The Alpha's Fake Mate

🌑ELARA AND LUCIAN 🌑 The room changed the instant he entered it.Not a sound, not a gesture just a shift in the atmosphere, the way pressure drops before a storm. Every person felt it without knowing why, conversations cutting off mid-sentence, postures straightening, eyes dropping to the floor.Lucian crossed the threshold and swept the room once.His gaze landed on Elara first. On the floor, hands pressed flat against the tile, books scattered around her in a wide arc. A split at the corner of her lip. She was breathing in the careful way of someone holding themselves together through sheer refusal to break in front of an audience that had already decided she was entertainment.His gaze moved to Aiden. Just once. Long enough.Then he walked to his desk at the far end of the room, picked up his car keys, and left without a word.The door clicked shut behind him.The room exhaled.Someone laughed, nervous at first, then looser and that was all it took. The tension dissolved into som

🌑ELARA🌑Saturday arrived like a small mercy.Elara was up before the sun, moving through the quiet house with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned early that mornings belonged to work. Her parents were already gone by the time she came downstairs ,both worked weekends, which meant the house was hers, and the house being hers meant the responsibilities were too.She cleaned. She cooked. She moved from room to room with her mind carefully blank, which was the only way she knew how to get through tasks when her thoughts were trying to pull her somewhere she didn't want to go.It worked, mostly.Then she sat down with her tea and it stopped working.The week replayed itself without her permission, Julie's voice carrying across the classroom, Aiden's face when he'd looked at her like she was a problem he was bored of, the floor of the Business Administration block, cold and hard beneath her palms. The sound of laughter that had nothing kind in it.She wrapped both hands ar

🌑LUCIAN & ELARA 🌑 He had not planned this.That was the thing Lucian kept coming back to, even as his feet carried him across the courtyard with the kind of certainty his mind hadn't caught up to yet. He had felt it from the parking lot her fear, specific and sharp, cutting through the ordinary noise of a Monday morning like a frequency only he was tuned to.He had told Miguel to park the car.Miguel had said something. He hadn't heard what.He was already moving.The crowd parted without being asked to. It always did.Lucian walked through it until he reached the center, where Aiden stood with his foot on a scattered page and his friends arranged around him like an audience that had forgotten it could leave. He took in the scene in a single sweep, the papers on the ground, the phones already raised, the tight controlled stillness of Elara's face that he recognized now as the expression she wore when she was holding something together through sheer will.He looked at Aiden.Aiden l