The Fake Luna: Marked By The Alpha King

Author’s POV

Omniscient

The eastern docks stank of brine and rust and something older underneath, the kind of rot that settled into the bones of a city and never fully washed out. Fog rolled in off the black water in slow sheets, swallowing the sodium lamps until each one hung in the dark like a drowned moon.

Zachary Grove had been waiting nearly twenty minutes when the car finally arrived.

He didn’t like it. His wolf had been pacing under his skin all night, hackles up, whispering that something in the air had gone wrong.

But a hundred million dollars in cash had a way of drowning out instinct, and so he stayed, one hand resting on the pistol tucked against his spine, watching the headlights cut through the mist.

The man who stepped out wasn’t a courier. Zachary knew that the instant the door opened.

"You’re not the errand boy," he said, easing back a step. "Where’s my money?"

Nathan Smith closed the car door with a soft click and walked toward him, unhurried, his coat buttoned against the cold. "There’s a change to the arrangement."

Zachary laughed, low and ugly. "There’s no change, pretty boy. There’s what I’m owed and there’s the rest of my life spent talking to journalists. You people always think you can renegotiate at the last second." His eyes narrowed. "She sent you to kill me."

Nathan said nothing. That was answer enough.

What happened next happened fast.

Zachary’s wolf surged and his hand snapped up with the gun, but Nathan had already closed the gap, human-fast and desperate, catching his wrist and driving it skyward.

The shot cracked into the fog and echoed off the water. They went down hard against a stack of freight pallets, and Zachary, older, meaner, born and bred to violence in a way the polished heir never had been, twisted free and got his forearm across Nathan’s throat.

"You Smiths," he hissed, pressing down, watching the younger man’s face go crimson. "Soft. Every last one of you. You should’ve stayed behind your mother’s skirt."

Nathan clawed at the arm crushing his windpipe, feet scrabbling against wet concrete, the edges of his vision starting to bleed dark. He thought, absurdly, of Sylvia’s voice on the phone. Don’t come back until it’s done. He had never once imagined it might be him who didn’t come back.

Then the pressure vanished.

One moment Zachary Grove was choking the life out of him, and the next he was simply gone, ripped backward through the air and slammed into a shipping container hard enough to buckle the steel. Nathan rolled onto his side, gasping, the fog swimming.

A figure stood over Zachary now, tall and unhurried, a Blackwood crest stitched at his collar.

"Landon," a voice called from the dark. Rick’s voice. "Alive. The Queen wants him breathing."

Landon, the Gamma, had his boot planted squarely on Zachary’s chest, pinning the older wolf to the ground like an insect on a board. Grove thrashed and snarled and reached for his wolf, but the Gamma leaned his weight down with almost bored precision, and something in the man’s ribs gave a wet crack.

"Wouldn’t," Landon advised him pleasantly. "You’ve had a busy month, Mr. Grove. Poisoning kings. Blackmailing widows. Strangling heirs. Frankly you could use the rest."

Ronan emerged from the fog beside Rick, his jaw tight, cuffs already in hand. He looked down at Nathan sprawled and coughing on the concrete, then at the man pinned beneath Landon’s boot, and let out a slow breath.

"We’ve had eyes on this burner for six days," he said. "Sylvia thought she was cutting the thread." He crouched, snapping the silver cuffs around Zachary’s wrists. "She never understood. We were the thread the whole time."

Zachary Grove began to laugh then, ragged and wild, blood on his teeth.

"You want the truth?" he rasped. "You want to know who wrote the checks? I’ll tell you everything. Every account. Every name." His eyes rolled toward the fog, toward the city that had sent men to kill him. "I’ll bury that woman so deep she’ll never see daylight again."

Rick looked at Nathan, still gasping on the ground, then back at the prisoner.

"Load him up," he said quietly. "We’ve got what we came for."

---

The first thing he became aware of was the smell.

Not the antiseptic sting of the hospital, not the stale recycled air of the machines. Beneath all of that, faint but unmistakable, threaded through everything like a signal cutting through static.

Her.

Rain on warm earth. Sun-bleached linen. The specific, impossible scent that had rewired something ancient in him the very first time he’d caught it. His wolf lunged awake before his mind did, a raw animal instinct clawing up through layers of darkness with a single desperate command.

Find her.

Damian’s eyes opened.

The ceiling swam, then sharpened. His body felt like it belonged to someone else, heavy and distant, every muscle a stranger. But he was breathing on his own. He was awake. And she wasn’t there.

The chair beside his bed was empty.

Something cold and enormous crashed through him. He turned his head, ignoring the way the room tilted, ignoring the tug of the IV in his arm, and his voice came out cracked and ruined from disuse.

"Aria."

No answer. Just the soft beep of the monitor, the empty chair, a blanket folded over the armrest where someone had sat for a very long time.

His pulse spiked. On the monitor a line jumped, alarms threatening. His wolf was snarling now, panic tearing through the fog. Ten days he’d spent somewhere warm and golden, somewhere she’d been beside him in every moment, and now he’d surfaced into a world where the chair was empty and he couldn’t find her scent moving anywhere close.

"Where is she," he demanded, louder.

The door swung open. A nurse hurried in, eyes going wide at the sight of him upright, alive, awake.

"Your Majesty, you shouldn’t—please, lie back—"

"Where is she." Every word was a blade.

The nurse steadied. "The Luna, sir. She’s been here every hour of every day. Ten days, she never left that chair." She reached for his wrist gently. "We finally convinced her to lie down an hour ago. She hadn’t slept. We only got her to leave because we promised we’d wake her the moment anything changed."

Something in Damian’s chest, wound so tight it had ached, finally let go.

She hadn’t left him. She’d been here. All of it.

"Get her," he said. Then, quieter, almost human, "Please."

They must have run, because it wasn’t long. He heard her before he saw her, the frantic slap of bare feet against the corridor, and then the door burst open and she was there, hair loose, eyes swollen, staring at him like she didn’t dare believe it.

Neither of them spoke.

She crossed the room and he opened his arms and she folded into them, and he held her against his chest so tightly he could feel her heart racing against his own. Her fingers knotted in the fabric over his shoulder. His face pressed into her hair. The scent that had dragged him back from the dark wrapped all the way around him now, and he closed his eyes and just breathed.

"I dreamed about you," he murmured against her temple, his voice rough. "The whole time. I thought I’d gone back to the happiest I’d ever been. And you were there. In every single moment of it, you were there."

Aria pulled back just enough to look at him, tears sliding freely down her face, and she cupped his jaw in both her hands.

"That wasn’t a dream," she whispered. "I’m here. I’ll always be here."