Semua Bab Rebirth Of The Broken Luna: A Second Chance at Luna's Heart : Bab 431 - Bab 440

Chapter 432JANICEThat is what I told myself, at least, in the moments before I began.There are rules to what I can do, and I want to set them down plainly, because I think it matters—maybe only to me—that the limits are real and not just a story I tell to make myself feel less like a monster.I cannot kill. Not directly, not as payment, not ever. Death is a door I am permitted to open once, for the person who is owed a second chance, and never again for them after that. Whatever else I do to Lumina, I cannot end her life. That is not mercy. It is simply outside what I am allowed to do.I cannot torture without end. Pain has its place in balance—suffering is sometimes the only currency a thread will accept—but it must have a shape and a limit, a beginning and a close. What I was doing to Lumina, sealing her in the grey, letting her drift in fragments too thin to hold onto, was not meant to be eternal. It was meant to last until the thread stabilized around her absence. Two years, ro

Chapter 434XENOISShe laughed, a little watery, a little relieved, and pressed her face into my shoulder.We stood there a moment longer, and I let myself remember—the way you let yourself remember something good in the middle of something terrible, grabbing at it like a rope thrown into deep water. Sophia, sixteen years old, laughing at something stupid I'd said outside the pack training grounds, the first time I'd realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life making her laugh like that. The years after, dating quietly at first and then not quietly at all, my parents' cautious approval slowly warming into real affection for her. The mating ceremony, her hand in mine under the full moon, the whole pack howling their approval into the night sky.The pregnancy. God, I remembered the pregnancy—how sick she'd been those first months, how she used to press my hand against her stomach in the middle of the night just so I could feel the twins move, how she'd cried the first time Riley kick

Chapter 436SOPHIAHe didn't answer. He rarely did, these days. He just looked at me with those large, solemn eyes—so like Xenois's, and yet somehow unlike them too, carrying something heavier than a five-year-old should carry—and then crossed the kitchen to take the stool furthest from his brothers."Pancakes are almost ready," I told him, keeping my voice light. "Chocolate chip or plain?"He shrugged. Just a small movement of his shoulders, and then he reached for the stuffed wolf he carried with him everywhere—a worn, gray thing with one ear stitched back on crooked, a gift Xenois had given him years ago that Ollie had never once been willing to leave behind—and set it on the counter beside him, arranging it just so, like the positioning mattered more than anything I'd asked him.Something in my chest tightened, small and reflexive, and I didn't examine it too closely. I never did."Plain, then," I decided for him, and turned back to the stove.It wasn't that I didn't love him. I w

Chapter 438OLLIETWO YEARS LATERThe smell came first, before anything else in the dream ever did.Wildflowers. Not the smell of the garden behind our house, which was mostly roses and something my mother called lavender that made my nose itch. This was different. Wilder. Sweet in a way that didn't sit in my chest so much as it wrapped around it, gentle, the way a blanket wraps around you when someone tucks it in tight enough that you can't wiggle free even if you wanted to.I never saw a face in the dream. That was the part that bothered me most, more than the smell itself, more than waking up with my heart going too fast and my sheets twisted around my legs like I'd been running somewhere in my sleep. There was just warmth, and the smell, and a voice that hummed instead of talking—no words, just a tune I could never remember once I was awake, no matter how hard I tried to hold onto it in the first few seconds before it slipped away like water down a drain.I had the dream maybe onc

Chapter 440RILEY Mom picked us up after school, the same warm smile, the same easy questions about our day, and I found myself talking twice as much as usual, filling the car with chatter about my science project and a book I was reading and a hundred small, inconsequential things, like I could somehow balance out Ollie's silence with my own noise. It was a thing I did without quite deciding to do it. Had done for as long as I could remember. Ollie went quiet, and I got loud, like our whole selves were built to counterweight each other."You're extra talkative today," Mom said, glancing at me in the mirror with obvious affection."Just a good day," I said, and didn't look at Ollie, who was staring out the window with his wolf clutched in his lap.That evening, after dinner, I overheard Grandma Silvia on the phone with Mom in the kitchen, their voices low but not quite low enough that I couldn't catch pieces of it from the hallway."