope was a dangerous thing to hand a grieving son but i took it anyway.

Before dawn, the four of us carried my father's real body through a passage beneath the Blackwood Temple that I hadn't known existed until that night — a chamber built centuries ago, Elara explained, for Alphas whose deaths had carried questions no one could answer. It was built with cold stone without windows.

Elara sealed the entrance behind us with old words I didn't recognize.

"Hope is dangerous," she murmured, more to herself than to me. "But sometimes it's all we have."

I knelt one last time and set his old chess king beside his still hand.

"Don't make this your last game old man." I told him like I expected an answer but he didn't answer. Of course he didn't. But some stubborn, wounded part of me needed to say it anyway.

At sunrise, the entire Blackwood Pack gathered on the temple grounds. A body was wrapped in our colors carried out and laid upon the pyre. But the body wasn't his. This secret was sealed between four of us. I stood at the front and felt like the greatest liar my father had ever raised.

Thousands of wolves howled as one voice.

Lila stood beside me in black, and when her hand found mine, I didn't hesitate this time. I put my fingers between hers and held on. Not because of the contract binding our names together but I needed something solid to hold, and she was the only solid thing left standing in my world.

I lit the pyre myself.

The flames climbed high and gold against the morning sky, and my pack watched their Alpha being laid to rest, not knowing that somewhere beneath their feet, in a sealed chamber older than the temple itself, a chess king sat waiting for a game that might never finish.

Ethan reached me just as the last howls faded, with soot across his face, breathing like he ran three hundred miles.

"Alpha." He barely got the word out. "We finished searching the vault."

I already knew somehow, before he said another word. Lucien hadn't come only for revenge.

Marcus read the inventory aloud. " The Founder Alpha's ceremonial sword. The Blood Ledger — centuries of Blackwood lineage recorded in ink that could never be forged. Treaties between the great packs, decades old, some of them the only surviving copies. Confidential alliance records. A sealed obsidian chest. All Gone."

"He knew exactly what he wanted," Ethan said quietly. Then I realized everything. The kidnapping, the chapel, my father's blood on cold stone, had been a distraction.

An advisor stepped forward before I'd even finished absorbing that. Clearing his throat like the words physically hurt him.

"Alpha. The Alpha Summit begins in five days."

The room fell silent in a different way this time.

Marcus suggested postponing but an elder cut him off immediately.

"If House Blackwood is absent after the former Alpha's death, the other packs will smell weakness."

"Some will challenge your authority outright," another added.

I didn't answer right away. I found Lila across the room instead, still in her funeral black dress, her eyes were red and puffy but steady on mine.

"We'll go," I said.

My men looked at me like I lost my mind. Maybe I had. But my father had never once run from a summit in his life, and I wasn't about to start his legacy with a retreat.

That night I stood at the balcony with thoughts running through my head.

Lila appeared beside me, still in black, her arms wrapped around herself in the cold night.

"Are you sure you're ready?" she asked quietly.

"I'm not," I admitted. It felt strange, saying it out loud. "But my father would've gone."

She was quiet for a moment, watching the dark treeline wherenthree nights ago, something had howled back at us that didn't belong to any pack we knew.

"Then we'll go together," she said.

I noticed it the second the word left her mouth. 'we'. small and easy to miss but somehow the loudest thing she'd said to me all day.

Something in my chest loosened for the first time since the chapel.

"Lila." I hesitated, unsure if this was even the right time to ask her."That night, the light. Do you have any idea where it came from?"

She shook her head slowly. "I don't even know my mother Damien, or seen her face. I don't know if she's alive or dead or if she ever thought about me at all." Her voice was shaking . "Whatever that was... just came out of me like it had always been waiting."

I pulled her into my arms, I didn't want her to cry anymore or feel the pain of being neglected. She has me now.

Somewhere three hundred miles north, Alpha Victor Carter sat through another summit briefing with the same bored patience he brought to everything, until a messenger came hurriedly through the council doors.

"Alpha! Blackwood has confirmed attendance at the Summit."

Victor didn't look up. "So?"

The messenger swallowed hard before he managed to continue "Alpha Damien isn't coming alone.He unfolded the guest list with shaking hands.

"His wife will also be in attendance. Lila Carter."

Across the room, Kieran's glass slipped from his fingers and shattered against the stone floor.