The Fake Luna: Marked By The Alpha King

Chapter 236: Chapter 236 Nightmare

The morning after Aria went back to V&A Group, a message from an unknown number landed on my phone.

I didn’t see it until hours later, buried under a stack of pack reports. When I finally opened it, my chest went tight.

Vanessa.

[Are you feeling better? I’m leaving the country tomorrow. Can we meet tonight—just once? —Vanessa]

I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to.

A while later, a second message came through.

[You said you’d never forget what my family did for you. Is leaving me to hurt like this how you repay the Cranes? I just want to say a proper goodbye. Otherwise... I could always tell Aria everything about you. But Damian, I don’t want to do that.]

*Everything about you.*

Something in me dimmed as I read those last lines.

Because when Aria had asked me about Vanessa, I’d told her the truth—just not all of it.

I’d told her about the pond. Alpha Crane’s visit, two pups playing in the garden, me falling in and hauling myself out before Vanessa ever thought to call for help.

A story light enough to laugh about. Light enough to end the conversation.

The rest of it, I’d never said out loud. Not to Aria. Not to anyone. In twenty years, I’d never once managed to force it past my teeth.

The memory pulled me under before I could stop it.

My father took the throne young, and he ruled well—but ruling well makes enemies.

In those years he was at war on every front: with rival Alphas, with his own relatives over the family empire, and finally with my mother, whom he divorced at the height of it all.

He cut everyone loose to protect the crown.

Including, for a time, me.

Cast out of his orbit, I became the perfect target. When I was fourteen, someone took me on my way back from training.

Held me in a basement that smelled of rust and river water, and demanded a ransom big enough to bleed the crown.

My father decided it was a hoax. He didn’t pay.

It was the Cranes who quietly put up the ransom, worked with the investigators, strung the kidnappers along for days until they found the basement.

When they finally pulled me out into the daylight, my father was there.

He was standing at the mouth of that basement looking like a man who had aged a decade in a single night. I’ll never forget his face in that moment.

Not the King’s face. Just a father’s, gray with the understanding that he had almost gambled his son away.

But he had still come too late to change what those days in the dark had done.