The Alpha's Contracted Luna

Awaken Alpha

By the time I actually noticed, blood had already soaked through my trousers. Three shallow cuts, where the ring dug into my palm from the moment the box left my hands. Some bitter part of me felt almost satisfied. At least this blood was mine.

Marcus gripped the steering wheel like it was the only thing anchoring him to the earth. Neither of us said a word. The car smelled like old coffee and gun oil—with the faint tang of my own blood beneath it all. I focused on the smell. It was easier than thinking about the note burning a hole in my coat pocket.

Six minutes ticked by before Marcus finally broke the silence.

“This isn't a ransom.” His voice sounded rough, like he hadn’t really intended to speak.

I stayed quiet. My jaw ached from clenching it. Nothing said now was going to change where we were headed.He stopped the car three blocks from the address. “I told them I’d come alone,” I said.

“You told me not to follow.” There was a twitch in his cheek—the look a man gets before he decides to argue with his boss for the first time in over a decade. Some tired, petty corner of me almost wanted him to push back. Arguing would be easier than this dead silence.

“I never said Ethan wouldn’t.”

He understood that. His shoulders finally dropped a notch—not with relief, exactly, more like he’d been allowed to set down some secret burden. Ethan was on the roofs. Rowan's men were out along the train line, close enough to move if they had to, invisible otherwise. Noah was up somewhere with a laptop, feeding every camera in a mile straight to me.

Still, I stepped out of the car alone. Alone was what their note demanded, and that was the one part I actually meant to follow.My palms sweated inside my gloves. I told myself it was just the blood. That was a lie. I only thought of Lila. My Lila

Cold concrete pressed against her cheek. The feeling came before thought, before pain, before she dared open her eyes.

Then came the smell—motor oil, rust, and something coppery that stuck in the back of her throat. Real fear, the kind they'd only describe in textbooks. She’d never tasted it herself until now.

The guards were speaking among themselves.

“He'll come.”

A low laugh, dark. “Obviously.He’s done this before.”

She kept her eyes shut, letting those words settle heavy in her chest. Done this before. Not ‘he loves her, he’ll come running.’ Before, like Damien walking alone into traps was just what he did, and this wasn’t even the first time. That truth burned deeper than the rope biting her wrists.

He moved in front of her, slow, gloved fingers untying the cloth at her mouth with calm, practiced patience. He offered her water—like a man who thought kindness cost him nothing.

She spat in his face before thinking it through.

He wiped it off, slow and unfazed, two fingers across his cheek, didn’t even blink. There was something in how bored he was with her defiance, something that rattled her more than a strike ever could.

“Hey beauty, do you know why Damien chose you?”

She said nothing, but her heart pounded in reckless hope, some traitorous little piece still hunting for the answer she wanted.

“Poor girl.” His voice came out soft, almost pitying, and that stung more than hate ever would. “You still think you married him.”He stretched the silence out, left her anger with nowhere to run.

“He inherited you.”

Four words. They landed under her sternum and stayed there, scrambling four months of contracts and cold hallways into something she really didn’t want to examine. Inherited—like livestock, or a bad debt nobody talks about.He walked away without another word. Not knowing did more damage than any explanation could have.

The warehouse wasn’t empty by the time I got there. Not really. The air still carried the hum of recent presence. Fresh tire marks sliced through clean dust. On a crate—a paper cup, still steaming. A speaker crackled overhead. My whole body went rigid—not with fear exactly, but something sharper, almost like a hunter’s focus.

“Excellent. Right on time.”

“You know who I am.” My voice sounded more like a growl.Silence followed, deliberate, waiting for me to fill it. I didn’t. Instead, I pulled off my right glove, slow and deliberate. If he wanted a show, he’d get it, but on my terms.

Claws out—black and wet-looking under the single overhead bulb.

“You won’t survive this.”

His laugh came through the speaker, thin and smug. “Still arrogant.”

I smiled for the first time all night.“No,” I said. “Experienced.”

The lights snapped on all at once. For half a heartbeat, my instincts shot me past ready into something harder, something with no name.Every wall, floor to ceiling, blazed with projected photos.

Lila at six, gap-toothed and laughing. Lila at ten, alone on some street I couldn’t place, so small it hurt just to look. The hospital corridor, but from the wrong angle, shot from above—meaning someone had stood where I never thought to check.

After the wedding. After the terrace. After the night I told her, flat out, that it didn’t mean a thing.

Twenty three years of her life, documented by someone who wasn’t me. My mouth went dry and metallic. The feeling curled tight inside me, more like sickness than anger.

I’d spent months telling her, telling myself, that all I wanted was to protect her. Standing there, I finally faced the rest of it. I’d wanted more since the first time I opened her file and I never told her. I never let myself admit it, even in my own head. Not until now, when some stranger had kept more of her than I ever allowed myself to.

“She isn’t the only one we’ve been watching.”

Sixteen years old—my own face, raw and unguarded like I haven’t looked in ages, standing next to a man whose funeral I sat through eleven years ago. His ashes are still in a drawer I’ve never been able to open.

Next, a voice came over the speakers. Warm, familiar and wrong in every way a voice can be.

“Hello, son.”