Page 31 of Rejected By My Shadow Alpha
My daughter is dying. She's seven. She has been cursed with ancient magic, I believe. Traditional healing is no longer effective. We believe the curse can only be broken by an alpha of the Lunaris Pack.
If anyone knows of a surviving alpha from the Lunaris Pack or a wolf carrying direct alpha blood from that line, please respond immediately. This is a life-or-death situation. Contact me in my DM for my location.
—Moonleaf
I stared at the message. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Once I sent it, there would be no taking it back. What if someone put the pieces together? What if they realized Liora carried Lunaris blood? That truth could make her a target, but if there was even one Lunaris alpha still breathing, I had to try.
I thought of her little hand squeezing mine in the dark and the way she once told me, "Mama, even when I'm scared, I know you'll find me."
I hit Send.
And then I wept, not from fear, not from regret, but from the aching, brutal, and unyielding love that only a mother could know. A love fierce enough to call ghosts back from the dead.
Chapter 13
Drew
The message stared back at me, each word carved into my brain like a brand.
Requesting urgent assistance. My daughter is dying... If anyone knows of a surviving alpha from the Lunaris Pack or a wolf carrying direct alpha blood from that line, please respond immediately — Moonleaf.
I read it again.
And again.
The words didn't change, but something in me did. My fingers hovered above the keyboard and then curled into fists. There were hundreds of messages flying through the healer network every week; requests, leads, rogue movements, alerts about silver attacks, but this was different.
This was personal. Too personal. She was asking for me.
A Lunaris alpha. Not just a healer with knowledge of our old bloodlines. She had named my extinct pack. That wasn't a guess. It was a direct call.
To me.
My jaw clenched. The Lunaris Pack was supposed to be ashes. Everyone thought so. Everyone knows so, except for a few of us, and yet here was Moonleaf, asking for the impossible. Her daughter was dying, and only blood from my bloodline could save her. Something about that burned in my chest, a dull throb, then a sharp sting.
Her daughter.
She'd mentioned the girl before, casually, in her older emails. Little light things like her daughter liked to dance barefoot in the garden under the moonlight. She once crushed dried herbs into her apple juice because she "wanted to make her own potion." I had smiled at those stories without thinking too hard, but now? Now, it felt like I was staring down a cavern with no bottom.
Why was this request bothering me so damn much?
I tried to picture what Moonleaf looked like, but I couldn't. All I could sense were just snippets of her gentle, guarded words, but the desperation in this message wasn't professional. It was raw. It was real, and it made my skin crawl with unease. Was I the only Lunaris alpha left? Probably. Was I the only one who could answer this call? Absolutely.
I exhaled sharply and pressed the intercom. "Alex. Get in here."
Moments later, the door opened, and Alex stepped in, one brow raised. "What's up?"
"I need you to describe the healer who treated you after you were attacked—the one you said stitched you up in her secret clinic."
He blinked at the suddenness of the question, then slowly nodded. "Uh… yeah, I remember her, a woman in her thirties, maybe?
"What did the doctor look like?" I asked, barely restraining myself from forcing the answer from him.
He blinked. "Uh…why?"
"Just answer."
Alex scratched the back of his neck, thinking. "Alright. She had fiery red hair. Long, like flames down her back. Green eyes, like really green, unnatural, almost. She didn't talk much, but when she did, you listened. She smelled like…" he paused "...wild roses and something smoky, like pine bark left on a fire. Not unpleasant. Just wild and strong."
