The Fake Luna: Marked By The Alpha King

Author’s POV

The blast tore through the front of the bus before anyone understood what was happening.

Metal buckled. Glass shattered. The cabin filled with smoke and screaming in the space of a heartbeat. Damian threw himself over Aria the instant the world came apart, pinning her between his body and the seat frame. A shard of windshield sliced across his back, opening a long red line through his shirt. He didn’t so much as flinch.

"Head down. Don’t lift it," he said against her ear, terrifyingly calm.

Outside, the gunfire came in a wall. Sunlight streamed through the shattered windows, catching in the drifting smoke, turning it a sick, glowing white.

Aria’s stomach dropped. This wasn’t a kidnapping. No one who wanted a hostage opened with an explosion. They didn’t want leverage. They wanted them dead.

"They’re not here to take us," she said, gripping his arm, her fingers ice-cold. "They came to kill."

"I know." Damian already had his weapon drawn, and something ancient and predatory had risen behind his eyes. He swept the cabin—a few of his people were dragging themselves up, dazed from the blast, and a scatter of terrified civilians huddled between the seats. "Rick. Rear exit. Get the wounded out, get the civilians clear."

"On it," Rick barked, already hauling people toward the back.

Damian turned and gripped Aria’s shoulders. "You go with Rick."

"No." She didn’t even think. "I’m not leaving you."

"Aria." His voice dropped low. "I promised I’d stand beside you. But standing beside me doesn’t mean dying beside me. There are a dozen guns out there and they’re here for me. If you stay, you split my focus—and that gets both of us killed."

She stared at him. She knew he was right. Her body still refused to move.

"You’ll come after me," she said, her voice shaking. "Promise me."

Damian’s fingers tightened for one second. He didn’t answer right away—because he didn’t lie.

"Go." He pushed her toward Rick. "That’s an order."

Rick seized her arm, throwing his other hand over her head, and dragged her toward the rear. She twisted back, and the last thing she saw was Damian alone in the churning smoke, cut through with hard bars of daylight, his back to her, standing like a wall between her and everything that was coming to kill her.

The rear door burst open and hot air rushed in. Rick pulled her down onto the sunbaked road, and a ring of pack members closed around her at once, shielding her as they broke for the treeline along the shoulder.

The gunfire behind her grew heavier.

It wasn’t until she’d run several hundred meters and thrown herself into the dark of the trees that the realization hit her.

Damian had sent everyone ahead. The wounded first. The civilians. Rick. Her.

He’d stayed until the very last.

He’d never planned to make it out with them.

She stopped dead. The blood drained out of her.

"He’s not out." She grabbed Rick’s arm, her voice cracking. "Rick—he’s still in there!"

---

On a service road on the far side of the district, a black SUV sat tucked in the shade of a warehouse overhang.

Ethan sat in the passenger seat, tapping his fingers against his knee in a slow, uneven rhythm.

The job had come through Nathan. Vague, the way these things always were—a target on a bus out past the industrial line, clean work, someone would handle the cleanup after. He should never have touched something this dirty. But Silver Creek was bleeding out, and a Pack this deep in the hole couldn’t afford to be picky about the work it took.

The muffled thump of the explosion rolled across the open field, and a column of black smoke climbed into the bright afternoon sky.

"It’s done," the driver said quietly. "Target vehicle’s down. Our people are moving on it."

Ethan shoved open the door and stepped out toward the wreckage. Through the smoke, his men were closing in on the toppled bus, rifles raised, the daylight glinting off the barrels.

His eyes drifted over the group fleeing out the rear door—and then stopped.

Light brown hair, lit up gold in the full sun. The woman being shielded in the center of that ring, running for the trees. As she turned her head, just for an instant—

Those gemstone-green eyes.

Ethan went rigid where he stood.

How could it be her?

"Stop." The word scraped out of him, then broke loose into something close to a scream. "I said stop—hold your fire!"

But the guns had already drowned him out.

---

Aria’s POV

The trees blurred past the window in streaks of green and gold, and I couldn’t stop seeing it.

The bus. The blast. The way the front of it had folded inward like paper, glass raining across the seats. And Damian—standing in the smoke with his back to me, a wall between me and everything that wanted us dead.

I pressed my fingers hard against my mouth to keep the sound from coming out.

The SUV rocked over a pothole and my whole body flinched. Rick had one hand on the wheel and the other pressed to a comm line, snapping orders in a voice so flat it scared me more than shouting would have. Two pack members sat behind me, rifles across their knees, eyes scanning the road behind us.

Everyone was moving. Everyone had a job. And I was just sitting here, being carried farther and farther away from him.

"Turn the car around." My voice came out cracked and strange, like it belonged to someone else. "Rick. Turn around."

He didn’t look at me. "Can’t."

"He’s still in there." I twisted in my seat, gripping the headrest until my knuckles went white. "You saw it same as I did. He never came out. He sent everyone ahead and he stayed—Rick, he stayed."

"I know what he did." A muscle jumped in his jaw. "And I know exactly why. He gave me one order, and it was to get you out. If I turn this car around, I’m handing them the one thing he stayed behind to protect. You understand me? They could still be tracking us. We lead them back, we finish the job for them."

"I don’t care." The words tore out of me. "I don’t care about any of that—"

"He does." Rick’s voice cut clean through mine. "That’s the whole point."

Something in me snapped loose then. I lunged for the door handle without a single clear thought in my head, only the animal need to be back there, to get to him. Rick’s arm shot across me and pinned me to the seat, and one of the men behind grabbed my shoulder, and I fought them both like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had.

"Let me go—let me GO—"

"Aria—"

"He is out there ALONE—"

I don’t remember much after that. I remember the world tilting, the edges going soft and gray, Rick’s voice getting very far away. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I hadn’t slept in almost a week, that I’d been running on nothing but coffee and fear since the night I found that warehouse lease.

Then there was nothing at all.