All Chapters of BLOODBOUND: THE LAST MATE : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

"I spent six months after you left," Ronin said, over the dinner she had promised him, "writing you a letter. In my head, mostly. Occasionally on paper, but I always burned it." He was eating with the particular focus of someone who is using the mechanics of eating to organize what they want to say. "The letter kept changing. It started as an apology and became a justification and then became an apology again, and then eventually it became something I couldn't categorize.""What was it, in the end?""An attempt to explain," he said. "Which is different from an apology and different from a justification. An apology says: what I did was wrong. A justification says: what I did had reasons. An explanation says: here is what I was, honestly, in the moment I made the choice I made, and I am not asking you to forgive it but I am asking you to understand that the person who made it is not the person I intended to be.""That's a careful distinction," she said."I've had a lot of time to work o

"You want to hear about my grievance," Halloway said, with the specific, suspicious flatness of someone who has been manipulated by sympathy before. "You want me to tell you what I lost so that you can determine the smallest accommodation that neutralizes me.""I want to hear about your grievance," Lena said, "because it's a real one and it has been treated as a political problem for fifty years rather than as a real one, and that is partly why you're here, in this position, with a petition in a courier's case." She held Halloway's gaze steadily. "And yes, I also want to know what it would take to make the petition unnecessary. Those things are not mutually exclusive."Halloway looked at her for a long moment. She was a woman in her fourth century — old enough to have seen many things, old enough to have her assumptions tested repeatedly, and carrying in her face the specific quality of someone who has been disappointed by what those tests found. She said, finally: "My family's holdin

"The classification document is complete," Lord Caius said, setting a substantial bound manuscript on the east study table with the care of someone placing something that is heavier in significance than in physical weight. "Three months of committee work, and I want to say — in the interest of honest accounting — that the process was made substantially better by the participation of Lords Fenwick and Bresne, who were both more rigorous than I expected.""And Halloway?" Lena asked. She was seated at the table, Rafael beside her, Caius across."Invaluable on the historical sections," Caius said, with the specific tone of a man giving credit that surprised him. "The eastern territory records she provided were primary sources unavailable anywhere else in the Citadel's holdings. The classification document's historical foundation is more accurate than it would have been without her." He paused. "She knows it. She said nothing about it at the committee sessions, but she knows it."Lena look

"Tell me what you want to say at the ceremony," Rafael said. They were in the east study, the night before the ratification session, the fire going, the correspondence done and set aside. The room had settled into its most honest form — the amber light, the quiet, the particular ease that existed in it when the court's formal architecture had relaxed for the day."I want to say something true," she said. "Not inspiring. Not designed to be remembered. I've been to enough formal declarations now to know that the words designed to be remembered usually aren't, and the words said because they were the only right ones usually are.""What's the only right thing to say tomorrow?"She thought about it. She had been thinking about it intermittently for the past week, when the day's work would loosen for a moment and the larger thing would surface. What was true about where she was? What had she learned that was worth saying in a room full of people who were all, in their different ways, still

"You're awake," Rafael said, from the doorway of the east study.It was the third night hour. She was in the armchair by the fire, not reading, not working, just present in the particular way of someone who has too much in their mind for sleep. She had the warm cup of tea she kept forgetting to drink, and the Shunned Star texts open on the side table — third volume, the one she had finally gotten to on her cleared day two weeks ago and had been returning to in pieces since."I'm awake," she said. "You should sleep.""I will," he said, which they both understood to mean he wouldn't, not yet. He came in and sat across from her in the other armchair — his chair — and the fire burned between them and the Citadel was quiet in the way it was only at the very deepest hours. "What are you reading?""The origin account," she said. She looked at the page. "The Shunned Star texts have a creation story, of a kind. About the bloodline's beginning. About what the Moon Goddess did and why." She paus