Chapter 12: Elunara

My eyes snap open. Darkness presses in. My heart hammers.

I sit up in bed and look around, absolutely sure they are in the room with me, but I’m alone.

I touch my breasts—warm and trembling. Desire still throbs in the silence.

Dew clings to the windowpane as the moonlight retreats, allowing the sun its time with the land. I rise from the bed, legs weak, mind tangled, and still in need.

I take three deep breaths, settling my racing heart before swinging my legs off the bed and shuffling to the shower. The tile is cold under my feet.

The pipes moan to life as I twist the handle.

Steam blooms instantly, curling in the air. I step out of my clothes—my skin tight, aware, flushed with the last fragments of a dream I can’t shake.

My thighs are slick, my breasts too full. I shouldn’t feel this way after waking. But I do.

The more I try to remember it or return to it, the more my dream fades from me.

I step into the shower.

The first hit of heat makes me gasp.

Water strikes my skin in sharp rivulets, each one a lash of sensation. It slides over me like hands—dozens of them—finding every hollow, every curve. My shoulders tense. My head tilts back. I let it cover me completely.

My breath catches in my throat, not from the heat, but from the way the spray moves across my chest—heavy against my breasts, drenching the heat that pulses between my legs like a second heartbeat. I flatten my palms against the tiled wall. My forehead follows. I don’t remember needing to brace myself, but I do.

Each drop strikes the small of my back, runs down my spine, and carries with it the friction of memory—his hands, his breath, the dream that hasn’t fully abandoned me. Darius. Vastian. The one I haven’t seen, but felt—Khael, I know it now, though no one’s told me. It doesn’t matter. My body knows him.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

But it doesn’t help.

Because now the water sounds like drums. The same rhythm that throbbed through the dream. The rhythm that matched my breath when I was on my knees in the moonlight, surrounded by them, claimed in ways I’m not ready to name aloud. And yet my body begs for it. My body remembers.

The water strikes harder now. Like it’s punishing me.

Or purifying me.

I press my hips against the tile, arching slightly, letting the water run between my breasts, over the tips now tight and aching. I don’t touch myself. I want to—but it’s not about release. Not yet. It’s about this moment. This slow undoing. The unraveling of every lie I’ve told myself about who I am and what I want.

My fingers curl against the grout. My breath is ragged now. My cheek rests against the warm, wet stone.

Somewhere under the thunder of the water, I hear my name.

Elunara.

I shudder.

The water coils around me, winding down my belly, circling my hips. I imagine a hand guiding it. A mouth following. My knees almost buckle. I don’t know how long I stand there, head bowed, chest heaving. It could be minutes. It could be hours.

The only thing I know for certain is this—

I don’t belong in the world I left behind.

Not anymore.

And whatever I’m becoming, whatever this place is doing to me—I want more.

* * *

The water cools, but I don’t move.

I stay there, letting the last threads of warmth trail down my thighs, letting the last vestiges of the dream—of them—bleed out through my pores and swirl down the drain.

When I finally shut off the water, silence falls like a curtain. It presses against my ears, thicker than steam, denser than fog. My breath sounds too loud. My heartbeat even louder.

I wrap the towel around me and step out, feet slick against the floor as I cross the hall back to my room. The air outside the bathroom is cooler than it should be. Not unpleasant, just… bracing. Like something unseen brushing against my skin.

The bedroom is dim, lit only by the light of early morning. I pull open the curtain, needing to see the trees, the barn, the wild stretch of field that no longer feels foreign.

I need to know that my dream was just that and nothing more.

That’s when I see it.

Rex, my plant I left on the sill.

I step close.

My sad, brittle little plant—so close to death when I brought him here that I half-considered throwing him out the car window somewhere near the county line—is thriving.

His leaves are burgundy with a lively green shade around the edges and along the stem. It’s vibrant in a way it’s never been.

I blink once.

Then again.

No, that plant was almost gone two days ago. It was dying when I set it on the windowsill. I put it there to give it something pretty to look out over in its last days, not because I thought it had any hope of revival.

I don’t have a green thumb. I kill everything I touch.

And yet… here it is. Very much alive.

I hover around it careful not to bother it, as if it might wilt under my gaze. But the closer I get, the stronger the truth becomes. This isn’t just a plant that bounced back. This is something else.

My dream flashes behind my eyes—those glowing amber eyes, the weight of unseen hands, the feel of the land shifting beneath my knees as the moon painted my bare skin in silver. That voice whispering: It’s okay, little hucow. You’re home now.

My stomach twists.

Home.

I let the towel drop to the floor and sit on the edge of the bed in nothing but my skin, staring at Rex as if he might start talking and explain himself to me.

He doesn’t.