บททั้งหมดของ Rejected Luna: Royal blood : บทที่ 101 - บทที่ 110

Emily's POVThe letter came with the afternoon rider.Not addressed to me. Addressed to Rollins, in the particular hand of the Voss border captain, tight and angular and written by someone who had learned the skill late and never fully trusted it. Rollins read it in the war room with Liam standing at his shoulder and handed it to me without comment when he was done, which was how I knew the content was mine to decide what to do with.I read it standing at the table.Cassandra had been found at the Aldenmere crossing eleven days ago. Alone. On foot. Carrying nothing except the clothes she'd left in and a small folded document that turned out to be her own formal resignation from the position of Luna of Ironclaw, written in her hand, witnessed by no one, and dated to the night of the sealing.The Voss captain wrote that she had asked for nothing. She had eaten what was offered, slept six hours, and ridden out before dawn on a horse they had loaned her toward the southern territories. Sh

Emily's POV She came to find me before the Archivist did. That told me something. The Archivist had been managing Lira's movements for sixteen years with the particular efficiency of someone who had never once let sentiment slow down a necessary thing. If Lira had reached me first, she would have moved without being told to. She had decided on her own when to go. I was in the inner yard when I heard her step on the stone behind me. The morning was pale and cold, the kind of cold that came after a long thing ended and left the air with nothing particular to do. I did not turn immediately. I let the moment be what it was. She came to stand beside me. We were quiet for a while. The yard was empty at this hour, the sentries on the outer wall and the keep still finding their way back to ordinariness. A horse moved in the stable across the yard, a slow, restless sound. One of the torches at the eastern gate had burned out overnight, and nobody had replaced it yet. "The Archivist wants

Emily's POV The keep was still dark when I went up. Not asleep, a keep of this size never fully slept, there was always a sentry's cough somewhere, always the low groan of the outer gate settling in the cold, but quieter than it had been in months. The specific quiet of a place that had been held under sustained pressure for a long time and had finally been allowed to breathe. I pulled my cloak tighter and climbed the wall stairs alone. The stone was cold under my palm on the rail. That same cold it had always been, indifferent to everything that had happened around it. The keep had burned and healed and held and broken apart and come back together, and the wall stairs were still exactly the same temperature at the fourth hour of the morning that they had always been. There was something honest about that. I had stopped expecting the world to mark the things that had marked me. The wall walk was empty. I went to the northern corner. The one that faced the tree line. The sky abo

Emily's POV The letter from Voss arrived on the fourth morning. Not the formal alliance correspondence, that would come through the proper channels, through Liam and the council table and the careful diplomatic language that turned decisions made in cold yards and waystation rooms into documents that would sit in the archive for a generation. This was something else. A single page, written in the border captain's angular hand, forwarded from the waystation with a note that said only: She asked me to pass this along. Voss herself had written it. Short. Four sentences. The kind of writing that came from a woman who had spent fifty years saying exactly what she meant and had no patience left for anything that wasn't that. The current reached my pack again last night. Not the way it did the first time, when none of us knew what it was. Quieter. More like remembering something we already knew. I wanted you to know that we feel it, and that it is good, and that what you built has not g

Emily's POV I woke before he did. That was unusual. Rollins was a light sleeper, the particular vigilance of an Alpha who had spent enough years responsible for a sleeping pack that his body had simply stopped allowing deep rest as a default. Most mornings I surfaced to find him already at the window or already dressed, the space beside me still warm but empty. This morning his breathing was slow and even and his arm was still across me and the grey pre-dawn light was coming through the shutter gaps and I lay still for a while and simply let him sleep. He had earned it. We both had. After a while I eased out from under his arm without waking him, dressed quietly in the grey light, and went up to the wall. The stone was cold under my palm on the stair rail. That same cold it had always been. Indifferent to everything. The keep had burned and held and broken and come back together across more years than either of us had been alive, and the wall stairs were the same temperatur