Moonbound: The Alpha's Chosen

Emily awoke with a gasp, disoriented by the familiar ceiling of her bedroom. How had she gotten home? The last thing she remembered was collapsing in the forest after something—or someone—had attacked her. Her hand flew to the back of her neck, finding a small, tender spot where the needle had pierced her skin.

Attempting to sit up triggered a wave of dizziness and nausea. Her skin burned with fever, muscles spasming painfully. Something was wrong—deeply, fundamentally wrong with her body. The blanket fell away as she struggled upright, revealing three angry red gashes across her ribcage, perfectly parallel like—

"Claw marks," she whispered, horror blooming as she traced the wounds. They weren't deep enough to need stitches but were unmistakably the work of something with long, sharp claws. Something that had attacked her in those woods.

Emily lurched to the bathroom, gripping the sink as another spasm wracked her body. In the mirror, her reflection startled her—face flushed with fever, eyes too bright, hair wild. She looked half-feral, barely recognizable as the composed journalist who'd entered the forest hours earlier.

"It's real," she murmured, staring at her altered reflection. "All of it. The laboratory, the experiments... the werewolves."

The admission she'd been fighting for weeks finally broke through her rational defenses. The evidence was literally carved into her flesh, impossible to deny.

Stumbling back to her bedroom, Emily grabbed her phone, scanning through its contents with trembling fingers. Most photos from the forest expedition were missing—deleted by whoever had attacked her—but a few remained, evidently overlooked in haste. Blurry images of the storage facility's exterior showed sophisticated security measures incongruous with a simple shed. More importantly, she'd managed to take photos of her wounds immediately after returning home, before passing out again. The timestamp confirmed they were fresh, not some elaborate hoax.

Fighting through waves of pain, Emily powered up her laptop and began a new document. "The Truth About A Group: Genetic Experimentation and the Werewolf Connection," she typed, the words both ridiculous and terrifying on the screen.

As she wrote, fragmented memories flashed through her fevered mind. Alexander's USB drive showing Lucas mid-transformation. Jason's warnings about werewolf bloodlines. The security footage of containment cells housing not-quite-human subjects. Lucas's inexplicable coldness after their night together, his muttered confusion about why she wasn't changing.

"It all connects," Emily muttered, typing frantically despite her shaking hands. Her journalistic training fought to organize the chaos into a coherent narrative, to present the impossible in factual, verifiable terms.

She detailed the attacks, the geographic clustering around A Group properties, the company's secretive research, the suppressed police reports. Each piece of evidence, viewed in isolation, could be rationalized. Together, they pointed to a truth so outlandish she could barely articulate it, even now.

Her gaze fell on the wolf pendant she'd discarded days earlier, now sitting innocuously on her desk. In the dim light, it seemed to pulse with subtle luminescence, as though responding to her distress. Emily reached for it hesitantly, remembering Jason's insistence that it had been protecting her all along.

The moment her fingers touched the silver, a sob tore from her throat. Not from physical pain, though that continued to wrack her body, but from the emotional devastation of everything she'd learned. Her mother hadn't been who Emily thought. Her own identity—her very humanity—was in question. And Lucas...

The memory of their night together, followed by his cold dismissal, sent fresh pain through her that had nothing to do with fever or transformation. He'd been testing her, using her body and her emotions to confirm some theory about her werewolf potential. When she'd failed to show signs of change, he'd discarded her without explanation.

Tears streamed down Emily's face as she clutched the pendant. "I don't want this to be real," she whispered to the empty room. "Any of it."

But the journalist in her—the part committed to truth regardless of personal cost—knew what she had to do. People were being attacked. A corporation was conducting inhumane experiments. Two powerful families were waging a secret war with innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

Emily returned to her laptop, adding the final paragraphs to her exposé with grim determination. Whatever she was becoming, whatever her connection to these werewolf families might be, her duty remained clear. She had to protect people from the danger lurking in the shadows, even if that danger included her own blood relatives.

As she attached the photographic evidence and prepared to send the completed article to her editor, another violent spasm tore through her body. This one different—deeper, as though her very bones were shifting beneath her skin. Emily collapsed beside her desk, crying out in agony as her fever spiked impossibly higher.

Outside, the nearly-full moon rose over the city, its silvery light filtering through her window to illuminate the discarded pendant. In the moonbeam, the wolf's eyes seemed to glow with ancient knowledge, watching as Emily Grey—daughter of Helena Wind—began a transformation that would reveal, once and for all, her true heritage.