The Alpha's Contracted Luna

Faces From The Past

Lila's POV

I had imagined facing the Carter Pack a hundred different ways.

In none of them was I wearing another man's ring.

The land looked the same through the SUV window, which felt almost insulting. Five years, and the tree line still bent the same way along the ridge, the same crooked fence post still leaned toward the road like it had been waiting for me to notice it hadn't fallen yet.

My stomach didn't remember the years. It only remembered the last time i walked down this road, in the opposite direction, mascara down to my jaw, certain I would never come back here as the girl who'd been rejected in front of everyone.

My thumb found my ring subconsciously . I caught myself doing it and stopped immediately.

Damien noticed. He always noticed everything with his radar eyes. But he never made a big deal of it, which I was starting to understand was a kind of gift.

"You don't have to face them alone," he said, but his eyes were fixed on the road.

I looked at him and realized that he wasn't talking about the summit at all.

....

The convoy drew every eye in the courtyard the moment it rolled through the gates. I watched it happen through the tinted glass, the way the Blackwood crest on the doors made grown men straighten their backs without seeming to decide to. They were bracing for Damien. Nobody in that courtyard was bracing for me.

I stepped out first.

There was a thick silence that followed with a wave of side talks and murmuring.

"Is that Lila Carter?" Someone said when I passed close, not bothering to lower their voice enough.

"It can't be." Someone else, replied.

I heard them both, but I didn't drop my chin the way the old Lila would have, the way I'd practiced dropping it for years before I ever left this place, small, apologetic and sorry for taking up room.

Damien came around the front of the vehicle, and instead of walking ahead of me the way protocol demanded, he simply stretched out his hand and took mine. The whispers were getting louder.

We walked through the gates together, and something about doing it in front of every single person who used to look down on me, formed a warm feeling in my chest.

...

The estate hadn't changed. But I had. And I'm glad it was for good.

I recognized faces everywhere I turned, girls who used to call themselves my friends until the day it became inconvenient. Servants who used to whisper behind their hands whenever I passed. Older wolves who'd never once bothered learning my name because I hadn't been worth the effort of it. Their eyes caught on the ring first, every time, before they even got to my face.

"She married Damien Blackwood?" One of them said, not even trying to whisper it properly.

"Apparently," someone answered.

I felt the old flinch start somewhere under my ribs and, for the first time in my life, watched it fail to land anywhere. They remembered a girl who'd left this place in pieces. They had no idea who'd come back instead.

...

Damien leaned toward me at some point between introductions, close enough I felt his warm breath on my neck.

"Tell me who hurt you."

"Why?" I said.

"Because I want to know who I'm supposed to hate."

That surprised me and I laughed for the first time since we'd crossed into Carter territory, and his expression eased slightly at the sound of it, like he was satisfied at the outcome.

I opened my mouth to answer him properly, then I heard a familiar voice behind me.

"Lila?"

I went still before I even turned around.

Kieran Blackwood.

It was last night I found out he was my husband's cousin. Wow, the moon goddess is full of surprises.

Kieran looked older but not in a way that aged him badly, in a way that made him look like someone I might have passed on a street and not quite remember.

Neither of us spoke for several seconds. I watched his eyes move, slow, deliberate, down to the dress, up to the ring, and finally to Damien's hand resting at my back.

His jaw tightened.

I waited for my chest to do something. Ache, tighten, anything. It didn't. My wolf sat there, calm, almost bored, and somehow that unsettled me far more than pain would have.

He took one step closer, and something in his face changed so fast I almost missed it.

I didn't know, then, what had actually happened to him in that step. I only knew his breathing had gone strange, shallow and quick, and his eyes turned a shade of gold. I didn't remember his eyes fixed on me this way five years ago . Like he was trying to solve something written across my skin.

Damien noticed it too. I felt his hand go still against my back and something in him sharpen without a single visible change to his expression.

Elena arrived before either of them said another word, reading the room in a single gaze, Kieran's face, his fixation, Damien standing close like he was at war.

She slid her arm through Kieran's like she was staking a claim nobody had asked her to make.

"Kieran."

He barely reacted. His eyes hadn't left me.

Her smile faded. She looked over me slowly and deliberately , the exact assessment I'd been receiving from her a hundred times in this courtyard as a teenager.

"So you're the famous wife."

"Apparently," I said, and let it sit there, calm, unbothered, the same word the whisperers had used about me an hour earlier, handed right back.

...

The Alpha Hall Contained every caliber of men. Every major house seated under one roof, the air thick with old rivalries wearing polite faces. The announcement carried my new name through the room like a stone dropped into still water.

"Alpha Damien Blackwood of House Blackwood, and his wife, Luna Lila Blackwood."

Every eye landed at me in unison. Damien's hand didn't leave mine.

Across the hall, I caught Kieran watching, and kept catching him, over and over, no matter how many times I made myself look elsewhere. Elena noticed too. Her fingers went white around her wine glass.

Alpha Victor Carter my father approached us not long after, his greeting formal enough to be its own kind of insult.

"Blackwood."

"Carter," Damien said flatly.

Victor's eyes moved to me, and for a second something flickered across his face that I couldn't name.

"Lila."

"Alpha Victor." I kept my voice even, gave him nothing, no apology, no old hunger for his approval buried in the words.

That, more than anything else all evening, seemed to genuinely unsettle him. We left him with words hanging in his throat.

One of the older Alphas found his opening during the first round of discussion, his voice pitched just loud enough to be heard by the tables nearest him.

"Interesting timing, considering the recent loss in House Blackwood." A pause, deliberate. "A convenient marriage."

The implication sat there ugly in the air. A weak Alpha and a wife from a disgraced pack.

Damien's expression went cold, and I felt him drawing breath to answer.

But I replied instead."If you're questioning the timing of my marriage, perhaps you should ask me directly."

The room went quiet in a way that felt entirely different from the silence at the gates. Damien looked at me like he was seeing something new, and maybe he was.

I stepped out into the corridor for air once the meeting began turning into side conversations.

"You really came back."

I turned. Kieran stood at the far end of the corridor and even after everything, some old current ran through me at the sight of him, faint, familiar, entirely separate from anything I actually wanted.

He walked closer. Five years of memory came in at once ; the humiliation of being disgraced in front of a hundred people .

He stopped a few feet away. "Lila."

"It's Luna Blackwood now." I sneered.

His expression stiffened and then something else replaced it fast, his breathing shifting, his eyes flashing gold.

I waited for the horror to arrive properly, the revulsion I expected to feel standing this close to a bond I'd never asked for. It didn't come the way I wanted it to. Something in me had gone very quiet instead.

"Lila." His voice dropped lower, urgent now. "Did you feel it too?"

I opened my mouth but no answer came out.

Footsteps sounded behind me before I found any words at all, and I didn't have to turn to know exactly whose they were.

"Lila." Damien's voice, closer than I expected, careful in a way that told me he'd heard at least part of it.

Kieran growled."You are my Mate Lila".