All Chapters of The Full Moon Verdict: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Headlights flared across the ceiling, slicing through rain and shadow. Tires sloshed on the gravel drive. The gate latch clicked, sharp in the night. Somewhere down the hall, a door shut with a deep, deliberate thud.“Bedroom,” Ethan called—not loud, but with the kind of voice that would find the right ears in the right house.Boots pounded against wood, heavy and sure. Rook appeared in the doorway on the last breath of the storm—a bear of a man, broad through the shoulders, his thick red beard bristling like copper wire caught between wild and tamed. He filled the frame as though the house itself had to widen to let him in. His eyes, sharp gray and unsparing, swept the room once and fixed on Anna. He carried himself like someone carved from siege walls, built for force but trained to wield it with precision. The duffel dangled from one hand, the hard case from the other, both looking smaller than they were in his grip. When he moved, it was with the controlled heaviness of a man who c

Chapter Twenty–Four: Head StartThe G-Wagen’s engine growled low, a restrained beast in the early light. He hadn’t touched the Lamborghini—too low, too stiff, too obvious. Anna needed clearance, comfort, stability. The Benz gave him all three.He eased it down the long drive, tires whispering over wet gravel, suspension absorbing every ripple. The world outside was rinsed clean by the storm, but the air still carried that metallic tang—the scent of things unfinished.Anna sat angled toward the window, her profile caught in fractured sunlight through the trees. The blanket lay over her lap, the pack wedged securely by her boots. She was pale, but her eyes tracked the passing world with quiet calculation, like someone cataloging both exits and threats.He kept one hand on the wheel, the other draped over the shifter, eyes flicking from the road to the mirror and back. No tails. Not yet. But paranoia wasn’t a flaw today—it was insurance.“Comfortable?” he asked without looking.She made a

He moved like the kiss hadn’t just happened.Like his pulse wasn’t still hammering.Ethan straightened from the couch, the shadow of his hand brushing her cheek vanishing as if it had never been there. He adjusted the open shirt at his shoulders, fabric shifting over him like it knew where to cling—dark cotton drawn to the breadth of his back, catching on the line of his biceps before falling loose again. The clean shave he’d kept was already threatening stubble, but the sharpness of his jaw was all there, framed by the faintest glint of streetlight slicing through the curtains.She caught the scent of him when he passed—warm cedar layered over soap and something distinctly male, metallic at the edges like the ghost of gun oil. It wasn’t a smell that clung by accident. It was him. The way the air shifted when he entered a room and made it his.Anna told herself not to track him with her eyes, but she did. The wolf-shadowed silhouette of him filled the apartment as he moved into the ki

Morning slid into afternoon, then into the blue weight of evening, the hours measured not by clocks but by the rhythm of small rituals: meds, water, food, checks. Anna’s world shrank to the radius of the couch, the bathroom, the stubborn walks to the kitchen and back. Ethan’s world looped the perimeter, every circuit returning to her without looking like it had.The lull wasn’t peace. It was pressure condensed into a steady weight—bearable only because they carried it together.Between takeout meals, calls from his office and conversations that weren’t confessions, they worked.The coffee table became a war table. Laptop open, maps tiled on the screen. Post-its like flags. A legal pad marked by Ethan’s jagged print—names, arrows, fragments. She saw the courtroom in him when he laid it out, the way he built a case from rot and motive.“You organize people like evidence,” she said at last, tracing one of his arrows with a dull pencil.“Every name’s a liability,” he said. “Proof comes af

Dawn crawled through the blinds in thin white bars, striping the floor like prison light.Time loosened its grip. Hours slid past, stitched together not by clocks but by small rituals: food, water, the steady pulse of Ethan’s checks. Anna’s world held to the couch and the stubborn path to the kitchen and back. Ethan’s world circled the apartment, a tide that always returned to her without looking like it had.The lull wasn’t peace. It was pressure condensed into a steady weight—bearable only because they carried it together.By the second day her body found steadier ground. The exhaustion that had tethered her eased into something manageable, a rhythm she could push against instead of surrender to. With every meal, every measured step, every long breath, strength came back in increments she could count.Between naps that weren’t quite sleep and conversations that weren’t quite confessions, they worked.The coffee table spread into a battlefield—maps tiled on the screen, post-its like