Chapter Five

Alex POV

The moon was blood red as I raced through the hospital halls. My wolf senses had already confirmed what the doctor’s call would tell me — Aretha was fading fast. I could tell right away she wouldn’t be there in the morning.

Her smell had changed — the surest sign of a werewolf’s curtain call. The disease had ravaged her once-mighty body, and her wolf spirit was hanging on by the slightest of threads. My Alpha instincts roared against this enemy I couldn’t conquer as I stalked to her bedside.

I knelt and touched her face. Her eyes, abruptly, popped open, as bright as day.

“I love you, Alex, my Alpha,” she whispered, the mate-bond between us thrummed one last time.

And then it happened — her eyes closed as the bond broke with a psychic agony that almost brought me to my knees. Her wolf had gone home to the Moon Goddess.

"No!" I growled, my cry guttural as I held her form. "You can't leave the pack. You can't leave me." My wolf scratched under my skin, wanting out to howl its misery.

I shook her in the way I used to during our full moon hunts, hoping she'd spring back like one of her surprise attacks. The nurses found me holding my dead mate, and my wailing grief emanated off of me in waves that made them slow and approach shyly, instinctively terrified without know how or why.

I drove everyone in our territory that night and then locked myself inside. My wolf and I raged for three days. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I took up wolfsbane-vodka and brought our den down to the rubble. My inner beast needed to destroy something, anything, to match the wreckage in my soul.

A week passed in a haze of rage and sadness before Kelly, my beta’s sister, breached my defenses. She found me half-shifted, my fragile form wedged between states. Her words ricocheted off me like bullets off steel. She threatened, however what can shake an Alpha devoid of his mate? The severed bond was an unending, corporeal suffering that made death a mercy.

Kelly had brought raw meat, but not even blood could tempt my wolf. She was my shadow, knowing any Alpha without his Luna was dangerous, dangerous to himself and others.

I nearly set her right when she made me shave. As I stared at my reflection in the mirror, I suddenly swept the silver-edged razor across my throat, one of the few substances that could actually hurt our kind.

The scar is still there—a silver thread just under my jaw from the moment I tried to defy my Alpha fate and follow my Luna into the grave.

Kelly ended up calling me out on Aretha’s burial. She spoke of combining pack rites with human customs even as I was looking through her, stuck in the shadowy woods of my grief. When she asked me to nod that her plans were acceptable, I did, though I couldn’t tell you what those plans were.

Days later, I found myself at a grave beneath a waxing moon, clutching a eulogy. As I read, memories accosted me from every direction:

“I smelled your perfume in the wind that first day — wild honey and summer rain. A sunbeam of a woman, legs for miles, a short, kinky Afro that caught the light like an angel halo. You walked right by me and were completely unaware that an Alpha had just discovered his mate.

I followed you obsessively, finding you enrolled in my territory’s high school. When I finally came closer, you flashed that crooked smile that had the perfect dimples, and my wolf knew right there you were meant to be our Luna."

Tears threatened, but I swallowed them with a growl. As I looked at the moon, I felt Aretha’s spirit close to me, giving me its strength.

“And so, with nothing but territory disputes and grand ideas, we finished the mate bond years later. And when you stalked striding toward me in that defiant peacock yellow dress, upending every human wedding convention, I knew my wolf had chosen well.

Luna, you gave the pack wealth. After my physiology and pharmacology degrees, you encouraged me to set up the lab. You had faith in my cure—a cure that would erase cancer from the lives of humans and werewolves alike, forever. You spent your savings — money you had earned by working two shifts without rest. And when I got the patent, your pride eclipsed my mother’s.”

I paused, recalling the night I returned to our den to find the devastating test results that turned everything upside down. My bodyguards — pack enforcers disguised as humans — stepped back to allow their Alpha room to grieve.

“I never expected you to succumb to the very same malady I had tried to vanquish. Damn it, girl, you should have fought more. If only you had waited for me to finish the last formula. If only—but it was too late. Too late for my mate."

“They say that death claims us all sooner or later. They're right."

A low growl came out of my throat as tears finally escaped.

“You weren’t supposed to go join the ancestors just yet. Not at twenty-eight. You were to carry our pups, run with me for decades. You were meant to grow old with me, to see our young to bolster the pack, and eventually, to allow them to tend us.”

“Instead, you’ve gone to places even an Alpha cannot follow.”

My knees buckled. If my enforcers hadn’t caught me, I’d have fallen into the grave that Aretha’s body was being lowered into.

A camera flash popped in my face, causing my wolf to go into reflexive defense mode. I blinked and saw human paparazzi flocking like vultures. Tomorrow, my mourning would be gossip column fodder.

I flicked my gaze to my trusted pack enforcers. "Get me out."

"Yes, Alpha." They led me to my waiting car, only to have it surrounded by more humans with cameras.

"Change of plans, Alpha. Follow me." Hugo, my right-hand enforcer, slapped my head with his baseball cap for a nothing disguise.

“Leave alone,” he ordered. “The humans will not know who you are, O you who has forgotten.”

The ruse worked. The humans looked through me, even as I glided past my own car.

Once in a taxi, the gravity of reality hit me. My mate, my Luna, was lost to me forever. I gave a single, silent howl of despair and then it was back to the severed connection, which

throbbed like an open wound.

No Alpha was destined to walk alone.