Escaping the Arrogant Dark Moon Alpha novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Dark Moon Gala
Roman names Portia his Luna and commands his secret mate never to leave his mountain, but it's the dark moon, so Marlow walks out, frees Tobin from the silver cell and drives a snowcat up Cairn Pass while Roman orders the avalanche gun fired at them.
Roman Quaid raised his glass to the whole pack and named his Luna, and it wasn't me.
"Portia Embry," he said. "Glass Lake's daughter. Dark Moon's Luna, as of tonight."
Two hundred wolves in black tie stood up and howled for her.
I stood by the door in my orange coveralls, with snowmelt dripping off my boots onto the lodge floor.
I'd driven the Embrys up the mountain in my snowcat an hour ago.
Roman had told me to wait by the door in case they needed a ride back down.
For three years he'd told me to wait.
The bond woke between us at the spring melt party when I was twenty-four.
I felt it under my ribs, and so did he.
He'd pulled me behind the cat barn that night and kissed me hard.
Then he'd said, "Nobody knows. A groomer can't be Luna."
So nobody knew.
I came to his room by the back stairs for two years.
Our last night was three weeks ago.
He'd fallen asleep with his hand on my hip and said my name.
Now he slid a ring onto Portia's finger under the antler chandelier.
She was all platinum hair and white satin.
"One more thing," Roman said.
The room hushed for him.
It always did.
"The Crown opens at the March Moot. Eleven Alphas are coming to my mountain. And my wife gets first tracks."
They cheered again.
I didn't.
The Crown was the bowl that killed two men last April.
Portia came down off the little stage with her glass.
She didn't go to her parents.
She walked straight across the hall to me.
Every head turned with her.
She looked me up and down, slowly, from my braid to my boots.
"So you're the bond he keeps in the garage," she said.
Somebody laughed.
Then everybody did.
She held out her empty champagne glass until I took it.
"Be a dear."
I looked past her at Roman.
He was smiling, the easy smile he used on bankers.
"Marlow grooms my runs," he told the room. "She'll groom the Crown for my wife's first tracks. She knows her place."
Then he dropped his voice into the Alpha register.
The one that doesn't ask.
"And you'll never leave this mountain, Marlow. Ever."
I waited for it to land.
An Alpha's command feels like a hand closing on the back of your neck.
Your body obeys before you've decided anything.
On April third his voice had come through my radio and made my hands pull a rope I was begging them not to touch.
Tonight, nothing closed on my neck.
Nothing at all.
I set Portia's glass down on a waiter's tray.
"No," I said.
The whole hall went quiet.
Roman's smile stayed on, but his eyes went flat.
I turned around and walked out the front door.
My feet carried me down the steps into the snow, one after another, my own.
Nobody had ever walked away from Roman's voice.
I looked up.
There was no moon.
Not a sliver, not a glow behind the clouds.
The dark moon.
A month ago I'd been bleeding the radiators in the boiler room under the lodge.
The silver cell is next to the boiler room.
Tobin Hatchett had been locked in it since April.
He was the forecaster who closed the Crown that morning.
He'd watched me work through the bars, thin and gray, silver burns ringing both wrists.
"Dark moon, nothing holds," he'd said. "Not an Alpha's voice, not a mate bond. My grandmother wrote it down."
I'd thought eight months of silver had cracked him.
"There's more," he'd said. "A wolf who crosses the line under a dark moon leaves free. That's in the charter."
"There's no page like that in the charter."
"Not anymore."
I went around the side of the lodge to the cellar door.
I had keys to every boiler, every barn and every lock in the building.
That was my place.
The cellar stairs smelled like rust and wet stone.
Tobin was sitting on the cell's bench with his back to the wall.
He looked up when my flashlight hit him.
"Sowell," he said. "Radiator's fine."
"Can you read Cairn Pass in the dark?"
He was quiet for a long moment.
"I can read it blind."
I found the cell key on the ring.
My hands were shaking so badly it took three tries.
"Why tonight?" he asked.
"He told me to stay."
The lock turned.
The door swung open, and he didn't move.
He stared at the open doorway.
Then he stood up slowly, holding the bars, and walked out.
He was taller than I'd remembered.
I couldn't look at his wrists.
I had my reasons.
We ran across the yard to the cat barn.
Behind us the gala was still loud.
They'd taken my "no" for a tantrum.
I climbed into the big cat and fired it up.
The diesel coughed and caught, and the headlights flooded the barn.
Tobin swung up into the cab beside me, shivering in his thin cell shirt.
I threw him my parka.
"Gate road?" he asked.
"Two guards on the gate tonight. We go over the top."
"Nobody runs a cat up the pass in December."
"Then nobody will be waiting."
I drove out the back of the barn with my lights off.
The cat crawled up the old pass road at eight miles an hour.
Its tracks bit into the new snow.
Tobin pressed his face to the side window, watching the white slope rise above us.
"Stay left of the rocks," he said. "The right side's loaded."
I stayed left.
Halfway up, my radio crackled on the dash.
"Marlow."
Roman's voice.
My hands didn't move.
They stayed on the sticks, my own.
"Turn it around. Now."
I kept climbing.
"You think you're leaving me?" he said. "You don't have anywhere to go. You don't have anything I didn't give you."
Tobin reached over and turned the volume down.
I turned it back up.
I wanted to hear him lose.
The radio went quiet for a second.
Then Roman's voice came on again, cooler, on the patrol channel.
"Load the Avalauncher," he said. "Aim it at the Cairn bowl. Bring the slope down on the pass."
Somebody stammered back, "Alpha, there's a cat on that road."
"I know what's on the road. Fire."
Tobin turned to me, his face white in the dash light.
"That bowl is right above us."
Far below, something thumped.
A whistle climbed the night.
The first shell burst on the slope over our heads, and the mountain moved.
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