Semua Bab His Luna Returned—So I Left With His Baby”: Bab 1 - Bab 9

Three months later, my name was Mara, and my world smelled like stale beer and old fry oil.The Vesperridge dive bar didn’t have a sign so much as a flickering red *OPEN* that never quite managed all its letters at once. It sat wedged between a pawnshop and a shuttered tattoo parlor, the whole block soaked in neon and indifference. Perfect.Nobody here cared who you’d been, as long as you paid in cash and didn’t bleed on the furniture.“Table three’s trying to pay with vibes again,” Risa called over the thump of bass. “And you missed a spot.”I glanced down. A ring of someone’s spilled drink glistened on scarred wood. I wiped it away with a swipe of the rag, then moved, hips doing a practiced sidestep to avoid a staggering wolf twice my size.Being pregnant made me slower. The cheap suppressant tabs made me dull around the edges. But the reflexes—those I kept. You had to, if you were an omega working nights in a place that sold more fantasies than beer.“Mara, right?” one of the regul

The phone’s screen went dark in Daire’s hand. The words still echoed off wet brick.*Recover the Lunaris vessel. Alive.*Every muscle in his body screamed to move.He didn’t waste time explaining.He spun back toward the alley mouth, eyes tracking the bobbing white beams of Tribunal flashlights as they probed the main street. Their line of advance was obvious: sweep the open fronts first, then the side alleys.They’d hit the bar in less than a minute.“Back inside,” he said. “Now.”The omega—Elowen, even if she hadn’t given him that name—blinked at him like he’d punched her. Rain plastered her hair to her cheeks. Silver pulsed faintly under her sleeve, the bracelet heat he’d felt against his palm not entirely in his imagination.“You just said—”“I know what I said.” His tone came out harsher than he meant. “The front is about to be full of uniforms with scanners. We don’t want to meet them in the open.”Her eyes flicked toward the end of the alley where light scythed across the rain,

The knock came in three sharp beats on the apartment door.Not the neighbor’s lazy fist. Not the nervous rattle of a landlord. A pattern. Crisp. Deliberate.Elowen was off the chair before she realized she’d moved.Her hand went automatically to the drawer by the chipped sink. Fingers closed around cold metal. The small kitchen knife felt laughable compared to what waited outside in the city, but the weight of it in her grip steadied something.Her body knew what her mind tried not to say out loud.You’ve been hunted before.“Stay back,” Daire said, already cutting between her and the door.She ignored him, keeping to the side, shoulders angled, knife low but ready. Old instinct: give yourself a line to run and a line to stab.The coded knock came again. Three. Pause. Two.“Kieran,” Daire muttered under his breath. His shoulders dropped half an inch from full attack stance to something slightly less murderous.He moved the chain, cracked the door, and then stepped aside as Kieran Sabl

For a long moment, no one moved.The words hung between us like a drawn blade.*I’ll marry you… but I won’t be your secret—ever again.*Daire’s eyes searched my face as if he expected me to snatch the sentence back. Behind him, Kieran went very still, some quick calculation flickering and then smoothing in his gaze.I didn’t flinch. I was so tired of flinching.“Well,” Kieran said at last, lightly, as if we weren’t standing on the edge of a knife. “That’s one way to make the Tribunal work for their paperwork.”Daire didn’t look away from me. “Terms,” he said quietly. “You set them. All of them.”A bitter laugh scraped up my throat. “You always say the right things *after* doing the wrong ones.”“I’m still learning,” he said. “That’s why I’m not talking until you tell me what this looks like. To you.”“Good instinct,” Kieran muttered.I turned away from both of them, just enough to think. The couch was behind me; I let myself sink down onto it, knees suddenly less trustworthy than I wa