All Chapters of The discarded Luna rises: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 2Sunlight hits me like a slap.I flinch away from it, throwing an arm over my eyes, and for one full second I brace for the beeping, the mask, the hands pinning me down. None of it comes. Just warmth. Just a soft mattress under my back and sheets that smell like the lavender wash I haven't used in months.I sit up too fast and the room tilts. Gold curtains. A vanity crowded with bottles I recognize. The Alpha residence. My old room, the one I shared with Adrian before he stopped bothering to sleep in it.I grab my phone off the nightstand with a hand that isn't shaking, isn't bruised, isn't hooked to anything.The date on the screen stops my heart for a different reason this time.A year. I'm a year back.I'm off the bed and in front of the mirror before I've decided to move. My own face stares back at me, and it's wrong in the best way — color in my cheeks, no grey under my eyes, no tremor in my hands. I press two fingers to my throat and feel my pulse going strong and even.

Chapter 4Freya's claws are a breath from my throat when a wall of muscle and fur slams into her from the side.The impact throws her sideways into a fruit stand, crates splitting apart, herbs scattering across the cobblestones. I stumble back, heart hammering, ears ringing from how close that was, and find Silas standing between us in his shifted form, silver-grey and massive, teeth bared toward the she-wolf sprawled in the wreckage.Four Gamma warriors fan out behind him, and every one of them wears the same crescent mark stitched into their collars. Moonlight.I've never seen anyone move to protect me like this. Not once, in either life. My father's people arrived on a street corner for a woman they'd known about for less than a day, and somehow that lands harder than the slap did.Freya scrambles upright, chest heaving, murder still in her eyes — until she actually looks at that mark. Her whole posture folds in on itself like a tent losing its poles. She backs up a step, then anot

Chapter 6The invitation arrives on paper so heavy it feels like a verdict.Black card stock, silver edging, the Valley Council's crest embossed deep enough to catch light at every angle. The annual Inter-Pack Charity Gala. Every major Alpha will be there tonight, every ambitious Beta angling for a better collar, every Gamma with an appetite for gossip sharp enough to draw blood. Silver Moon always attends. Blackthorn almost never does.This year, apparently, is different.I turn the card over in my hands three days after walking out of my father's hospital room, and I already know I'm going.I arrive late on purpose.The Valley estate's ballroom is already full when I step through the arched doors — candlelight pooling gold across marble, chandeliers scattering it further still, champagne towers glittering beside platters of moon-fruit too rare to find outside a night like this one. Wolves measure each other in low murmurs all across the room, the particular music of a crowd deciding

Chapter 8The oxygen monitor hisses somewhere behind me, and I've already told them twice I don't want it attached.I sit on the edge of the examination table in the remains of my black suit — jacket gone, blouse torn at the shoulder, the pendant resting cool against skin that still hasn't stopped humming from the fall. A thin cut above my eyebrow has been cleaned and left uncovered. My hands are steady on my knees, folded there like they belong to someone calmer than I am. Under the skin, my pulse isn't steady at all. It hasn't slowed since the stone cracked beneath us.The physician finishes pressing along my ribs and steps back, tucking his hands into his coat pockets like the exam is something he needs distance from now that it's over."No fractures. Soft-tissue trauma. You're fortunate the landing was controlled."Fortunate. I turn the word over once and set it aside. There was nothing fortunate in it — only a man who decided, mid-fall, that his body would be the thing that hit t

.Chapter 10The pool sits dark green under old trees, shaded enough that the water looks bottomless even in late afternoon light, the surface unbroken except for the occasional ripple of wind moving through the branches overhead.I walk the length of the deck barefoot, stone still warm from the day under my feet, a thin black one-piece the only thing I'm wearing under a white linen shirt I left unbuttoned like an afterthought. The pendant rests cool against the hollow of my throat, a small anchor against everything else that's been loose in my chest since the fall. I didn't come out here to swim. I came out here because the compound's walls have started to feel smaller than they are, and I needed somewhere to think that wasn't a room with a locked door on one side of it.Sabotage reports I've read too many times already. Adrian's silence since the fall — no calls, no visits, nothing, which worries me more than his usual noise ever did, because a quiet Adrian is a scheming Adrian. Twent