The Alpha's Contracted Luna

The Unknowm

Three armored SUVs, sirens off, headlights slicing through black trees. I had the wheel in a death grip and my foot buried in the accelerator, too fast for the road, but not fast enough for whatever was waiting at the end of it. Didn't matter which but i couldn't slow down either way.

Lila sat beside me, hands flat on her knees. My jacket hung around her shoulders covering the bruises on her wrists. She was holding herself together by sheer stubbornness but I knew she was overwhelmed and scared. Marcus worked the radio in the back, low, steady, feeding grid coordinates to our men.

Nobody talked. That silence sat heavier on my chest than the fight we'd just walked out of. Lucien's man's words echoing in my head 'Already there'. No, I refused to believe it.

Then Lila's voice, small, careful, like she already regretted asking before she got the words out.

"Do you think we're too late?"

My hands tightened on the wheel hard enough to creak. "We won't be." Even I didn't buy it.

"ETA is eleven minutes," Marcus said from the back. Also navigating to our men.

"Make it five". I was already losing patience.My wolf was ready to run on all fours if that meant faster.

"Alpha, the road..."

"I said five".

He didn't argue again. No one questions impossible orders. Not when I gave them.

A truck came out of nowhere. Broadside, across the road, up in a wall of fire that made me turn the wheel so hard Lila slammed into her door. Heat rolled through the windshield, close enough I could taste metal at the back of my throat. Wolves broke from both tree lines at once. Gunfire opened up before I even had the SUV back under control.

"Ambush!" Marcus was already reaching for the door.

"Protect Lila." I didn't wait for a response.

I hit the ground shifting, claws first, bone grinding under my skin in a way that should've hurt more than it did. Rounds cracked past my shoulder close enough to move the air. I didn't stop to count them. The fight didn't last. Brutal, fast, over almost as soon as it started, and that bothered me more than if it had dragged on. These weren't Lucien's best. Nobody sends their best to lose in under a minute.

Men who aren't trying to win are buying someone else time.

"Alpha, we should sweep the..."

"No time." I was already moving. "Drive!"

The manor came up through smoke instead of trees. Gates gone, twisted metal scattered across the drive, two guards down and not moving. The Blackwood crest that had hung over that gate my entire life lay in pieces on the ground.

Lila made a sound behind her hand I didn't have room to comfort. I was out of the car before it finished stopping.

"Father!"

Nothing came back but the echo of my voice and creak of a house that had just been through hell. I went room to room. Portraits knocked off the walls. Furniture on its side. Blood dark across the hallway runner in patches I made myself walk past instead of understanding. A chair with one leg snapped clean off, wedged like someone had used it to hold a door. A curtain torn in a line too straight to be anything but claws.

His walking stick lay broken in the study doorway, and I went down on one knee next to it without deciding to. He hadn't gone quietly. Whatever happened here, he'd fought, and fighting meant he'd still been breathing to do it. My fist closed around the wood hard enough to drive a splinter into my palm, right next to the cuts the ring had already left there hours ago. I barely felt either.

"Alpha." Marcus's voice, tighter than I'd heard it all night. "You need to see this."

The study had survived the fire untouched, which somehow made it worse than the wreckage everywhere else. An envelope sat centered on the desk, sealed, my name on the front in handwriting my whole body recognized before my brain caught up.

Lucien's.

One page inside.

You're still chasing the wrong person.

Under it, a chess piece. A king, painted black, colder and heavier in my palm than something that small had any right to be.

"What does it mean?" Lila's voice, quiet from the doorway, arms wrapped around herself like the room had dropped ten degrees.

"It means he never plays the game he shows you."

That didn't comfort either of us. I didn't expect it to.

We tore through the rest of the house for another hour. Nothing. Just more overturned rooms, a fight that had clearly moved wall to wall before it ended somewhere I still couldn't find. Every empty room felt like holding my breath and not being allowed to let it go. By the last one I was running on nothing but momentum, refusing to stop long enough to feel how close I was to coming apart.

I was still standing in my father's gutted study, the black king cutting into my fist, when Marcus came running from the front hall, breathless, holding a satellite phone out like it was already burning his hand.

"Alpha."

I took it. For a second there was nothing but static and my own pulse hammering in my ears.

Then his voice.

Weak. Shaking. Unmistakably him.

"Don't come after me."

Every muscle in my body locked at once. "Father, where..."

"Listen." A pause that cost him something to hold. "Don't trust Lila."