The Fake Luna: Marked By The Alpha King

Damian’s POV

The Day of the Explosion

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The world came back to me in pieces.

Smoke first. That bitter chemical stink coating the back of my throat, telling my wolf before my brain caught up that this had been no accident. Then the ringing, a high thin whine drilling straight through my skull. Then the pain, blooming along my ribs like someone had lit a match under the bone.

I was flat on my back. Metal and glass scattered across the road. What was left of the car sat twenty feet off, one wheel still turning slow in the gray afternoon light.

"Alpha." A hand pressed flat to my chest, holding me down. "Don’t move. You move, you bleed out faster."

Landon. My Gamma. His face swam into focus above me, blood running from a gash over his brow, his eyes gone cold and flat the way they always did when things went to hell.

"How bad," I rasped.

"Bad enough I need you to shut up and let me think."

A crack split the air. Bark exploded off the trunk beside Landon’s head, and he threw himself flat over me on pure instinct.

"Rifle," he breathed. "Northeast ridge. They’re finishing the job."

My wolf surged up snarling, wanting the shift, wanting to tear the shooter apart with my own teeth. "Let me shift. I can reach them—"

"You shift with your ribs like that and you drive a bone through your own lung." His voice went low and hard through the pack bond. "Stay human. Stay with me. Our wolves are no good to us dead."

Another round chewed into the asphalt where my leg had been a second earlier. Landon returned fire twice, quick and controlled, then hauled me up by the collar.

"Down the slope. Now. Keep the wreck between us and that ridge."

We moved. God, it hurt. Every step tore something loose inside me, and Landon took most of my weight, dragging me down the embankment while my boots skidded through wet leaves. Rounds cracked past us, punching into tree trunks, kicking up dirt. My wolf howled and clawed for a shift I couldn’t afford to give him.

"Talk to me," Landon grunted, because he knew if I went quiet I was going under. "That animal in your head still awake?"

"He wants to rip the throat out of whoever did this." I spat blood into the dirt. "He can get in line."

"Good. Keep him hungry. Hungry wolves don’t die."

Then boots crashed through the brush behind us. Not one shooter. A team, spreading wide, closing the net. Landon shoved me behind a boulder and dropped to a knee, gun braced.

"Two flanking left, one center," he said. "They’re driving us toward the treeline. That’s the kill box."

"So we don’t go where they want." My head was swimming, edges softening in a way I hated. "The culvert. Under the road. They can’t flank us in a tube."

He fired, caught one center-mass, and the man dropped. Return fire hammered the rock, chips stinging my face. Landon grabbed my arm and we ran the last thirty feet with lead screaming past our ears, and threw ourselves into the drainage culvert running beneath the road.

Dark. Cold. The narrow mouth gave them one angle in and no more.

Landon had his phone out, blood smearing the cracked screen. No bars. He swore, thumbed it anyway.

"Emergency line’s dead. Jammed. They came prepared."

"Then use the other number." My voice was fading now, and I forced the words out anyway. "The one I gave you before we left. You still have it?"

Landon went still. "Alpha—"

"Do it, Landon." I caught his wrist and made my grip mean it, even half-conscious. "I called Ronan before we drove out. Told him if this went sideways, he comes for me. No questions. He gave his word."

"Ronan." Landon said the name like he couldn’t believe I’d made that call.

Ronan was an Alpha, sure, but the kind who moved through the shadows between packs—not the sort of ally you claimed in broad daylight.

But he was the kind who came when he said he would.

"He owes me," I said. "And he’s the one man in a hundred miles they won’t see coming. Make the call."

Gunfire raked the culvert mouth. Landon fired back into the smoke, made the call, and pressed his ripped shirt against the wound in my side all at once.

Then we waited. I don’t know how long. Long enough for the cold to settle into me. Long enough that I stopped feeling the wound as a separate thing and started feeling it as the whole world.

My wolf had gone quiet, and that scared me more than his snarling had. He never went quiet. Not ever.

"Stay awake." Landon shook my shoulder. "Boss. Damian. Keep those eyes open. Think about her. Think about Aria."

Aria. Her name landed under my ribs, warmer than the blood I was losing. She’d be waiting. She’d be furious. She’d be terrified, and she’d never once let it show.

"She’s going to kill me," I murmured. "If the bomb doesn’t."

"Then don’t give her the chance."

Then, over the ringing in my ears, gunfire. But wrong. Coming from behind our hunters, not at us. Screaming. The wet snarl of shifted wolves hitting a line of men who’d thought they were the predators. Bodies. Chaos. Someone shouting orders in a voice I knew.

My wolf surged back up all at once, teeth bared, and this time I couldn’t tell if it was the enemy or my own instinct answering something familiar.

Then a low, dry, impossibly calm voice at the mouth of the culvert.

"You know," Ronan said, crouching in with a gun in one hand and that infuriating half-smile on his face, "when you said sideways, I really thought you were being dramatic."

"Ronan." Relief hit me so hard it nearly finished what the blast had started.

"Save it." He was already signaling his men. "Thank me when you’re not leaking all over my rescue. Can you walk?"

"No."

"Course not." He got a shoulder under me, and between him and Rick they lifted me out of the dark. "Twice now, Blackwood. Twice I’ve dragged your royal carcass out of a hole. Making a habit of it."

"Last time," I managed.

"You said that last time too."

The sky opened up above me as they carried me clear, gray and enormous and blessedly free of smoke. My wolf finally let go, and I let the dark take me knowing it wasn’t the end.

I’d made the right call before we ever left home.