The Alpha's Unwanted Luna Series

What do you do when you're a human in a wolf pack and your best friend is the next Alpha?

You join in, that's what. Or you join in as much as a human can. Aria and Liam have been friends since birth. Their moms were best friends in college and passed on that friendship to their kids.

When a tragic accident claimed her parents but somehow left Aria alive, and no family members would take on the burden of a teenager with no large inheritance, the one person closest to her mom stepped up to claim her.

Aria and Liam have been inseparable ever since. She has spent the last two years learning pack ways and pack values, but is set on going to college and experiencing human life outside the pack she knows and loves. She’s a human and knows she won’t be a wolf’s mate. She is prepared to leave the pack and live in the human world. She aspires to take over the fitness studio her mom started with Liam's mom. It's a legacy that keeps her parents' memory alive.

She has everything planned out, much to her best friend's dismay. All her college forms are signed, room and board set up, and her business classes are on track to have her graduate in three years. She just has to survive high school for one more year before that can all happen. Thankfully, werewolves think that senior year is the time to start focusing on the future, so many classes are in place to help her succeed faster.

Her life is planned. Liam will start training to take over his pack. This is their last hurrah before their lives go in their predetermined ways. She knows they will always be close, just like their moms. She can't go a day without talking to him. It's been like that for as long as she can remember. She feels incomplete without the contact, a strange, phantom limb ache in her soul when he’s not near. There is no question of losing touch. She also knows that they aren't mates, even though many people in the pack were hoping their close relationship couldn't be anything else. After their eighteenth birthday came and went without the spark of a mate bond, the whispers finally died down, replaced by a quiet, collective sigh of disappointment.

Their relationship, now at eighteen, is that of siblings with twin-like tendencies. It’s something no one can quite explain. She can't mind-link or shift, and yet she moves like a wolf, thinks like a wolf, has the instincts of a wolf. It’s an anomaly that the pack elders mutter about over thick, ancient books, their brows furrowed in confusion. Liam's father, Alpha Robert, once joked that she was the most wolf-like human he’d ever met. The comment, meant as a compliment, only served to highlight the chasm between what she felt like and what she truly was.

Many in the pack believe she will get her 'human adventure' out of her system and then come home for good. They see her college plans as a youthful folly, a brief excursion before she inevitably settles back into the only home she's known for years. They can’t imagine a world where the future Alpha’s shadow doesn’t have Aria trailing right beside it.

What they don't understand, what even Liam struggles to grasp, is that this isn't just an adventure for her. It's a necessity. The fitness studio isn't just a business; it's the last tangible piece of her mother. It's a brick-and-mortar legacy of a woman who taught self-defense to both humans and werewolves, who believed in bridging worlds. Taking it over is Aria's way of continuing that legacy, of proving that she is more than just the human orphan the pack took in out of pity. It’s her own territory to claim, her own pack to lead in a way.

She’s meticulously planned every detail, every course, every student loan application, constructing a future fortress of normalcy brick by brick. Her life is a carefully drawn map, and she’s just one year away from stepping onto the path she’s charted for herself. Liam’s path is just as clear, paved with tradition and duty, leading straight to the Alpha’s throne. They stand at a crossroads, their last year together before their worlds diverge permanently. She tells herself they’ll be fine, that their bond is stronger than distance. Their mothers managed it, a friendship spanning states and life changes. Why can't they?

But a gnawing feeling persists, a cold dread that slithers around her heart late at night. The world has a funny way of tearing up carefully drawn maps. She's learned that the hard way. The universe doesn't care about plans.

Until Aria's life decides to throw her another curveball, a catastrophic, life-altering pitch she never saw coming, forcing her to make choices she never, ever planned on. Choices that will threaten to shatter not only her carefully constructed future but the very soul of the boy who is more a part of her than her own heartbeat.