Claimed as the Ruthless Alpha's Fake Luna

Seraphina POV:

"Darling, do try to look happy. You're representing the Foster Pack."

My stepmother Linda's voice carried a silken threat, her smile as sharp as the crystal glass in her hand. I forced a smile, the tug of muscles never reaching my eyes.

Across the room, my father, Alpha Arthur Foster, was chatting and laughing with Hayden's father, their heads bent together over champagne like two merchants closing a deal on livestock. Which, in a sense, they were. The transaction of trading a daughter for profit was nearly complete.

After my mother died, I had spent the past sixteen years being invisible. My wolf had never awakened-the therapists called it "dormant," while my father called it a defect.

The entire pack treated me as someone of no consequence. The only things that truly belonged to me were the crescent pendant my mother had left me, and the betrothal contract bearing my name-a contract made with Hayden before I could even walk.

And now I was the prized mare-polished carefully, then paraded onto the stage of the engagement banquet.

I smoothed the silk of my gown. A prickle of unease crept up my spine. My fiancé, Hayden Price - he should have been by my side - was nowhere to be seen.

My gaze swept the room again. My stepsister, Isabelle, was gone too.

"I need some fresh air," I murmured, ignoring Linda's disapproving frown.

Guided by instinct, I bypassed the crowded terrace and walked to the elevators, pressing the button for the private suites floor.

The luxurious corridor was eerily quiet, a stark contrast to the cacophony downstairs.

A muffled giggle echoed from the end of the corridor, from a suite registered to the Price Pack. I recognized that laugh. It was Isabelle's. My blood ran cold.

My heart hammered against my ribs, each beat a drum of impending humiliation. I felt the burn of betrayal before I even saw it. My hand was steady as I raised the keycard to the door. It had been given to me as the "future Luna" of the Price Pack. The electronic lock clicked open with damning finality.

The scene inside stole the air from my lungs. On a plush velvet sofa, Hayden was tangled with a half-dressed Isabelle, his hand possessively on her thigh. The air was thick with their mingled scents of cheap perfume and arrogance.

Isabelle let out a theatrical shriek, clutching a cushion to her chest. Hayden, however, just looked irritated. His expression was one of annoyance at being interrupted, not guilt.

"Sera." He didn't even sit up. He tipped his head back against the sofa and regarded me. "It's not what it looks like."

"Then tell me what it looks like," I said. My voice came out strangely calm. "I have time."

Something flickered across his face - irritation, then contempt, then a bored kind of honesty. "Fine. You want honesty?" He reached for his shirt. "Every Alpha in that ballroom knows what this engagement is. Border routes. Patrol rights. A bloodline worth merging. The Mating is a contract, Sera, and you are its signature page. I was always going to give you the title, the house, the respect." His mouth curved. "All I ever asked was that you not make things difficult."

"Difficult," I repeated.

"Isabelle doesn't mean anything," he said, in the tone of a man discussing an appetizer. "She knows her place. You could stand to learn from her."

Isabelle let the cushion drop - deliberately, letting me see all of her. "Don't blame him, sister dear. He came to my room the night you signed the contracts. Ask yourself why he never once came to yours." Her smile was sweet poison. "You got the ring. I got the Alpha. We all get what we're good for."

I didn't scream. I didn't cry. A chilling calm descended over me. I raised my phone. The camera flash ruthlessly captured their shocked faces.

"Sera-" Hayden lunged for the phone. I sidestepped him effortlessly.

"Don't you dare touch me," I said, my voice low and venomous. "Come near me again, and the next thing I airdrop is the video."

There was no video. His face went white anyway. Guilty men never check.

I turned and walked out, leaving the door wide open for anyone to see. The sounds of their frantic scrambling were a pathetic melody behind me.

Back in the ballroom, the cheerful music felt like a personal mockery. My father and Alpha Price were on the main stage, beaming, about to raise their glasses for the official announcement. The entire elite of the werewolf society was watching.

I didn't hesitate. I walked straight to the stage, ascending the steps with a predatory grace I didn't know I possessed, and took the microphone from my father's stunned hand.

The hall fell silent. My voice, amplified, rang out with perfect clarity. "I apologize for the interruption. There's been a change of plans."

I paused, letting the tension build. "The Mating between the Foster and Price packs is officially called off."

A collective gasp rippled through the crowd. I looked directly at the ballroom entrance, where Hayden and a hastily dressed Isabelle were now standing, frozen in horror.

"It seems Hayden has already found a more... enthusiastic partner in my dear stepsister, Isabelle."

With a flick of my thumb, I airdropped the photo to the main screen behind the stage. The image of their tawdry embrace, ten feet high, filled the screen. Chaos erupted. Shouts, whispers, and the satisfying sight of my father's face turning purple with rage.

I let the microphone drop. It clattered loudly on the stage, the sound a final, definitive punctuation mark. I turned my back on the ruin I'd created and walked away.

I made it three steps down from the stage.

A hand like a steel trap closed around my arm and wrenched me back. My father. Up close, Alpha Arthur Foster's face was the color of old wine, a vein jumping at his temple. Three hundred pairs of elite eyes were watching him, and every single one of them was watching his humiliation.

"Do you have any idea," he said, very quietly, "what you have just cost this pack?"

The crack of his palm across my face turned the music off. The ballroom went dead silent. I tasted copper. In the front row, Linda rose to her feet with fluid, delighted grace, one hand pressed to her mouth in perfect maternal horror - and behind her Isabelle was already crying, beautiful, luminous, photogenic tears. "Daddy, please, don't be angry at Sera. She's just upset. She didn't mean it."

"Ungrateful," my father said to the room, to the cameras, to anyone who would help him bury me. "You want to act like a stray? Then be one. I, Arthur Foster, Alpha of the Foster Pack, cast you out. Your name is struck from the roll. The bond is severed. You are no daughter of mine - you are no one."

I looked at my father one last time - the man whose name I had carried for eighteen years, who had just sold me and then burned me for objecting - and I smiled at him. Really smiled, for the first time all night.

"Thank you," I said. "You just made it very easy to never come back."

I ignored the furious roar of his voice chasing me out of the ballroom. For the first time, it had no power over me.

I didn't head for the main revolving door. Instead, I slipped into a small corridor-long, dark, reeking of disinfectant.

Suddenly, a suite door at the far end was thrown open with violent force.

Before I could even react, a huge, powerful hand grabbed my arm and dragged me into the darkness of the room.

The heavy door slammed shut, plunging us into near-total blackness. The click of the lock echoed like a jail cell closing. A man's harsh, ragged breathing filled the suffocating silence. He smelled of something wild and dangerous.

A low, guttural growl rumbled from his chest, vibrating through the hand on my arm and into my very bones. A single word, a primal claim:

"Mine."

Seraphina POV:

Panic seized my throat. I was pinned to the door by a wall of muscle, the man's body blazing like a furnace, and no matter how I struggled, it was like a mouse battling a mountain lion - utterly useless.

He reeked of pine and winter frost, mingled with something that stirred the very depths of my soul - something I felt I recognized.

The inner wolf that had slept for years stirred in that moment, surging with a terrible hunger. My heartbeat was no longer fear, but a crackling resonance between us; where our bodies pressed together, my skin stung with a thousand tiny sparks. It was a physical urge I couldn't control.

He bent down, burying his face in the curve of my neck, his ragged breath scorching my skin. "Finally..." he rasped, his voice dripping with pure agony and relief.

Strangely, the chaos in my soul stilled in that instant.

The pain of Hayden's betrayal, the fury, the humiliation - all of it receded, replaced by an impossible sense of belonging - as if the missing piece had finally clicked into place.

Then a growl rose from within me, familiar yet foreign, brimming with possession and power: Mine!

It was mate recognition, confirmed through all five senses, indisputable.

The Moon Goddess - the deity my pack revered - had a cruelly ironic sense of humor: on the worst night of my life, she thrust my fated mate at me - a beast barely in control, savage in the dark.

He suddenly went rigid, groaned, and shoved me away, stumbling back into the darkness.

"Get out," he rasped.

Moonlight slipped through the gap in the curtains, limning his silhouette: massive, radiating an aura that suffocated, an Alpha among Alphas.

"This scent... it's too strong." The words were ground out between clenched teeth - that wasn't passion, it was genuine pain.

This wasn't a normal mate recognition. He was suffering. He was cursed. He collapsed onto the bed, breathing hard, his heat unmistakable even across the room.

I should run. But his desperate, agonized gasps pinned me in place.

The fledgling mate bond was a chain, dragging me toward him, commanding me to soothe his pain.

"Are you... okay?" The question was absurd. I asked it anyway.

He didn't answer. Driven by some impulse, I edged closer - a foolish instinct to help overpowering my fear. The moment my fingertips met his arm, a bolt of current exploded between us - fast, hot, like lightning, impossible to say whether it was pleasure or terror.

He jerked his head up sharply, breath catching, his eyes finding mine in the darkness - those glacier-blue pupils gleaming with a predator's light. Yet the trembling... was easing under my hand, little by little. I froze - my touch was helping him.

Before I could pull away, he seized my wrist, faster than I could blink, with a grip like iron. "Don't... leave." His words came out shattered by ragged breath, laced with desperate pleading.

He dragged me down onto the edge of the bed beside him. I fell with a soft thud, body rigid. He made no further move - just held my wrist, his thumb pressing rhythmically against my pulse point, as if drawing strength from it. Gradually, his breathing steadied, his trembling stopped - he was falling asleep. My closeness was his medicine.

I lay there for what felt like hours, a prisoner of his need. I had bonded myself to a monster, and I was his cure.

Finally, his grip loosened. I eased my wrist free, slipped off the bed, and landed soundlessly on the floor.

In the dim light, I studied him for a moment - and finally recognized the man.

He was Damien Sinclair, the feared Alpha of the Sinclair Pack, the wealthiest and most powerful wolf pack in the country.

I had apparently provoked the one man I should never have crossed. I scrambled out of the room and didn't look back.

The next morning, I was packing my bags to leave my father's house for good.

My father came in without knocking. In sixteen years, he had never once knocked.

"You'll sign before you go." He set a folder on the bed without looking at me.

Two documents. The first struck my name from the Silvercrest pack registry. The second took my breath for a moment: the transfer deed for my mother's orchard house at the edge of the territory - the little estate she had carried into this marriage, the only place I had ever been happy - signed over to Hayden's pack.

"Compensation," my father said, in the voice he used for settling invoices. "They were owed an apology for the embarrassment."

"It was my mother's."

"Your mother has been dead eleven years, and the house has stood empty. Sentiment doesn't pay debts." He held out the pen and, for the first time that morning, actually looked at me.

I signed. They were paying for my freedom with the last thing my mother owned.

Collect it later, I told myself, watching his back disappear down the corridor. The orchard. The name. Every glass raised last night - with interest.

I had just zipped the suitcase when my phone buzzed. An unknown number: "Celestial Hotel. Penthouse Suite. Now."

I ignored it.

A second text arrived. It was a photo of my mother's crescent moon pendant, the one I was wearing right now, taken from a security camera angle in the hotel hallway. The threat was clear. He knew who I was.

The cold walked up my spine - and beneath it, treacherous as a struck bell, the bond pulled toward that hotel. Toward him.

A third text: "Don't make me come get you."

I could run. Sixteen years of practice had made me very good at being invisible. But I looked at the pendant photo, and I did the arithmetic my father had taught me without ever meaning to: an Alpha's reach was a weapon, and I had just been discarded by lesser men. If the world only dealt in monsters, then I would take the strongest one I could find.

The Moon Goddess had thrown me to a beast on the worst night of my life. Fine. I had nothing left to lose but a pendant and a grudge - and I intended to keep both.

I went.

By the time I reached the penthouse suite, he was standing at the floor-to-ceiling window, impeccably dressed in his suit - the beast of last night tucked into this restrained shell, only a sliver of cold showing through his eyes. He turned, and those ice-blue eyes pinned me in place - the possessiveness still there, low and burning.

He offered no greeting, no apology. From a few steps away, his voice was low: "I need you."

Then he walked toward me. Not the crush of footsteps closing in - a composure that made you forget to breathe. He stopped in front of me, gaze dropping, sliding over the delicate chain at my throat, then suddenly leaned down. "Afraid of me?" A pause, and his tone carried something almost like genuine bewilderment. "You were bold enough last night."

Seraphina POV:

My hand clenched before I could stop it. I gave no answer.

"Your name." He said it softly, like a request - and like a command.

My chin lifted instinctively. After the night I'd had, I was fresh out of obedience. "And why should I tell you?" I countered, my voice laced with ice.

A flicker of surprise crossed his face, quickly replaced by dark amusement. "Because I am the man whose bed you shared last night. And because you are my Mate." He said the word 'Mate' like it was an irrefutable fact of physics, a law of the universe that our kind lived by.

The events of last night were a raw wound, and his casual mention of it made me flinch. "That was a mistake," I said through gritted teeth.

"It was destiny," he corrected, his voice a low growl. "And your presence... it helps me." He didn't elaborate, but I knew he meant the curse, the agony I had witnessed.

The door to the penthouse opened and an elegant, silver-haired woman with sharp blue eyes walked in. She radiated an authority that rivaled Damien's. She was followed by a younger man in a sharp suit who looked like a calmer version of Damien.

The woman didn't look at the man beside me. She walked straight up to me, her eyes scanning me from head to toe. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then, slowly, she spoke. "So the rumors are true-the Foster daughter who publicly ground the Price family's dignity into the dirt at her own engagement banquet."

The corner of her mouth curved into a satisfied smile. "Very much like me when I was young."

"Grandmother." Damien's voice dropped low.

She raised a hand, cutting him off, her gaze never leaving me. "Until last night, no one knew he would survive it. But you didn't just keep him alive-you kept him breathing until dawn." She paused, and something else entered her tone-almost a test. "Tell me, child. Are you willing to become this pack's salvation?"

I met her gaze and did not lower my head as she had expected. "My name is not Salvation. My name is Seraphina Foster. If you need me, you'd better first tell me-why me."

My bluntness made her pupils contract slightly. Then, surprise turned into genuine interest. She laughed, low. "Found an eagle in a phoenix nest." She turned to Damien, her voice dropping but still firm. "You will claim her. Mark her. The stability of the pack-your life-depends on it."

Damien's jaw tightened. I saw the conflict in his eyes with my own-the primal pull of the mate bond warring against something deeply rooted in resistance. "I'll handle it, Grandmother."

Victoria didn't argue. But she turned back and gave me a long, knowing look. "Child, I trust you this far because you understand something better than anyone in this room: what you need is far more than the title of a 'husband's pack.'" Then she left, that young man trailing behind her, unhurried.

The door closed. Silence flooded the room at once.

I slowly pieced the board together. I saw my opening. He was under pressure. His curse made him need me. For the first time since I walked into that ballroom last night, I held leverage-and the one who'd handed me a third of it was his grandmother.

My mind, sharpened by a lifetime of navigating my family's politics, worked furiously. Revenge on Hayden required power. Reclaiming my mother's legacy required resources. This tormented Alpha was offering both on a silver platter. I am not a victim to be claimed. I am a player in this game.

I broke the silence. "You want me. Your grandmother wants you to claim me. You need me to soothe whatever hell you're living in." I listed the facts coldly.

He watched me, his expression unreadable but intense. "State your point."

I took a deep breath, my heart pounding with the audacity of my own plan. "I won't be claimed like property. I won't be marked like a prize."

"I will, however, consider a Mating," I said, my voice steady. "On my terms."

His eyebrows raised in genuine surprise. A slow, dangerous smile touched his lips. "You're in no position to make demands."

"Am I not?" I challenged. "You need a Mate to satisfy your pack, and a remedy for your curse. I am both. That makes my position very strong."

"I propose a contract," I said, the words tasting of victory. "A contractual Mating." A purely transactional bond was almost unheard of, a modern perversion of a sacred tradition, but it was my only play.

"You get a Luna to parade in front of your Pack and a... personal pain reliever. We maintain a public facade of a Mated pair."

"And what do you get, little wolf?" he asked, his voice a purr that sent shivers down my spine. He thought he knew the answer. Money. Status.

"First," I said, holding up a finger, "The Sinclair Pack will use its full commercial power to crush the Price Pack's primary holdings. I want Hayden Price and his family ruined."

Second, I needed to recover certain lost family heirlooms.

That was the real prize, but I didn't say it out loud.

He scrutinized me, his cold eyes searching for something. I met his gaze without flinching, exuding an air of carefully calculated greed.

I could see the moment he reached his conclusion. The corner of his mouth curled into a cynical, mocking smile. He saw me as a shallow, vengeful, money-grubbing opportunist. Perfect.

"You want revenge," he said, his voice dripping with obvious contempt. "A steep price for a moment of peace."

He was underestimating me. He thought my ambition was that small. This misunderstanding was my shield.

"Is that a yes, Alpha?" I pressed, using his title to remind him of the power I was bargaining for.

He stalked closer, invading my personal space again. He leaned down, his lips brushing my ear. "You have no idea what you're asking for," he whispered. The brief contact sent a jolt through me.

"I'm a fast learner," I whispered back, refusing to show fear.

He pulled back, a final, assessing look in his eyes. "Have your lawyer contact my legal team. We'll draw up the contract."

He turned away, dismissing me.

"And my name," I said to his back, a final act of defiance. "Is Seraphina Foster."