by C. R. Jane
Wild Moon
Kingdom of Wolves
C.R. Jane
Mila Young
Contents
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Kingdom of Wolves: A world where Alphas rule.
Kingdom of Wolves series
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Wild Heart
One
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Wild Moon Copyright © 2021 by C. R. Jane and Mila Young
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review, and except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Dedication
For every girl whose gotten lost and along the way found their wild...
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Kingdom of Wolves: A world where Alphas rule.
Enter the Kingdom of Wolves, a shared universe created by a set of fantastic authors that feature psychotic and possessive wolf alphas, intoxicating relationships, fated mates and strong badass heroines.
These stories are all set in the same world and can be read in any order. Some books are standalones and some are the start of a series.
This shared world will bring you books by the following authors:
Wild Moon by C.R. Jane & Mila Young
Lost by M. Sinclair
Torn to Bits by Katie May
Crossed Fates by Lexi C. Foss & Elle Christensen
Shift of Morals by K Webster
Rabid by Ivy Asher & Raven Kennedy
Alpha’s Claim by Amelia Hutchins
A Lycan’s Rage by Theresa Hissong
Lunacy by Lanie Olson
Check out all the books in the Kingdom of Wolves collection!
Kingdom of Wolves series
From C.R. Jane and Mila Young
Wild Moon
Wild Heart
Wild Girl
These stories are set in the Kingdom of Wolves shared world, but our Wild series will follow Rune’s continuing story with her alphas.
Wild Moon
REAL WOLVES BITE...
I was taught my whole life about the importance of true mates, how when you find that one wolf for you, everything falls into place.
Everyone who taught me that was a liar.
When I found my true mate, happily ever after sure as hell didn’t start, but hell definitely began.
I ran away, and now I’ve been searching for peace for weeks as I drive around the country.
I didn’t mean to take the wrong road.
I didn’t mean to make it to that small town.
And I didn’t mean to meet two men, who set me and my wolf on fire.
But here I am somehow, and peace is the last thing I’ve found.
And don’t forget about the serial killer…
1
Rune
I was cursed.
That had to be it.
I’d come to this conclusion somewhere on the highway, lost in the middle of nowhere, in a strip of land so empty and so flat, it made you feel like you were the only person on the planet. Hours after my car had been broken into while I used the restroom, leaving me with only a twenty-dollar bill to my name.
I’d been driving for weeks…or was it months already? And the only conclusion for why my life had thus far been a giant shit show of the most epic proportions was because I was cursed.
I was perhaps also an idiot.
The sun was falling in the west, and the sky was a kaleidoscope of color. A mixture of pinks and reds that at one point, would have made me shed a tear, back when I had a heart that could still be affected by beautiful things.
Alistair had sucked all the beauty out of my life, twisted and tore at my heart until it was incapable of viewing the world as it once had.
And yet something inside of me, something that was irrevocably tied to him for forever, it still missed him. Despite what he had done, what he’d kept from me. Despite the fact that I’d been told my whole life how wonderful my life was going to be once I found my true mate, and then he promptly destroyed any notions of happily ever after I’d ever dreamed about.
Despite all of that, I still wanted him.
And I always would. Because that’s how true mates worked. It was a bond that forced you to need something, even if it would kill you.
Hence why I was thinking that I was cursed.
I dragged myself away from my pity party as the sun finally sank below the horizon. The landscape was changing around me. Jagged rocks were springing up from the land that I’d sworn had been flat as a board just a few minutes ago. Had I been lost in my head for that long? That wouldn’t have been a surprise since I’d spent most of the last few weeks stuck in my head. I really needed to pay attention every once in a while though.
The landscape was definitely getting higher and higher, and I could see even steeper peaks up ahead. The road in front of me winded up through them. And now the sun was officially gone, and the stars were peaking their way out in the velvet sky.
Did I mention I was terrified of heights? And not just heights, add in driving and the dark too, and you officially had the trifecta of ridiculous fears that I’d developed over the years.
For a moment, I contemplated pulling over to the side of the road and trying to sleep until the morning. I quickly shook that thought away.
Despite the fact that a part of me wanted to be with Alistair, my true mate, desperately, all the other parts wanted to make sure we never saw that asshole again. The large majority of my parts also wanted to live, and Alistair would kill me after what I’d done. I knew that for a fact.
Taking a deep breath, I continued to drive, and it just kept getting darker and darker.
There were no lights out here, of course there wasn’t. Because why put lights in the middle of nowhere? I put my brights on, not giving a fuck. If I was going to drive through a mountain range in the pitch black, you better believe I was going to be able to see while doing it.
Looking in my rearview mirror, I began to freak when I saw headlights approaching. Any time I saw another car, I wondered if it was Alistair, if somehow, he’d found me despite the crazy precautions I’d taken to be hidden from him. Like the way I’d snuck a stash of cash from Alistair’s safe and bought a car with it when I was supposed to be grocery shopping. The way I’d used more o
f that cash to pay for everything I’d done on this road trip from hell. The way I’d gotten rid of my cell phone when I left so there was no way he could track it. The way I’d been wearing an ebony wig twenty-four-seven to try and change my looks.
I breathed a bit easier when I saw it was a Honda Accord. Alistair wouldn’t be caught dead in a car that didn’t scream money and privilege. While I was all about the practicality and the gas mileage of a Honda, Alistair wouldn’t get in one no matter the circumstances, even if it was the only way to catch me.
My breathing increased however as the terrain began to rapidly ascend and I realized I was no longer approaching the mountain, I was going up the motherfucker.
There was a guardrail off to my right, but that didn’t calm me down. I was now hyperventilating as I white-knuckled the steering wheel and leaned forward, trying to make sure I stayed right on that white line. If I was on that white line, then I wouldn’t go off the edge. Right?
A loud honk had me jumping in my seat, swearing, and swerving the car. I hadn’t handled unexpected things with grace over the last few years…but could I really be blamed for that after all that had happened?
I tore my eyes off the white line and glanced in the rearview, only to see that there were now a few cars lined up behind me. The driver behind me seemed to be waving his hands around.
Whoops. A glance at my speedometer showed that I was going about ten miles per hour right now. I highly doubted that was the speed limit, based on the cacophony of angry honks I was beginning to hear.
I rolled down my window, continuing to keep my eyes on that white line since my brain was filled with images of my car tumbling down the side of the mountain and bursting into flames fit for an action movie. I began to wave my arm out the window, trying to get them to go around me. Was there etiquette for this? Besides the obvious move of not driving forty miles under the speed limit.
The car behind me finally got the hint, and it swerved around me, honking loudly and rudely as it did so.
“Jerk,” I muttered. The rest of the cars followed their leader, their brittle horns filling the night.
And then finally, it was just me.
Which maybe I hadn’t been thinking through, because now that there weren’t any other angry drivers to worry about, I was more aware than ever that I was painfully alone.
“What will it be like, Mama? When I find him,” I whispered to my mother as she curled up beside me on the bed, a copy of Harry Potter laying in her lap just as it was every night.
“He’ll make all your dreams come true, baby,” she said with a gentle smile. “He’ll see all the parts in your heart, and he’ll accept them no matter what he finds.”
“Why are there different parts in my heart?” I asked, the six-year-old me very confused about the words my mother was saying.
She giggled in that magical way of hers, and I watched entranced at the love I could see in her eyes. Was every mother that wonderful?
“I just mean, sweetheart, when you find him, you’ll feel complete,” she said sweetly as she brushed a piece of hair out of my eyes.
“Did you feel complete when you met Daddy?” I asked, sadness creeping down my throat at the blurry memory of a man as big as a bear who always smelled like peppermint and those cigarettes he used to smoke constantly as he anxiously paced around the room.
Something in my mother’s eyes flickered and changed. There was a look there that I didn’t recognize, but which made my little heart uncomfortable because it was so unfamiliar from the gentle looks my mother always gave me.
“Do you promise it will be like that?” I spit out, suddenly desperate for that look in her eyes to go away and for her to give me the reassurance I could always expect from her.
“I promise,” she whispered, that look in her gaze fading slowly away.
I settled back into my pillows, ready to hear what Harry, Ron, and Hermoine were up to next, confident that the future was bright because my mother had said so.
Too bad my mother turned out to be a liar.
“Holy shit,” I screeched, swerving out of the lane as something black…and furry, sprinted across the dim light of my headlights, startling me out of my journey to the past where I had no business spending time in the middle of the night in the freaking mountains.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered as I slowed down even more and tried to look around.
An even larger furry beast suddenly sprinted in front of my car, and this time, I yanked the steering wheel way too far to try not to hit it.
I screamed as my car went flying past that white line and careened off the embankment, the guardrails nowhere to be found. I went a few feet as I frantically pressed on the brake, those visions of my car tumbling down the mountains suddenly coming true right before my very eyes.
Was this how it ended? A sucktastic life ending with a fall down a mountain in the middle of nowhere.
Only me.
Shrubs and small trees…combined with my braking power, succeeded in slowing down my car, but the pine tree on the edge of the thick forest in front of me succeeded in stopping me completely. I choked on a scream as I hit the tree. The impact sending me flying forward as the airbags burst out of the steering wheel and door. I hadn’t hit the tree very fast, but the force of the airbags sent me backwards, my neck whiplashing as it snapped back. The airbags ripped at my skin, burning my forearms, and a noxious plume of gas filled the air.
The silence after the crash was deafening for a long moment. But then a loud buzzing filled my ears as the adrenaline crashed against my veins. I coughed, wearily trying to wave my hand around to clear the air, the enormity of what had happened settling over my skin.
“Fuck,” I gasped out. The human mind was truly exceptional. I mean, the fact that it could feel a myriad of emotions all at once as I was now.
Incredible.
“No, no, no,” I cried out as I hit at the airbag and steering wheel in front of me.
My head and neck were beginning to hurt the longer I sat there, and a glance at my arms showed me that I did indeed have burns and lacerations from the stupid, fucking airbags.
“Okay, you can figure this out,” I coached myself as I quit beating at my steering wheel and turned my attention to unlocking my seatbelt, which judging by the pain I felt in my chest, had definitely stopped me from flying through the windshield.
Small mercies.
After the seatbelt was successfully dismantled, I struggled against the car door, the movement sending agony against my protesting muscles. This is why you shouldn’t live on gas station snacks and fast food for weeks on end, I thought to myself. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to open a small thing like a car door if my muscles actually existed in my arms anymore.
Success! The car door finally flew open, and I promptly fell out of my seat into the shrubs and rocks that were waiting for me just outside. Apparently, my legs weren’t working anymore.
I shivered as I looked around. Somehow, my lights were still working, and the area around me was eerily illuminated.
There was a thick forest just ahead of me. And although I couldn’t see anything…it felt like something was watching me.
I shivered again and decided it was best to try and get to the road and see if I could flag someone down for help. Although really, that was probably worse than staying here by the trees. I’d seen the news, I knew the danger of trying to hitchhike, especially out in the middle of nowhere like this. With my luck, I’d get picked up by a mugger or a murderer…or even Alistair. And not to mention those two animals I’d seen…
I groaned and reached back into the car to grab the tiny flashlight from my door that I’d picked up at…you guessed it…a gas station, and then I limped my way back towards the road, which was a seriously difficult task since I’d fallen down a shallow embankment. The roots, rocks, and weeds didn’t exactly help. I was not a hiker. I was only a few feet away from the road when a howl ripped through the air. I stopped in my tracks.
That thing inside of me that had been there for as long as I could remember perked up at the sound. There was a time that a wolf’s howl meant home. A time that I believed my howl would once call out into the night. My mother had promised that it would be a moment I would remember forever.
That was just another one of her lies.
Although I’d once welcomed the howl of a wolf, right now, the sound was a reminder that I was in the wilderness and there was a real possibility that I could be eaten. There weren’t any shifters out here, I’d seen the map many times as Alistair tried to plan world domination or whatever it was that he was interested in. Which meant the howl I was hearing was not a good sign.
Fuck, I sighed. I really was cursed. Deciding to proceed with my plan, I finally made it to the roadway, praying the next car that came by didn’t contain a psychopath. I’d definitely already had my fair share of those.
I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited some more.
How was it I couldn’t get cars off my ass earlier, and here I was, actually wanting cars to be on my ass, and they were nowhere to be seen? Had I taken a wrong turn somehow and stumbled upon a road that no one went down? I squinted at the road, trying to see if it looked like it was in disrepair. I hadn’t noticed any out of the ordinary bumps.
