Shattered Moonlight, Broken Luna Chapter 01

Shattered Moonlight, Broken Luna Chapter 01

At the class reunion, someone suggested truth or dare.

The former prom queen was drunk. Someone asked her the worst thing she had ever done. She pointed straight at me in the corner, laughing so hard she almost fell off the couch.

“That time Damien went to take a shower, and I used his phone to delete that broke little girlfriend’s text begging for help, then replied for him, ‘Get lost!’”

“You guys have no idea. That poor thing waited for him in the rain all night. I laughed myself sick…”

The private room roared with laughter.

Only the guy in the main seat didn’t laugh. The crystal glass in his hand shattered with a sharp crack. Blood mixed with red wine ran down his fingers.

He stared at me, unblinking. The yellow-green tint in his irises meant his wolf was close to the surface.

I calmly held out a napkin. “Alpha, you should wipe it. It is dirty.”

Some things, once they were dirty, never came clean again.

***

The most exclusive private club in Manhattan had been booked out for the night.

When Mr. Anderson handed me the gold-stamped wine list, there was a faint, unreadable pity in his eyes. “Chloe, about that box tonight, if you don’t want to go, I can send someone else.”

I lowered my head and tugged at the not-quite-fitting server uniform, smiling blandly. “It is fine, Mr. Anderson. That is our highest-spending room. The opening fee alone gets us a nice commission. I need the money. You know that.”

Mr. Anderson sighed and dropped it, only lifting a hand to pat my shoulder.

When I pushed open the SVIP room door with the decanter in my hands, heat rushed out at me, heavy with expensive perfume and cigars.

It was the smell of money burning.

On the leather sofa in the center of the room sat the guy I hadn’t seen in seven years.

He had changed a lot.

The down-and-out Alpha in a cheap shirt with cold, stubborn eyes was gone. In his place was the chairman of the Werewolf Chamber of Commerce, a big shot wrapped head to toe in power and control.

He was listening lazily to someone talking, the corner of his mouth lifted in a careless, cold smile. Curled up against his side was the former prom queen, the girl who had stolen him from me.

Ella was wearing a Chanel haute couture white dress. The moonstone necklace at her throat flashed under the lights, almost blinding.

She swirled the wine in her glass, her whole posture that of a smug white swan.

“Damien came back to the Northern Territory this time mostly for me,” she flaunted. “He is going to shift the company headquarters back too. We have to plan our engagement after all.”

Compliments exploded around them.

“You two are made for each other!”

“Alpha Damien is on the cover of every finance magazine now. Ella, you are so lucky!”

“That is what they call suffering first and sweet later. Not like someone who dumped him for money back then. Bet she regrets it to her bones now.”

Someone threw that out on purpose, and the air in the room froze for a second. Every gaze slid toward me, the server in the corner opening the bottle.

I moved like a puppet with no strings left to pull. I skillfully cut the foil with the corkscrew, twisted in the screw, eased out the cork.

“Left-bank Bordeaux, twenty minutes in the decanter for the best taste,” I said.

I poured the wine into the crystal glass in front of Damien, my motions textbook perfect.

Only then did he lift his head.