The Abandoned Luna

The click of the deadbolt sliding into place was far more devastating than the thunderclaps shaking the roof.

Ivy wrenched the brass doorknob once more, but the cylinder refused to budge. Dropping to her knees, she angled the dim glow of her phone toward the gap beneath the door, her fingertips brushing nothing but freezing metal. When Veronica Thorne took the key, Ivy hadn't even processed it, assuming it was just another cruel joke.

"Cousin? Veronica!"

Her only answer was the dull, relentless roar of torrential rain hammering the roof. The dilapidated cottage in Silvercreek Village had stood abandoned for three years. Gale-force winds slammed the loose shutters against the outer wall, each rattling crash sounding like snapping bone.

Another streak of lightning split the pitch-black sky. Pale, sickly glare poured through the shattered windowpanes, catching the tremors in Ivy's hands. She feared the dark. Had feared it since she was five years old. Veronica Thorne knew that. Of course she did.

The signal bars on her phone dropped to nothing.

Ivy stepped back, her spine colliding with the damp wall. Mildew and stagnant dust invaded her nostrils. Swallowing down a cough, she clutched the phone tight against her chest. Rainwater seeped through the cracked frame, forming rivulets across the floorboards that soaked straight through her canvas sneakers. It was freezing. A December night in Silvercreek Village was never meant to see a deluge like this, let alone a complete power blackout. When the lightning flared again, she made out the wall clock—the hands stood frozen at eleven forty-seven.

A lunar eclipse.

Tonight was the lunar eclipse.

Growing up in the werewolf settlement of Silvercreek Village, Ivy had heard every myth surrounding lunar eclipses. Nights when the Moon Goddess raged, when shadow and reality collided, and fated mates devoured one another in the pitch black. She had never believed a word of it. She was just a commoner Omega—her mother a Beta, her father an Alpha who had abandoned them years ago. There was not a drop of noble blood in her veins that the Moon Goddess would ever deign to notice.

When thunder rolled overhead, a scream finally tore from her throat. The sound was swallowed whole by the downpour, leaving not even an echo behind.

Time dragged on—ten minutes, perhaps half an hour. Ivy curled into the corner, knees tucked tight against her chest, burying her face into the crook of her arm. Beneath her skin, something began to stir: the instinctive response of an Omega's pheromones to raw panic. A sweet, heavy scent of roses seeped from her pores, mingling with the rain. In a remote place like Silvercreek Village, she dared not imagine what kind of predators that scent might draw.

She dug her thumbnail deep into her palm.

The sharp burst of pain forced the pheromones back down.

Then came a sound that didn't belong to the storm.

Metal shearing. Timber splintering. Something colossal plummeted from the sky with an ear-piercing scream, followed by an explosive impact that shook the entire cottage to its foundations. Plaster and grit rained from the ceiling. Ivy looked up instinctively as the heavy timber beam overhead groaned under sudden strain.

After the deafening crash, silence descended—eerie and hollow. The rain still fell, but the air felt drained from the room. And then, she smelled blood.

Thick, fresh, and laced with mud and rusted iron, the stench of blood billowed from the rear of the ruined house, washed into a dark, viscous stream by the rain. Ivy's stomach heaved violently. She parted her lips, but breath caught in her throat. Beneath the iron reek lay something else—something primal, savage, like a beast grinding its fangs in the dark.

Alpha pheromones.

She had only ever smelled Alpha pheromones twice in her life. The first was when the Alpha village chief had flown into a rage, unleashing a suffocating dominance that forced every Omega present to their knees. The second was right now.

This scent was a hundred times more overwhelming than the village chief's. Pine, rich cigars, and leather, mingled with the chilling, silver-gray aura unique to a lunar eclipse. It struck her like a red-hot blade thrust into her nostrils, scorching down her throat and searing straight into her lungs. Every hair on Ivy's body stood on end, and the scent gland at the nape of her neck flared with agonizing pain.

This was wrong. Pheromones of this magnitude didn't belong in Silvercreek Village. They didn't belong anywhere near this backwater. A concentration this lethal could only come from one person: the Alpha King.

Pushing against the crumbling wall, she hauled herself up on shaking legs. Half of the back wall had caved in, allowing wind and rain to sweep aside scattered bricks. Through the breach, she saw a man.

His black tailored suit was drenched in blood and mud, clinging to the broad expanse of his shoulders and powerful arms. He knelt amidst the rubble, one hand bracing against a shattered support beam, the other clamped tight over his flank. Shards of helicopter rotor blades lay strewn across the dirt, and on a twisted tail fragment, the Moonstone crest of the Blackwood family flashed under a sudden streak of lightning.

Ivy's pupils constricted.

Damian Blackwood. CEO of the Blackwood Group, Alpha King of the werewolf pack, and holder of a permanent seat on the Pureblood Council. His picture was still saved in her phone's gallery—saved just three days ago. Veronica Thorne had shoved the screen in her face, declaring that this was what a real Alpha looked like, her voice reverent as though chanting an incantation.

He lifted his head.

His eyes burned gold. The eyes of a wolf. The eyes of an Alpha locked in a feral rage state.

Ivy backed away on pure instinct. Her heel caught on a loose brick, and she tumbled backward, the base of her skull cracking against the doorframe. Stars burst across her vision, and her Omega pheromones spilled out unchecked, spreading a warm haze of wild roses through the driving rain.

Damian rose.

His movements betrayed none of the agony of his wounds. Silver poisoning had already coursed deep into his bloodstream; across the back of his hands, dark, blackened veins webbed outward beneath the skin, yet he held himself impossibly erect. In a feral rage state, an Alpha's pheromones were nothing short of a lethal weapon. Right now, his rolled toward her like an impenetrable wall—frigid, tyrannical, commanding total submission.

Ivy's knees buckled.

She sank into the muddy grime, rain dripping from her chin. Every Omega instinct screamed that the creature before her was the Alpha King, the sovereign peak of the pack hierarchy. Her body trembled violently, yet her gland burned like fire. The lunar eclipse.

The edge of the moon emerged from behind heavy storm clouds, casting a crimson sheen through the shattered window. Damian stood bathed in the blood-red light, the fluid welling from his side dripping onto the ground and pooling pitch-black in the mud. He took a single step toward her.

"You..."

His voice was raw, grating like sandpaper scraping rusted iron. Caught in the throes of feral rage, the Alpha could not govern his pheromones. His agony and fury manifested as palpable atmospheric pressure, crushing the breath from her lungs.

"You are here," he said.

It was no question. His gaze pinned her where she knelt, an apex predator claiming its prey. Ivy smelled the subtle shift in her own scent; the cold dread was giving way to something far more terrifying. Her scent gland throbbed fiercely, and fire coursed through her veins.

A fated mate bond.

She had read about it in old lore. A one-in-a-thousand rarity, forcibly awakened under a lunar eclipse. Like two poles of an irresistible magnetic pull, fated souls were drawn together, their very essences branded with each other's mark.

"No." Ivy shrank back, pressing hard against the cold wall. "You're mistaken. You don't even know who I am—"

His hand clamped around her wrist. It was massive and scalding hot, the dark tracks of silver poisoning pulsing beneath his flesh. The instant his skin touched hers, a searing shock raced from her wrist to her shoulder, as if a red-hot branding iron had pressed against her flesh. A cry escaped her lips.

Damian leaned down.

The tip of his nose grazed the sensitive gland at the nape of her neck, his scorching breath washing over her bare skin. Ivy went completely rigid. Her Omega pheromones surged outward toward him without restraint—soothing, yielding, offering total surrender. Her body was betraying everything her mind fought against.

"Stop..." Her voice fractured into a breathless whimper.

Damian's lips pressed against her gland.

Her world detonated.

A blinding flash of white tore across Ivy's vision, and every single sense was instantly submerged in his pheromones. Pine, aged cigars, leather, and beneath the iron tang of blood, something infinitely deeper—ancient, sovereign, and hollow with loneliness. Loneliness. The solitary ache of an Alpha King who had walked the earth for five decades without his fated mate.

He was trembling.

Damian Blackwood, locked in the grips of a feral rage state, the supreme ruler of the pack, the most powerful Alpha on the Pureblood Council, was trembling. His fangs grazed the tender skin around her gland, resting lightly without piercing, without claiming. He was holding back. Silver poisoning boiled through his veins and feral madness threatened to consume his mind, yet he refused to complete the mark.

"An incomplete mark," he rasped against her flesh, his voice muffled and deep, as if rising from the bowels of the earth. "You... could not survive a full one."

Ivy's tears spilled over, washing down her cheeks with the rain.

Releasing her wrist, Damian cradled the back of her head in his palm, pulling her flush against his chest. His torso burned with feverish heat, his heartbeat thundering like war drums. With her face pressed into his ruined suit, the copper tang of blood and his intoxicating pheromones flooded her lungs. Her inner Omega howled, demanding more, urging her to sink her teeth into him in return.

Yet Damian shoved her away.

He staggered back two steps, his golden eyes flashing in the lightning. The blackened web of silver poisoning had crept up to his jawline. His breaths rattled heavily, like a wolf cornered at the edge of an abyss. Reaching up, he tore an ornament from his own neck—a string of moonstones glowing with a faint, ethereal blue radiance in the gloom.

The Moonstone Collar of the Blackwood lineage.

He looped the collar around her neck. The moment the stones brushed her collarbone, a soothing chill sank through her flesh and straight into her marrow, as though the Moon Goddess herself had pressed a finger against her soul. Ivy knew what this relic was. The badge of the Luna. The sacred heirloom only a true fated mate was entitled to bear.

"Bring the collar and find me."

Damian's voice bordered on a beast's roar. The heavy thump of helicopter rotors echoed in the distance. Searchlights swept across the skeletal remains of the cottage, illuminating the scattered debris and Ivy's pale, rain-streaked face.

"Blackwood Group. Mooncrown City." He turned and stumbled toward the approaching beams of light, his footing unsteady as his boots crunched through broken glass. "Find Brandon Cole. Give him my name."

"Wait—"

"Tell no one what happened tonight." He paused, not looking back. "Especially... Vivian Perry."

Vivian Perry. The name flashed in Ivy's mind—Damian's chief secretary, the woman Veronica Thorne had pointed out just three days ago. When had Veronica ever crossed paths with Vivian Perry? Before she could piece the thought together, a rescue helicopter touched down in the clearing outside the cottage, its downdraft whipping sheets of rain through the torn walls. Two men in dark suits rushed forward to support Damian, the wound at his flank glistening an ominous, necrotic black under the stark searchlights.

Before he was hauled into the cabin, Damian cast one last glance back.

Those golden eyes, cutting through the veil of rain and wreckage, pinned themselves deep into her very bones.

"What is your name?"

Ivy parted her lips. Rain flooded her mouth, brackish and cold.

"Ivy—"

"Ivy Thorne," he repeated, tasting each syllable like a crushed grape upon his tongue. "I will remember."

The cabin door slid shut. The helicopter lifted into the air, its searchlights sweeping one last arc across the night sky before vanishing toward Mooncrown City. The rain poured on, and the ruined walls of the cottage swayed precarious in the wind. Ivy knelt in the mud, the Moonstone Collar searing against her collarbone. The brand at the nape of her neck burned like a fresh brand, the agony blinding her vision with black spots.

Her last thought before blacking out was that he had remembered her name.

What he didn't know was that tomorrow, Veronica Thorne would tell his secretary, Vivian Perry, that Ivy Thorne was dead inside that ruined house in Silvercreek Village.

Crushed to death.

Mangled beyond recognition under a support beam brought down by the torrential storm.

The Moonstone Collar would be buried beneath the rubble. The Tracking Spell would break. The fated mate bond would be smothered under five years of dust and lies. And inside her womb, the Quad Moonmark was already quietly taking shape in the dark.

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