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2026-09-19 23:58:37
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His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 131.
ELLARIA. By the time the vows were done I was fully and formally named Luna of the Eastern Sector in front of several hundred people.I sat with that through the entire reception.The hall had transformed from ceremony to celebration the way that only significant amounts of money and staff could manage. Food on every table. Drinks appearing in glasses that kept emptying. The dance floor packed from the first song and the music loud enough that you felt it in your chest before your ears caught up.Arren and I sat at the center of all of it.Guest after guest came to offer congratulations. Alpha families and council members and people whose names I tried to hold onto and lost immediately. I smiled and said the right things and let Arren handle the political dimensions of each conversation because he knew these people and I didn't and we both understood that without having to say it.His hand was in mine the entire time.He kept me close. Not as a performance. Just consistently. His bod
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 130.
ELLARIA.The dress weighed more than I expected.Heavy white fabric that pooled at my feet and required two people to arrange every time I moved. The tailors had been at it since before sunrise, adjusting things I couldn't see and conferring in low voices about things I didn't understand. I stood in the middle of it all and focused on breathing at a normal rate.Some of the women I used to work with were here.That was the strangest part. Women I'd cleaned corridors beside and eaten breakfast with in the staff kitchen were now pinning fabric and handing things to the tailors and not quite meeting my eyes. I didn't blame them. I didn't know how to meet their eyes either.Mirela was the exception.Arren had introduced me to his cousin a week ago. She'd looked me over once and then pulled me into a hug I wasn't prepared for and said she was so glad someone was finally making him do this. I'd liked her immediately in the way you liked people who didn't leave you any choice.She was still
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 129.
ELLARIA.I stood there and heard the words land and my brain did absolutely nothing useful with them.I want you to be my wife.He was still looking at me. Waiting. Like he'd said something reasonable. Like he'd asked me to pass him a document or confirm a time and was simply waiting for the practical response."I'm sorry," I said. "Could you say that again.""You heard me," he said.I had heard him. That was the problem. I'd heard him perfectly clearly and my brain was refusing to process it because processing it meant accepting that I was standing in a palace boardroom being asked to marry the heir to the eastern sector by the heir to the eastern sector and that was not something that happened to maids from refugee camps who still didn't know where their mothers were."I'm a maid," I said."I'm aware.""You're a prince.""Also aware."I looked at him. He looked back at me with the patience of someone who had anticipated this part and was prepared to wait it out."Why?" I said.He le
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 128
TEN YEARS AGOELLARIA. The palace didn't know what to do with itself. That was the only way to describe it. The king was dead and every corridor and every staircase and every room I moved through in the days that followed had the particular unsettled energy of a place that had been running on a specific rhythm for a long time and had just had that rhythm pulled out from under it. The maids felt it more than most. We were everywhere and invisible at the same time which meant we heard everything. "They're saying the succession has to happen quickly," Mara said. She was working the other end of the upper corridor from me, polishing the same stretch of floor she'd been polishing for twenty minutes without making any progress because she kept stopping to talk. "The council won't wait. They can't." "He's not married," said Deli from the linen cupboard. Her head appeared around the door. "That's the issue isn't it. They can't properly install him without a formal union." "That's not s
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 127.
TEN YEARS AGOELLARIA.It had been five days since I'd seen Katerina.Four days since they'd moved me to the palace.I didn't know why. Nobody had explained it and I hadn't asked because you didn't ask, not when you were a maid and the decision came from somewhere above you. You packed your things and moved where you were told and got on with it.The last time I'd seen Katerina she'd been on the phone in her sitting room with a mood on her that filled the whole space. I'd cleaned around her as quietly as I could and left the moment I was done and told myself whatever was happening had nothing to do with me.I still wasn't sure that was true.The palace was different from Katerina's residence in the way that a river was different from a glass of water. The same basic thing but a different scale entirely. High ceilings. Long corridors. Staff moving through it in a permanent quiet efficiency that told you everyone here had been doing this long enough to stop thinking about it.I hadn't s
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 126.
ELLARIA.The hotel was the nicest thing we'd stayed in since leaving the eastern sector.Why wouldn’t it be with three rooms off a shared sitting area. A window that looked out over the town's main street and furniture that hadn't seen better days. Catherine walked in, looked around once and called it acceptable, which from her was close to a standing ovation.Arren went out for dinner.I made tea in two cups. I set Catherine's on the small table beside her armchair and took mine to the end of the sofa. She had her shoes off and her legs crossed and the ease of someone who was comfortable in any space she entered.Outside the town was settling into evening. Lights coming on in the shop windows. People passing on the street below moving slower than they had in the morning."Nice town," I said."Mm," she said."For a town full of witches." I added pointedly, still not letting her live it down. She smiled into her cup. "Most nice things are complicated when you look closely enough."W
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 6.
ELLARIA.He told me to stop making a fuss and walked away.Katerina at his side and the little boy trotting along between them, and the three of them moved down their path together like a unit, like something complete, like something that had existed long before I came into the picture and would ex
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 5.
ARREN.Kade came in and dropped into the chair across from my desk with the energy of a man who'd aged five years in the last two hours."Katerina's taken the boy in," he said. "He's down for the night.""Good."He looked like he had more to say about the evening's events. After something like the
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 2.
ELLARIA.He was standing on the front porch with his back to me, one hand pressed against his ear, his voice so soft I almost didn't recognize it."Hey, hey. Calm down. Tell me what's wrong."I stood frozen in the doorway, watching him speak to another woman in a voice he had never once used with m
His Contract Luna Says Goodbye 1.
ELLARIA.My Alpha forced me to sign a marriage contract: no love, no children.He didn’t know I had fallen in love with him at first sight. And now, with only three months left until our contract expired, I was pregnant.***“Luna! You’re having twins!” the doctor exclaimed.The two tiny, beating h
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