Moonfire: A Wolf Queen’s Awakening
Description
Rena Vale never believed in destiny-until the Lunar Trials bound her soul to the Alpha King and awakened a power the world thought extinct. Thrown from a cruel academy into a kingdom of wolves and crowns, she must navigate politics, prophecy, and forbidden desire while her light grows too strong to hide. Between the storm-eyed Alpha sworn to protect her and the boy she once loved, Rena's heart could save or doom them all. As ancient enemies rise and the moon itself calls her "Luminous," she must decide whether to bow to fate-or break it wide open.
Chapter 1
Nov 27, 2025
POV: Rena Vale
“Say it out loud, Vale—find your fate,” Hailey purrs behind me, sweet as spun sugar and sharp enough to cut. The chant swells on cue because a queen bee never has to raise her voice to be obeyed.
She claps in time with the subwoofers while banners—Northwood Academy Lunar Trials: Find Your Fate!—droop from the rafters like weary confetti.
The whole place smells like sweat braided with glitter spray and berry punch, a fake-fruit promise that sticks in my throat. I wonder if hope can be aerosolized and weaponized against scholarship kids who don’t know when to stop dreaming.
“Breathe with me,” Lyria whispers inside my skull, a ribbon of cool air winding through heat that keeps climbing my neck. “In—hold—out. I’m here.”
I try to obey, but breath frays as the spotlights pin me in the ceremony circle. Too bright, too hot, too intent on turning my cheekbones into proof that I can be fixed into place if enough electricity is applied.
The senior class folds around the ring with hunger, faces tilted like sunflowers that learned to drink gossip instead of light.
“Eyes up,” Lyria urges again, yet my gaze has already found Auren Blackthorn across the chalked sigils, lounging as if the gym was built for him to practice boredom.
He wears careless royalty—dark hair falling exactly where it wants, shoulders cut to fit any rumor, mouth tipped in half-smirk.
Auren watches the faculty at the invocation dais like this is another appointment between kissing another girl behind the bleachers.
The sight scrapes something raw along my ribs because my crush since sophomore year looks this night least interested.
“Rena, the circle’s waking,” Lyria breathes, and I feel it before the floor glows—runes thrumming under my shoes, a hum that threads my arches and laces up my spine. Magic tightens around my body, and a spark pricks behind my sternum where Lyria lifts her head as if a scent just struck.
Alert without panic, poised without peace.
Light answers the call, rising from the painted symbols in two colors that should never meet—silver from me, gold from Auren. Skeins climb and twist until they bridge the space and knot themselves between our chests with a shimmer that makes the crowd inhale as one living creature.
“Shut up—look,” someone says near the pep banner, and a flock of phones takes flight because proof tastes better than truth.
Hailey’s voice breaks the gasp into glitter. “No freaking way,” she squeals, bright with the thrill of a favorite show betraying its fans.
The glow braids tighter, spinning a soft-gold thread through my silver until the air presses back against my skin. I understand with a steadiness that feels like falling without speed: my fated match is Auren.
“Don’t look away,” I tell myself, but I do—right back to his eyes.
Horror flickers there first.
Auren steps in until cedar and smoke slide under the strobe burn, and his mouth barely moves while every syllable carves itself into me with a craftsman’s care.
“You’re not good enough for me.”
The words are simple, ordinary, almost gentle in their quiet, yet they land like a seal on a decree I never got to read before signing.
“What did you just say?” I ask, and the sound is small, a breakable thing that embarrasses me as it leaves—the ghost of twelve-year-old me hearing a guidance counselor translate grit into “know your place.”
He leans in, not close enough to touch, but close enough to colonize the air.
Auren’s voice slides in like a surgeon’s blade that claims mercy while it separates. “Don’t get excited. This changes nothing.”
He straightens, lifts his chin toward the spinning lights, and lets the gym have the rest. “I reject this match.”
Noise detonates around us in a messy rain—laughter that tries to pass as shock, shock that tries to pass as empathy. A chorus of whispers that hiss like a nest you didn’t see before you stepped.
Heat floods my cheeks, drains away, returns in a punish-and-repeat cycle, and inside me Lyria makes a sound I have never heard from her. A broken whine that skitters along my spine and asks a question my mouth can’t form.
“Why would he—Rena, why would he do this—”
There isn’t room in my chest to answer. Not with the air cinched tight and the circle’s glow fading to leave me outlined in humiliation.
Hailey’s commentary slices again, pitched for maximum carry. “Guess the Silver Nobody wasn’t meant to shine,” she sings to her court, and giggles spark like flint.
“I need to move,” I tell Lyria, and my body obeys before my brain can vote.
I pivot toward the exit because if the first tear falls here they will name it for me and sell versions of it for the rest of senior year.
Someone’s fingers catch my wrist with a proprietary certainty that steals what oxygen I had left.
Auren holds on like he purchased the right with a sentence, and his voice drops into a low murmur. “Rena, it’s better if you don’t hope.”
Fire lifts beneath my skin, not the warmth of someone who cares, but the clean burn of a boundary I should have drawn seasons ago.
I can still feel his hands on my body, the way it trembled under his touch. I wished I could turn back time and pushed him away. With his sweet words. ‘You and I are forever’ he said that night, didn’t know forever ended so early.
“Let go,” I say, putting iron under the words.
His grip doesn’t ease.
I pull free anyway—hard enough that it stings—and the shake in my voice turns into something I can use as I raise it for the people who collected my hurt. “Don’t touch me again.”
Surprise cracks his expression.
I shoulder through bodies and whispers and Hailey’s syrupy, “Run, little wolf.” The music keeps pounding because music never cares what it scores. The lights spin because lights love a spectacle. My breathing roars in my ears like the ocean in a shell I can’t put down.
Cold air slams my face when the gym doors burst outward under my hands.
I stumble one step, two, three into night and almost collide with a shape that wasn’t there a heartbeat ago.
I skid, heart lurching, vision rethreading to understand what my body already knows. This isn’t a student playing at danger, not a teacher pretending to be in control. This is a man built like a verdict, height turning the doorway small, shoulders dusted with mist, tattoos mapping his forearms before disappearing under a black shirt.
He stands with the kind of stillness that doesn’t ask permission from storms or girls who just ran from a room where their future got turned into content.
Storm-gray eyes track me, and when I manage an apology that trips over itself—“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” he says “Rena Vale?”
The sound of my name wraps the air tighter around my ribs, and Lyria’s head snaps up inside me, ears sharp, tail rigid. A growl of awe caught behind her teeth.
“Do you feel that?” she asks, stunned, and I do, God, I do—something electric and older than whatever the faculty tried to conjure. A thrum that crawls my skin and makes breath go shallow.
The man takes one unhurried step closer, a raven-black lock falling over his brow, gaze reading my face. Wind shifts and carries his scent across the threshold—pine and winter storm.
“Who are you?” I ask, voice unsteady but standing. His mouth curves, not into a smile, but into something sharper.
“You already know,” he says. “Look at me, Rena.”
I do, and the recognition detonates behind my eyes before my mind catches up: storm-gray gaze, a presence that bends the air, a legend that never belonged inside morning announcements and yet haunted them anyway.
Alpha King.
My pulse slams the inside of my throat hard enough to bruise as the rest of his name arrives like a strike of lightning.
Kai Riven stands three feet from me, watching with a look that carries shock and recognition and hunger and something primal I don’t have language for. And then all those streaking emotions settle into an expression that feels impossibly close to fate.
Heat trembles out of me on a breath I don’t remember drawing, and Lyria whispers a single word. “Yes.”
He felt it too.
Moonfire: A Wolf Queen’s Awakening
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