Reborn Before The Apocalypse: The Alpha King’s Sec

Wren

The moon had been red for thirty-eight days.

I knew because I counted them. I scratched a line into the wall beside my mattress every time the sky stayed red when it should have turned blue. Counting was the only thing in the Crosspack house that still belonged to me.

My husband had taken everything else.

I sat on the cold floor of the storage room they’d thrown me into, one hand resting on my five-month-pregnant stomach. My baby kicked weakly against my palm, and I pressed back, trying to tell my child I was still here and that I was trying.

I hadn’t eaten in three days.

Through the thin wall, I could hear them laughing in the dining hall as their cutlery clinked against their plates. The smell of roasted meat drifted under the door, and my stomach twisted so hard I had to bite my lip to keep from making a sound.

Even in the middle of the end of the world, they still had meat to eat.

And I had nothing, because a week before the moon turned red, Damian had sat me down in our kitchen and slid a stack of papers across the table.

“For the pack, Wren,” he’d said, his hand warm on my shoulder. “If something happens, someone needs access to the accounts. You trust me, don’t you?”

I had trusted him. He was my husband, and I’d signed every page without reading a single one.

By the next morning, every account my father had left me had been emptied. Ashbourne Group, the company my father had built from nothing, collapsed within days. And when the moon rose and the screaming started, I was just a wolfless, penniless woman living in a pack that had never wanted me.

The door opened.

Vanessa stood in the doorway, licking grease off her fingers. My stepsister looked healthy, glowing even. Her hair was clean, her cheeks were full, and she was wearing my cashmere sweater.

“Damian wants you,” she said. “Everyone’s in the hall.”

I pushed myself up off the floor, my legs shaking as Vanessa watched me struggle without offering a hand.

The dining hall went quiet when I walked in. The whole pack was there, maybe forty of them, sitting around tables piled with food they’d taken from the stores I’d paid for. Gerald and Margot Cross sat at the head table like royalty. Damian’s Beta, Kellan Price, stood guard by the locked pantry door.

And Damian sat in the Alpha’s chair with his arm stretched across the back of the seat beside him, the Luna’s seat that rightfully belonged to me.

Vanessa walked past me and sat down in it.

“Wren.” Damian smiled at me, and once, that smile had made my knees weak. “There’s something the pack needs to know.”

Vivienne, my stepmother, rose from her place and handed him two folded papers. He opened the first and held it up for everyone to see.

It was a finalized divorce decree bearing the names Damian Cross and Wren Ashbourne.

My signature was at the bottom of it.

Then he unfolded the second document, a marriage certificate bearing the names Damian Cross and Vanessa Ashbourne.

It was dated the day before the Blood Moon rose.

“You signed it yourself, Wren,” Damian said, as casually as if he were reading the weather. “Right there with the account papers. You didn’t even look.” He shook his head at me, almost pitying. “We’ve been divorced for over a month. Everything you signed over became mine before the ink on the decree was dry.” He turned to the pack. “Vanessa is your Luna now.”

The hall broke into murmurs. Nobody looked shocked because they had all known.

I stared at my handwriting, and four years came apart in my head. I thought of every late night he claimed was packbusiness, every million he took for “investments,” and every time Vanessa smirked at me across the breakfast table while I cooked for them.

“You used me,” I whispered.

“We used your money,” Vivienne corrected, smoothing her skirt. “Your father should have shared it. He didn’t. We fixed his mistake.”

My hand went to my stomach. “And the baby? Damian, this is your child.”

Something cold moved behind his eyes. “A wolfless mistake,” he said. “Just like its mother.”

Margot laughed, and someone else joined her.

That was when something inside me finally broke. My father had never loved me much, but he’d taught me how to fight, and for the first time in four years, I used what he’d taught me. I lunged at Damian across the table, my fist catching his jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways.

For one second, the hall was silent.

Then Damian stood up, and his eyes flooded black as his wolf surfaced.

I’d forgotten what I was fighting. I had no wolf, no strength, and I was nothing more than a starving, pregnant woman facing an Alpha. He caught my wrist and twisted until something cracked. I screamed as he threw me onto the stone floor, and before I could curl around my stomach, he kicked me.

He kicked me twice.

The third time, I felt something tear inside me.

Warmth spread between my legs. I looked down at the blood pooling on the floor and couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I did, and the sound that came out of my mouth didn’t sound human.

Nobody moved to help me. Not one person in that hall.

I lay there holding my stomach while my baby died, listening to Damian sit back down and ask Kellan to pour him more wine.

They dragged me back to the storage room. I don’t remember how long I lay there, whether it was hours or an entire day.

When the door opened again, Vanessa stood there with Damian behind her.

“The food’s running low,” Vanessa said. “We’ve done the math. We can’t keep feeding everyone.” Her eyes moved slowly over my body. “And you’ve always eaten the most, haven’t you? One mouth too many, Wren. You are a fat pig.”

Damian hauled me up by my hair.

He dragged me through the packhouse to the front gate while the pack watched in silence. Kellan unbarred the gate, letting in the red light and the sounds I’d been hearing for thirty-eight nights: howling, snarling, and bones cracking somewhere in the dark.

“Please,” I begged. “Damian, please.”

He shoved me through and slammed the gate behind me.

I crawled until I reached an alley between two burned-out shops, though I don’t know how far I’d gone. There, I collapsed against a wall and waited to die.

They came within minutes. Ferals, wolves that had lost their minds, with foam dripping from their jaws and eyes glowing the same red as the sky. There were five at first, then eight, circling me in the alley.

I closed my eyes, but nothing happened.

When I opened them, the ferals were sniffing the air around me and whining. One stepped closer but recoiled as though I’d burned it. Then, one by one, they backed away and vanished into the dark.

All except one.

At the end of the alley stood the largest wolf I had ever seen, with silver-gray fur and gold eyes. He didn’t come closer but remained where he was, watching me as though he were guarding the entrance.

He stayed until dawn.

When the sky turned that dim, bloody pink that passed for morning now, he was gone. And somehow, I was still alive.

So I went back because I had nowhere else to go.

I dragged myself to the pack house gate and pounded on it with my good hand. It opened, and Vanessa screamed as though she’d seen a ghost.

Damian pushed past her. He stared at me for a long moment, and I watched the calculation happen in his eyes. If I lived, people would hear what they had done. If I lived, someone might ask how a husband had tricked his pregnant wife into signing away her own marriage and her father’s fortune in the same breath.

“Why won’t you just die?” he asked quietly.

Vanessa grabbed my arms from behind, and I was too weak to fight her.

Damian’s knife went in just under my ribs.

It didn’t hurt as much as I expected. Maybe I had nothing left to hurt with. I looked past him and saw Vivienne standing on the stairs, watching with her arms folded, as calm as if she were waiting for a car.

As the world went dark, I thought of Maya Lindqvist, my assistant and the only person who had ever warned me about Damian. I had fired her for it.

I’m sorry, I thought. You were right.

Then something cold and vast opened in my chest, and I was gone.

“Wren! Where the hell is breakfast?”

My eyes snapped open.

Sunlight streamed into my bedroom, falling across the soft sheets as I stared up at the familiar ceiling.

I sat up so fast my head spun, and my hands flew to my stomach. It was flat and unharmed, with no wound under my ribs and no blood.

My phone glowed on the nightstand. I grabbed it with shaking fingers and stared at the date.

Thirty days before the Blood Moon.

“Wren!” Damian shouted again from downstairs. “Are you deaf?”

I looked at my hands, which were whole, warm, and mine again.

And for the first time in four years, I smiled.