บททั้งหมดของ REJECTED LUNA RETURNS FOR WAR!: บทที่ 151 - บทที่ 156

EDMUND’S POV We stood in the pack house corridor for a long time before either of us spoke. Not awkward — not exactly. The specific quality of two people who had too much to say and too little framework for saying it, who had been through separate impossible things and emerged into the same morning and were now required to be in the same space without the structure of before to organize around. Before was gone. What was here was — us. Whatever that was now. Whatever we were after eight months of east chambers and a rejected mate bond and Clara and Redmoon and everything that had happened between the night I’d kissed Clara in the garden and this corridor. I looked at Isabella. She looked at me. Different. I’d known she’d be different and I’d told Ramona she was still Isabella and both things were true simultaneously. The thin and the distilled and the quality I couldn’t name that lived in her face now. She’d been through something I didn’t have words for and come back from it n

ISABELLA’S POV I knew before I let myself know. That was how it worked sometimes — the body carrying information that the mind wasn’t ready to process, storing it somewhere accessible but not examined, waiting for the moment when the examination became unavoidable. The moment became unavoidable on a Wednesday morning in the fourth week. I’d been tired. Not the exhaustion of aftermath — that I’d been managing, the specific bone-deep tiredness of someone who had run on too little for too long and was slowly, imperfectly, reconstructing normal. That kind of tired had a quality I recognized and a direction it was moving in. This was different. Different in the morning specifically. The specific quality of mornings being wrong in a way that the rest of the day wasn’t. Marta came to me. Not because I’d asked for her — because Marta was the healer of Evergreen and Marta had known me since before I could form complete sentences and Marta had the specific gift of arriving when she was

ISABELLA’S POV He came to me in the dream. Not the way dreams usually worked. Not the distorted, half-logical way where people appeared as themselves but also as something else. Where geography made no sense and time ran sideways. This was clear. The east garden. The dry fountain. The bare branches. Leon standing beside the fountain in his working clothes. That expression on his face. The kind and welcoming one. I looked at him. He looked at me. For a moment neither of us spoke. We just stood there. Two people who had never had enough time. “You’re dreaming,” he said. “I know,” I said. “How is it,” he said. “Evergreen.” “Standing,” I said. “Difficult. Rebuilding.” I paused. “Ours again.” He nodded slowly. Something in his face was different from how I remembered it in life. The tension was gone. All of it. The weight of the binding and the conquest and thirty years of a hand at the back of his neck. All of it gone. He looked free. He looked like what he might have b