005 ~The Three Alphas~

She wore red.

Victor had laid it out on the bed before she woke up. He got her a gown the colour of something expensive and attention-commanding, cut to make her look like exactly what he needed her to be tonight.

His decorative perfect doll.

She’d put it on without a word, because the fight from two nights ago was still in the walls of this house and she didn’t have the energy to start another one, and because somewhere between the bar and the dawn and three hours of shallow, broken sleep, she had made a quiet decision to move through today like water, finding the path of least resistance, causing no disruption, drawing no attention to the thing sitting in her chest that still hadn’t fully resolved into a feeling she could name.

Cedar. Rain-soaked cedar.

The banquet hall of Ashfang’s diplomatic residence was already half-full when they arrived. It was a neutral ground, technically. The kind of building that belonged to the inter-pack council rather than any single Alpha, used for exactly these kinds of evenings where everyone needed to pretend they trusted each other over expensive food.

Victor moved through the room like a man who had already won whatever game was being played. He gave firm handshakes, names rolled off his tongue as easy as a lie. The particular performance of confidence that she’d watched him perfect over five years to dominate every small group he entered.

She moved beside him. Smiled when smiled at. Answered questions with the correct number of words. Accepted a glass of something sparkling from a passing tray and did not drink it.

She was watching the room, an old habit she picked up at nineteen when she’d been taught that a Luna’s first job at any gathering was to read it and to know before anyone else did where the tension was sitting, which alliances were fraying, which smiles were real and which were the architectural kind, built for load-bearing and nothing else.

She’d been good at it once and she was still good at it. Except she just no longer did it for Victor’s benefit.

“You look pale,” Victor said, low, close to her ear. He said it the way you’d note a prop wasn’t quite right before a performance.

“I’m fine.”

“Smile like it.”

She smiled like it.

He moved away to intercept a council elder and she exhaled slowly, let the expression drop to something more neutral, and turned toward the tall windows overlooking the grounds. Outside, the evening was doing something almost beautiful— last light catching the treeline, the sky going amber and deep blue in layers.

She looked at it and thought about nothing.

“Luna Ashfang.”

She turned. A woman she half-recognised— someone from the council’s administrative side, young, slightly nervous in the way people got when they’d been given a job they weren’t sure they could do correctly.

“I wanted to make sure you’d received the updated guest register,” the woman said. “For the summit. Given that your household will be hosting, Lord Ashfang thought you should be—”

“The guest register?” Selene kept her voice pleasant. “I wasn’t aware there was an update.”

“Oh.” A flicker of uncertainty. “Yes— the alliance summit. The three delegations confirmed this morning.” She offered a small folder, the kind used for formal documentation. “Lord Ashfang approved the final list at midday.”

Selene took it and opened it.

The document was two pages, loaded with arrival schedules, room assignments and dietary requirements. The administrative architecture of hosting three major Alpha houses simultaneously— the kind of logistical undertaking that meant weeks of preparation and the complete loss of whatever privacy she had managed to carve out within her own home.

She read it line by line till she reached the delegation headers and stopped.

Blackwood Pack. Delegation of six. Arrival: Friday.

The hall noise went distant, like someone had moved it several feet further away from her.

Silverclaw Pack. Delegation of four. Arrival: Friday.

Her hand tightened on the folder, careful enough for anyone to see.

Thorncrest Pack. Delegation of five. Arrival: Saturday.

She read the three names again.

Blackwood. Silverclaw. Thorncrest.

Three pack names that she had not spoken aloud in five years. That she had not allowed herself to speak, or think in sequence like this, because separately they were manageable, they were history, they were past, they were the scar tissue she’d learned to move around. But together, in a list, in that order—

Together they were a night, the one specific night where red sky and smoke and twenty-seven wolves and the faces of four people she had trusted with the entirety of herself turning toward her in the chaos with expressions she had spent five years trying to forget.

Kieran. Damien. Ryker.

And Victor, who she’d married. Who’d called her a political solution two days ago without flinching.

All of them, in the same place. In her place.

In the home she had made the mistake of beginning to think of as hers.

“Luna Ashfang?” The woman was watching her with careful, professional concern. “Is everything—”

“Why these three houses?” Selene asked. Her voice was very steady and she was proud of it.

“I’m sorry?”

“The alliance. Victor is pursuing the High Alpha election. There are eleven major houses he could have approached.” She looked up from the folder. “Why specifically Blackwood, Silverclaw, and Thorncrest?”

The woman blinked. “I— I wouldn’t know the political rationale, I only handle the logistics—”

“Of course.” Selene closed the folder. “Thank you.”

The woman retreated with visible relief as Selene turned back to the window.

Outside, the last of the amber had left the sky as darkness covered the evening from the east, the way it always did once it started, as if the light had simply made a decision.

Why those three houses?

She knew why without needing Victor to explain it, without needing the council’s political briefings or the inter-pack gossip that moved through diplomatic circles like weather. Blackwood, Silverclaw, Thorncrest were the three most powerful uncommitted Alpha houses in the territory. Whoever secured their unified support didn’t just win the High Alpha election, they became untouchable.

Victor wasn’t building an alliance, he was building a wall.

And he’d chosen to build it with the three men who had been there the night Selene’s life ended, which was either a coincidence so insane it bordered on comedy, or a choice so deliberately cruel it meant he knew exactly what he was doing to her.

With Victor, it was never a coincidence.

She felt the particular displacement of air that came with his presence, something she’d learned to sense the way you learned to sense weather and turned around.

“I see you found the register,” he said, stopping beside her at the window.

“You could have told me.”

“I’m telling you now.”

She looked at his reflection in the dark glass rather than his face. It was easier that way. “Blackwood, Silverclaw, and Thorncrest, Victor.”

“The three strongest uncommitted houses, yes.”

“You know what those names mean to me.”

He was quiet for a moment and in those few seconds of reflection, she watched his expression and found nothing. Just the smooth, closed surface of a man who had considered this and decided it wasn’t his problem.

“What they mean to you,” he said finally, “is five years ago. This is now. This is politics. This is my election.” He turned to look at her directly, which meant she had to turn too or look like she was hiding. “I need this alliance, Selene.”

“And what do I need?”

“To be my Luna without giving me a reason to worry for the next three weeks.”

She searched his face for a flicker of acknowledgment that he was asking a great deal. That three weeks in a house with Kieran Blackwood required more from her than the word graciously could carry.

And again, she found nothing.

“When does Blackwood arrive?” she said.

“Friday. Two days.”

Two days.

She handed him the folder. “I’ll need the full hosting schedule by tomorrow morning.” She turned from the window. “If I’m doing this, I’m doing it correctly.”

“That’s my Luna.”

She stopped walking. Didn’t turn around.

“Don’t,” she said quietly. “Don’t call me that tonight.”

She moved through the crowd toward the exit, and if her spine was slightly too straight and her pace slightly too measured, not one person in that room could have said with certainty whether it was composure or whether it was the only thing standing between her and the door.

Outside, the night air hit her face and she stopped on the steps and breathed.

Blackwood. Silverclaw. Thorncrest.

Kieran. Damien. Ryker.

The three men who had stood in the wreckage of a Blood Moon and watched her drown.

Coming to her house.

Sleeping under her roof.

Eating at her table.

She pressed her hand flat against the cold stone balustrade, felt the solidity of it and thought about the bar two nights ago. The cedar scent. The dark jacket. The abandoned drink still cold when she reached it.

He was already close.

He had been close, and said nothing, and disappeared into a crowd rather than face her.

Good, she thought. Be afraid.

Then, quieter, underneath, in the part of herself she had the least control over:

Two days.