THE LUNA WHO LEFT HER ALPHA CHAPTER 3

Percie Blade stood amidst two oak trees. Arms folded across his chest. Eyes fixed on her with that same intensity she remembered him giving at the end of her first life. Taller than Leon. More slender. More sleek. More of a knife than a mallet. Dark hair pulled away from his face at the nape of his neck. A small slash running through the left side of his brow.

“You’re early,” he said. The words emerged in a gruff voice, unused to speaking anymore.

“Just as you are.”

He didn’t smile much. But there was a softening of some sort in his gaze. Something like recognition. As if he could already see the death hanging off her.

“You missed the Alpha’s run.”

Not a question.

Corinne raised her chin. “Yes.”

For a long while, Percie looked at her. As if he could already see the blood she was missing from her dress. The cuts she had lost on her body. “The eastern grounds are empty,” he said. “If you want to practice without a crowd.”

She should have said no. Should have walked on and found someplace where there wasn’t anyone around but her and where her choice really counted. But the look he gave her that showed that he saw her as a person instead of her position, that he respected her choice, loosened something in her chest for the first time since she woke up in this new life.

“Okay then,” she said.

Percie turned around and walked ahead of her without waiting for her to walk with him. Corinne followed him along.

Behind them, in the pack house, the Alpha, Adrian Leon, stood by the second-story hallway window and watched his mate walk out of his house and into the forest with someone else. The mate bond tugged painfully in his chest, uncomfortable and strange. He couldn’t understand why the golden string between him and his mate suddenly seemed thinner. He couldn’t understand why she would look away from him. He couldn’t understand why seeing her walking next to Percie Blade made him feel cold inside.

He couldn’t understand why.

No.

Training with Percie wasn't anything like training with Leon.

Leon had always been gentle with her. He gave soft instructions, touched her lightly when she did something wrong. He praised her in a way that made her glow from inside out. To him, she was an expensive vase that could shatter under his careless touch.

Percie took her like one who went through hell to become a fighter.

"Again," he said after she fell down for the third time in a row, his voice harsh but matter-of-fact.

Corinne wiped her split lip with her hand, got up despite the trembling of her arms, burning lungs and the dirt stuck to the sweat on her body. Pain was pure. True. No one else could claim it.

She attacked.

Percie evaded the blow in a relaxed manner, grabbed her wrist and threw her to the ground using her own power. Corinne landed heavily and burst into real laughter. Surprised, they stopped moving.

He arched one eyebrow.

“You don’t hold back,” she said, pushing herself up and spitting out grit.

“You asked to be trained. You didn’t ask to be babysat.”

Her ears picked up his voice in a way that made her shudder inwardly and she nodded and got up on her feet and resumed her stance without having to be told. They went through another round and then another. It wasn’t until the sun was completely up that her muscles started aching in ways they hadn’t before and her mind’s chaotic screaming slowed down to an almost reasonable level.

Percie threw her a water bottle and she took it and gulped deeply from it as she sat down on a log, him still standing up and always keeping at least some distance between himself and her while constantly scanning the forest around him.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked after a while.

He knew perfectly well what she meant.

“You looked like you needed someone who wouldn’t ask you questions that you were not ready to answer.”

“Yes,” Corinne said quietly. “Most people would have followed Leon’s command and dragged me back to the pack house already.”

“I’m not most people.”

She raised her eyes. Percie had a look on her face that was unreadable on the outside, but beneath the surface of that expression, there was a hint of recognition and of deep-seated anger.

“You saw,” Corinne breathed before she could help herself. “In the other life. You saw what he did.”

Percie froze. Even the trees surrounding them seemed to freeze.

A heavy silence fell between them.

Then, in a low, gravelly tone: “I saw everything.”

Corinne swallowed hard. Her eyes were burning with sudden tears. She blinked them back fiercely, but one found its way down her dirty face nonetheless.

“Ten steps away from him, and I died. And he didn’t even glance over as I bled out. Too wrapped up in hugging her, Percie. Smiling at her, as I was dying. We broke our connection and he didn’t even feel it, or he didn’t give a damn that he couldn’t feel it.”

Percie’s jaw worked so hard, Corinne heard the grinding of his teeth. His hands clenched into fists on either side of his body, then released carefully, finger by finger.

“I know,” he said.

Two words, just two words. But they were spoken with such conviction that Corinne could hear the rage beneath the soft words, the silent rage of a life spent unable to voice what should have been said before.

Corinne put her hand over her face.

She sobbed the way she never had with Leon. The ugly, ragged, angry sobs that wracked her entire body. She sobbed for the girl who had trusted in the Moon Goddess to protect her. She sobbed for the Luna who had perished ten feet away from the man who should have been hers forever. But Percie didn’t step closer. He didn’t provide false consolation. He merely stood where he was, a strong, steady pillar of calm between her and everyone else.

After a long while, when the hardest of it had ended at last, she slowly put down her hands. Her voice was ruined, hoarse.

"I won’t chase after him again this time."

"Good."

"I won’t try to compete with Trisha. I won’t beg and plead. I won’t sacrifice my life for a man who has already chosen another."

"Even better."

"I’ll choose me."

His eyes locked with hers. For the first time in her memory of him in either lifetime, a real expression crossed his face something wild and almost proud, tinged with protective possessiveness that made her breath catch.

Her mate bond, pulsing in her chest with Leon's confusion and building frustration, was nothing compared to the feeling Corinne had at that moment.

She felt free.

Leon came to find her on the roof of the old storage shed behind the pack house as the sun set.

She sat dangling her legs over the side of the roof, watching the sky change from bruised to bleeding. Her mate bond tugged at her through the day, restless and confused, frustrated with each hour she denied its demands. It was alive now, not the warm golden connection that once weakened her. It had teeth.

Without saying anything, he began to climb and sit beside her. His body was so close to hers that she could feel his shoulder against hers.

“You have been avoiding me.” Not a question.

“I have been busy.”

“Busy with Percie Blade.”

There it was. The point where things turned ugly. The point where the growl of possession that once made her wolf bow in submission would begin.

Corinne kept her eyes on the horizon. “He offered to train me. I accepted.”

“You train with me.”

“I used to.”