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THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS
THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS
ผู้แต่ง: Bella Cruz

Chapter

ผู้เขียน: Bella Cruz
last update วันที่เผยแพร่: 2026-03-25 04:54:36

Not the sharp sting of a cut. Deeper than that. The kind of burn that settled into bone and stayed there, quiet and cruel, reminding Ava Sterling with every breath that she was not leaving this stage on her own.

The warehouse smelled like motor oil and sweat and alpha dominance — thick, competing scents that pressed against her from every direction. Industrial lights overhead blasted white heat down onto the platform. Thirty feet below, men in expensive suits sat in folding chairs like they were watching a livestock show.

Because they were.

Ava kept her chin up. She wouldn't give them the pleasure of watching it drop.

Her father stood at the edge of the platform in his pack Alpha sash, the golden threads catching the light. He hadn't looked at her once since they chained her wrists. He was looking at the crowd, at their hands, at the numbered bidding paddles lifting one after another as the auctioneer called out figures that climbed like temperature on a fever chart.

"Sixty million."

"Seventy-five."

"Eighty million for the Evergreen omega."

Her father's jaw tightened with satisfaction.

*Payment for the debt.* That's what he'd called her in the car on the way here. Not *daughter.* Not even *Ava.* Just *payment.* One hundred million dollars that Evergreen Pack owed Blackthorn Empire after the border war, and her body was the currency he'd chosen to settle it.

She pressed her knees together. Kept her breathing slow.

*Don't let them see.*

But then the memory hit — the way it always did when she was most desperate to hold herself together.

Four months ago. Seattle. The inter-pack summit.

She'd felt the heat come on without warning, too fast, too savage. She'd barely made it to the corridor outside the conference hall before it swallowed her whole. A hand had closed around her wrist in the dark — large, sure, pulling her out of the foot traffic and into a hotel suite before she could form a single coherent word.

Ryder Kane.

Alpha of Blackthorn Pack. The War God. The man every pack feared and no one approached without permission.

She'd known it was him and she hadn't cared, because the heat had burned every rational thought to ash and his scent had been the only thing in the world that made sense. He'd pulled her apart and put her back together three times before the sun came up, and she'd fallen asleep curled against his chest believing, in the hazy warmth of the aftermath, that something had shifted between them.

Dawn had been a cold correction.

He'd stood at the window in a white dress shirt, looking out over the city, and said the words without turning to face her.

*"You are nothing to me."*

Seven syllables. Clean as a blade.

She'd dressed and left and never told a single person what had happened — not even when, two weeks later, the tests confirmed what her body already knew.

"Ninety million."

The auctioneer's voice dragged her back.

Ava's wrists screamed against the silver. The man bidding ninety was watching her with flat grey eyes and a smile that didn't reach them. She recognized his pack crest. She looked away.

*Don't react. Don't give them anything.*

"One hundred million."

The voice came from the back of the room.

Low. Quiet. The kind of voice that didn't need volume because the room simply obeyed it.

Every head turned.

Ava's did too.

He stepped out of the shadow between two support columns like he'd been standing there the entire time, watching, waiting for the right moment. Black coat. Hands in his pockets. Crimson eyes that swept the room once and dismissed everyone in it before landing on her.

Ryder Kane.

Her lungs locked.

He didn't look at the auctioneer. He didn't look at the crowd. He looked at *her* — steady, unblinking, something burning behind those red eyes that she couldn't name and didn't dare try to.

Silence spread through the warehouse like a held breath.

"Sold," the auctioneer said, the word barely above a whisper.

Nobody argued. Nobody raised another paddle. A hundred million in alpha authority, and the room folded.

Two of Ryder's men walked the platform and removed her chains. Not gently, but efficiently. Her wrists were raw and red and she pressed them against her coat the moment the silver fell away.

Ryder was waiting at the bottom of the steps. He didn't extend his hand. He simply turned and walked, and his men guided her after him.

They took her to a private room off the main floor — bare concrete walls, a single light, a metal table no one was sitting at. The door closed behind them. His men stayed outside.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then he moved.

One step. Two. Close enough that his alpha scent hit her like a wall — cedar and iron and something dark beneath it, something that made her body betray her instantly. Her thighs pressed together. Heat crawled up her throat.

*Stop. Stop it.*

His hand wrapped around her jaw, not squeezing, just holding — tilting her face up toward his as if she were something he'd purchased and was now examining in the light.

Her pulse was a drum.

His eyes moved across her face slowly, and whatever he found there made something shift in his expression. Not softness. Nothing that simple. More like recognition. Like a man who'd been looking for something and was irritated to have finally found it.

He leaned down, lips brushing the shell of her ear, warm breath against skin that had no business responding.

"Four months ago," he said, voice gravel-low, private, meant only for her, "I left you dripping."

Her breath fractured.

"Tonight," he murmured, "I'm collecting every drop."

The door opened before she could speak.

His men stepped in, coat held out, ready to move.

Ryder released her jaw and straightened like nothing had happened.

"Let's go," he said.

And Ava Sterling, omega of the Evergreen Pack, daughter sold like cattle, walked out of that warehouse carrying a secret that would either save her—

Or destroy them both.

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  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Book2 chapter 22

    The ceremony location was the mansion's northern grounds.Not the archive chamber, not the rooftop, not any of the interior spaces. Ava's mother had walked the full property at sunset with her hands slightly raised and her eyes half-closed, reading the resonance the way you read weather — and she'd stopped here, on the grass forty feet from the treeline with the city at their backs and the dark forest ahead, and said:"Here."Ryder had looked at the open ground."Tactically—" he'd started."It has to be open sky," her mother had said. "The resonance requires it. The ceremony ground needs to be under air, not stone." She'd looked at him. "The perimeter is your domain. The ground is mine."He'd accepted this.The perimeter was considerable. Frost had reached fourteen packs in the two-hour window, which was two more than he'd promised and exactly the number of packs Ryder had needed without knowing he'd needed it. Wolves in a wide formation around the property, layered in three rings

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Book2 chapter 20

    Stellan found it.Nobody directed him to it. Nobody told him it existed. He was in his carrier on the kitchen table at five in the afternoon while Ava ate something she barely tasted and Ryder ran a final communication with Frost's alliance contacts, and Stellan had been facing the east wall the way he sometimes faced specific directions when he was tracking something the rest of them couldn't read.Then he reached over the edge of the carrier.He knocked his rattle off the table.It hit the floor and rolled to the base of the east wall, and it rolled specifically — with a particular angle, as if it had been placed rather than dropped — and came to rest against a spot where the baseboard met the floor tile.Ava put down her fork.She crossed to the rattle.She picked it up.She looked at the baseboard where it had stopped.She pressed her fingers to the gap.There was a gap — small, deliberate, the kind that didn't exist in well-maintained construction unless someone had created

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Chapter 19

    Frost was found two hours later.A security team to the coordinates Vael gave, a compact site that read as a decommissioned water treatment facility from the outside and was something considerably older inside, and the real Frost in a suspended hold exactly as Vael had described — sitting, breathing, eyes closed, dreamless. He woke inside sixty seconds of the hold being released and spent the first twenty minutes being deeply confused and the next hour being extremely focused, which was, Ava had learned, simply his personality on a sliding scale.He came back to the mansion and looked at the chair where his mirror had been sitting and then at Ryder."Eight months," Ryder said."Eight months," Frost said."We need you for tonight."Frost looked around the room. At Ava. At Sera, who had met him before — or had met his mirror — and was now looking at the real version the way you look at something you've been told is different but can't immediately feel the difference. At the Architect at

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Book2 chapter 18

    The face belonged to General Frost.The man standing in the doorway was General Frost in every particular — the specific set of his jaw, the way he held his shoulders, the faint scar at the corner of his left eye that had come from a border skirmish four years ago. Even the way he was standing, weight shifted slightly to the right the way Frost did when he was at ease. The mirror gift was not approximate. It was a copy that had been made with care and maintained with discipline.Ryder looked at it.He looked at it with the specific stillness of a man confronting something that used the face of someone he trusted, and the stillness was doing a great deal of work."Where is he?" Ryder said.The face kept its composure — not the flinch of someone caught, the controlled response of a professional who had anticipated discovery and prepared for it."I don't know what—" it began."Frost," Ryder said. "The real one. Where is he."A pause."Secure," the face said. "Not harmed. She doesn'

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Book2 chapter 17

    Morning brought the Architect to the kitchen table.He sat with both hands around a mug of coffee and looked at the city through the kitchen windows with the expression of someone encountering ordinary things after a long absence. The coffee. The view. The specific domestic smell of a room where people lived rather than operated.Ryder sat across from him.He had his own coffee. He hadn't touched it. He was looking at the Architect with the steady, patient attention he used when he was learning something rather than confronting it."The Shadow Queen's network," he said. "How many active assets in our region?"The Architect considered."Thirty-one confirmed," he said. "Six probables. Not all of them wolves — she uses human assets in positions where wolf instinct would be redundant. Administrative roles, technical access, that kind of thing.""Inside the mansion?""Three when I left her network." He paused. "Whether she's added to that since is outside my knowledge. I've been building

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Book2 chapter 16

    They put the Architect in the rear vehicle.Not restrained — Ryder had considered it and decided it would accomplish nothing. A man who could wear any face he chose and had been operating inside sealed compact networks for sixty years was not going to be meaningfully detained by zip ties in the back of a truck. He sat in the rear seat between Frost and Petra and looked out the window at the passing forest with the expression of someone watching a landscape they'd memorized and were seeing for the last time.Ava's mother sat in the lead vehicle.She sat beside Ava and held Ava's hand the way she must have held it when Ava was small, the specific grip of a mother who has been keeping herself from reaching for her child for thirteen years and is now allowed to and cannot quite stop.Sera sat on Ava's other side.Nobody spoke for a while. The road unreeled ahead of them and the forest thinned and eventually the city reappeared, orange and spread flat under the night sky."I need to ask

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Chapter 12

    He cancelled everything.She found out from Marcus — who delivered the information with the expression of a man suppressing strong feelings about it — that Ryder had cleared two council meetings, a military briefing, and a territorial review call with the eastern alliance."He never cancels the eas

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Chapter 5

    Ava had noticed that about the rooms Ryder chose — he preferred walls, controlled space, exits he could account for. The dinner table was set for two. No staff lingered. Whatever this was, he'd cleared the floor.She sat across from him and picked up her fork and told herself this was simply the ne

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Chapter 4

    Ava dropped to her knees on the cold marble and gripped the sides of the toilet, body heaving, eyes watering, one hand pressed flat against the floor for balance. The marble was icy against her palm. The morning light through the frosted window was thin and grey.She stayed there until it was over.

  • THE CONTRACTED LUNA SECRET TRIPLETS    Chapter 3

    Not the temperature — the heating worked fine, the kind of expensive, invisible warmth that costs more per month than most people earned. Cold in the way a room gets when no one has ever laughed in it. Black marble floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows running the full length of the east wall. The city

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