The Luna He Turned Into an Omega

The goblet's stem bit into my palm the second Damian's mouth found my ear.

"This is where you belong," he murmured, low enough that only I could hear it, his breath warm against skin that used to belong to him and now belonged to no one. "Beneath the Luna who was strong enough to hold me. Make a scene tonight, Valentina, and I'll double your years in the Omega quarters."

I didn't look up at him. I looked at the wine instead, dark red and trembling in the silver cup, my calloused fingers wrapped around it the way I'd once wrapped them around a wedding ring. Three hundred pack members filled the hall behind me. I'd felt their eyes since the warriors dragged me from my quarters twenty minutes ago, since they'd zipped me into a gown five years too big for the body they'd starved down to bone, since Damian's Alpha tone had rolled over the crowd and forced me to my knees at the foot of Peyton's throne.

Peyton smiled down at me now, her painted nails curled around the armrest like she was posing for a portrait. "Careful," she cooed. "Wouldn't want to spill on the rug."

I held the goblet up to her. My hand shook. My spine did not.

Something in my chest split open like a fault line finally giving way after five years of pressure.

It didn't stir gently. It detonated.

Bone cracked in my shoulders first, then my spine, a sound like ice breaking under weight. The goblet hit the floor and wine bloomed across the stone like a wound. I heard someone scream — Peyton, I think — as my skin split and silver-white fur tore through it, and I stopped being a kneeling woman in a borrowed gown and became something the hall had no name for. My shift ripped outward in a shockwave that sent lower-ranked wolves staggering, baring their throats without meaning to. Tables flipped. Chairs scattered. Peyton toppled backward off the throne she'd stolen from me.

I stood twice the height of any wolf in Shadowmere. My own breath sounded like thunder in my ears.

A man in royal grey dropped his goblet and fell to one knee before me. Marcus Kane — the Lycan King's Beta, a diplomatic guest I'd served wine to an hour ago without knowing his name meant anything. Now his face was open with something like shock, like reverence.

"She carries the King's blood," he said, and his voice cut clean through the chaos, steady, absolute, a verdict the whole hall would repeat for years.

I watched Damian stagger back. His Alpha aura, the thing he'd used to crush me for three years and cage me for five, flickered like a candle in wind — small, suddenly, against whatever was rolling off me now. For the first time since I'd met him, he looked afraid.

Then the doors slammed open.

A runner, breathless, blood-drained. "The former Luna — Elena — she's collapsed, she's foaming, someone help—"

My wolf's head turned toward the east wing before my mind caught up. The scent hit me even from here, threaded under the smoke and wine and fear-sweat of three hundred wolves: bitter, green, wrong. Wolfsbane. A growl rolled out of my chest, low and resonant, before I understood why I was growling at all.

The shift back came without warning, my body folding in on itself, convulsing on the cold floor, naked and shaking with a violence I'd never trained for. Marcus was there instantly, stripping his cloak and wrapping it around me before Damian could take a single step closer.

"She is under royal diplomatic protection," Marcus announced, his voice carrying to every corner of the silent hall. "Any further harm done to a potential member of the King's bloodline will be treated as an act of war against the throne."

"She belongs in the Omega quarters," Damian snapped, but it came out thin, stripped of its usual weight.

Marcus didn't move an inch. "She does not."

I looked at Damian then — really looked, straight on, no lowered lashes, no apology in my spine. I said nothing. His jaw worked like he wanted a response he wasn't going to get.

Marcus led me to the guest wing. The bed was the first real one I'd slept near in five years. I sat instead, in the dark, fingers finding the cold, hollow scar of the mark on my neck.

A voice answered from somewhere underneath my ribs — ancient, silver-toned, furious.

*You were never weak,* it said. *I am Seraphine. I was buried, not gone. I am awake now, and I will not sleep again.*

I pressed my palm flat to the floor I used to scrub on my knees, and something in me burned instead of ached.

Then I reached under the pillow for the one thing that had survived everything — my mother's tarnished lunar pendant.

My hand closed around nothing at all.