All Chapters of THE LUNA WHO WASN'T SUPPOSED TO EXIST: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 1: The dress didn't fit.Luna knew it the second she pulled it over her head, the way the silver fabric pinched at her ribs and pooled too long at her feet. She had ten minutes to fix it before the whole pack watched her become someone's mate."Stand still," her mother said, pins between her lips, kneeling on the floor of Luna's small room. "If you keep shaking, I will stab you.""I'm not shaking." Luna was shaking.Outside her window, the pack grounds were already full. She could hear it — wolves laughing, boots crunching over frost, someone tuning a fiddle badly. Tonight was the Claiming Ceremony. Tonight, in front of everyone, Alpha Damon Cross would call her his mate, and Luna Hart, the girl who tripped over her own feet at her father's funeral, who once set her own hair on fire trying to light a bonfire, who had been laughed at more times than she could count — that girl would belong to someone. Would matter to someone.She had loved Damon since she was twelve years old

Chapter 3: The trees were full of eyes.Luna saw them catch the last red light of the dying moon, dozens of them, pale and low to the ground, blinking into existence in the dark spaces between the black trunks like stars appearing in a clouding sky. She counted six before she gave up counting, her heart slamming so hard against her ribs it hurt to breathe."Don't move," Kade said, low, and stepped in front of her without seeming to think about it at all, his bare shoulders still marked with drying blood from the rogue wolf he'd killed minutes ago. "Whatever happens, stay behind me.""Who are they?""Scouts." His jaw was tight, his pale gold eyes moving across the tree line, tracking every shift of shadow. "Which means whoever sent them already knows something crossed the border tonight. Which means we have less time than I thought."A branch cracked to their left. Luna spun toward the sound, and a wolf stepped into the open — smaller than the rogue Kade had killed, sleek and gray, wi

Chapter 5: The ground shook a third time, harder than before, and this time Luna felt it in her teeth."We need to move," Kade said, already pulling her toward the tree line, away from the low grinding groan still rolling up through the forest floor beneath them. "Now, Luna.""What is it?" She stumbled after him, her exhausted legs barely keeping pace, one hand fisted in the torn fabric of her dress to keep from tripping on the hem. "You said no one comes back out of the deep Woods. What's down there?""A story I hoped I'd never have to prove was true." Kade's jaw was tight, his eyes scanning the black trees around them with a new kind of fear Luna hadn't seen from him yet — not the careful, controlled wariness he'd shown around Garrick, but something older, something closer to dread. "The old wolves call it the Sleeper. A thing that came into these Woods before there were packs, before there were Alphas, before the moon herself ever chose a wolf to bond with. It doesn't wake for jus

Chapter 7: The light didn't hurt. That was the first thing Luna understood, somewhere in the endless, silver-white nowhere she'd fallen into the instant she said yes — that whatever this was, it wasn't pain the way the awakening at the border stone had been pain. It was more like being unfolded. Like something that had been pressed flat and small her entire life was finally being allowed to open all the way.She couldn't feel her body anymore. She couldn't feel the broken tower floor beneath her, or Kade's hand around hers, or the cold night air against her skin. There was only the light, and inside the light, memory that wasn't hers arriving anyway, the way water arrives in a cup that's been waiting empty a long time.A woman with Luna's same dark hair, standing on a cliff above a moonlit sea, one hand pressed flat against her own stomach. Elena. Young, frightened, alive in a way Luna had never seen her — not the Elena of gentle bedtime stories and lullabies, but a girl barely older

Chapter 9: The stronghold wasn't just burning. It was screaming.Luna heard it before she fully processed what she was seeing — wolves crying out in pain and fury somewhere beyond the tree line, the deep, structural groan of old timber giving way to fire, and underneath it all, a high, panicked sound that took her a horrified second to recognize as children's voices."Pups," Selene choked out, already sprinting harder. "There are pups in the east den—"She didn't finish the sentence. She shifted mid-stride, silver-brown fur exploding outward where a woman had been running a heartbeat before, and tore through the last stretch of forest as a wolf, her pack surging after her in a wave of fur and fury. Luna stumbled to keep pace, her exhausted legs screaming in protest, and felt Kade's hand close hard around her arm, hauling her forward."Stay close to me," he said, voice tight. "Whatever's happening in there, we don't know who did this yet.""I think we do," Damon said grimly, close on