The Luna He Turned Into an Omega

The goblet's stem bit into my palm the second Adrian's mouth found my ear.

"This is where you belong," he murmured, low enough that only I could hear it, his breath warm against skin that used to belong to him and now belonged to no one. "Beneath the Luna who was strong enough to hold me. Make a scene tonight, Tessa, and I'll double your years in the Omega quarters."

I didn't look up at him. I looked at the wine instead, dark red and trembling in the silver cup, my calloused fingers wrapped around it the way I'd once wrapped them around a wedding ring. Three hundred pack members filled the hall behind me. I'd felt their eyes since the warriors dragged me from my quarters twenty minutes ago, since they'd zipped me into a gown five years too big for the body they'd starved down to bone, since Adrian's Alpha tone had rolled over the crowd and forced me to my knees at the foot of Vanessa's throne.

Vanessa smiled down at me now, her painted nails curled around the armrest like she was posing for a portrait. "Careful," she cooed. "Wouldn't want to spill on the rug."

I held the goblet up to her. My hand shook. My spine did not.

Something in my chest split open like a fault line finally giving way after five years of pressure.

It didn't stir gently. It detonated.

Bone cracked in my shoulders first, then my spine, a sound like ice breaking under weight. The goblet hit the floor and wine bloomed across the stone like a wound. I heard someone scream — Vanessa, I think — as my skin split and silver-white fur tore through it, and I stopped being a kneeling woman in a borrowed gown and became something the hall had no name for. My shift ripped outward in a shockwave that sent lower-ranked wolves staggering, baring their throats without meaning to. Tables flipped. Chairs scattered. Vanessa toppled backward off the throne she'd stolen from me.

I stood twice the height of any wolf in Blackthorn. My own breath sounded like thunder in my ears.

A man in royal grey dropped his goblet and fell to one knee before me. Rhys Calder — the Lycan King's Beta, a diplomatic guest I'd served wine to an hour ago without knowing his name meant anything. Now his face was open with something like shock, like reverence.

"She carries the King's blood," he said, and his voice cut clean through the chaos, steady, absolute, a verdict the whole hall would repeat for years.

I watched Adrian stagger back. His Alpha aura, the thing he'd used to crush me for three years and cage me for five, flickered like a candle in wind — small, suddenly, against whatever was rolling off me now. For the first time since I'd met him, he looked afraid.

Then the doors slammed open.

A runner, breathless, blood-drained. "The former Luna — Evelyn — she's collapsed, she's foaming, someone help—"

My wolf's head turned toward the east wing before my mind caught up. The scent hit me even from here, threaded under the smoke and wine and fear-sweat of three hundred wolves: bitter, green, wrong. Wolfsbane. A growl rolled out of my chest, low and resonant, before I understood why I was growling at all.