Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Luna Returned—So I Left With His Baby”: Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

For a second after Crowe’s words, the square felt like it had been punched.*House Lunaris, come home.*I couldn’t breathe. Not because my lungs had forgotten how, but because every bone in my body was vibrating with that glass-singing frequency, the bracelet burning like it wanted to melt into my skin.Then Daire’s hand closed firmly around my elbow.“Now,” he said. “We move now.”The crowd churned, everyone trying to decide whether to stay and gawk or pretend they hadn’t lingered at a tribunal rally. Calista stepped back from the mic, hair gleaming under the gray light, expression serene.If she saw us, she didn’t show it.Kieran angled his body in front of mine, cutting a path. “Side street,” he said. “Same way we came. Keep your head up.”I wanted to duck, curl, to disappear, but I forced my chin level. Weak didn’t have to mean small.We pushed through knots of people, Daire’s grip, steady but not bruising. The bracelet’s heat ebbed to a simmer, then to a dull pulse in time with m

Calista’s voice bled out of Kieran’s phone like poison.“…uses a stolen bloodline to steal my husband. And I’m taking him back.”The host made a sympathetic noise. The crawler at the bottom of the screen read:**LUNA DRAVENNE SPEAKS: “ALPHA VHALOREN IS BEING MANIPULATED.”**I wanted to throw up.Daire stared at the screen, something raw crossing his face before he slammed the emotion back behind a hard, flat mask.“She’s good,” Kieran said. “I’ll give her that.”Daire’s hand curled around the edge of the binding-room shelf hard enough that the wood creaked. “We’re done watching her puppet show,” he said. “We move to the ground I can control.”“Where?” I asked. “You’ve already dragged me through three safehouses and an enclave. You have more secret boltholes lying around?”“Yes,” he said, simply. “One.”***The “one” turned out to be a guarded apartment on the edge of a Nightmoor-heavy district—high enough in the building that you couldn’t accidentally fall out of a window without tryi

The crushed camera sat on the coffee table like a dead insect.Kieran had pried it open with a screwdriver, just to be sure. The tiny lens was a spiderweb of cracks. The internal chip was cracked clean through. No light. No sound. No more blinking red eye on our balcony.“Think they got anything?” I asked.“Probably,” he said. “But not this.” He nudged the broken pieces with one knuckle. “This was maintenance. A live peek to see if their sniff-tags were paying off.”“Comforting,” I muttered.“Comfort’s not on the menu,” he said. “But information is.”***Comfort definitely wasn’t on the menu the next morning.Calista’s face was.It bloomed across every screen in the apartment. The guards had the news feed on low in the hall, the volume barely above a murmur. Kieran had three different channels open on his laptop, each with a commentator dissecting the same thing.The interview was pre-taped, packaged beautifully, and airing on the loop.“Turn it off,” I said from the kitchen doorway.

“They’re sweeping the district tonight—checkpoints, door-to-door.” Kieran’s words tasted like metal in my mouth. “How many?” Daire asked. “Enough.” Kieran wiped a hand over his face, leaving a faint smear of sweat on his temple. “They’ve already locked down the main arteries. I counted three mobile units and at least two scent teams before I made it back up here. This building is on their list.” “How do you know?” I asked, even though the dread in my ribs already knew the answer. He lifted his phone. A blurry shot of the corner outside our building’s entrance glowed on the screen—Tribunal vans parked at the end of the block, black-jacketed figures checking IDs under a portable light “And,” Kieran added, “because their “evaluation prep” tags were freshly planted in our stairwell. They don’t waste those on places they don’t plan to visit.” The baby shifted, restless. The kick from a minute ago had left a dull ache in my lower belly, a reminder that I wasn’t just one person

The message burned in the dark between us.**LUNARIS RELIC LOCATED — FROSTVEIL VAULT.**Sleep, when it finally came, wasn’t deep. It was the kind where your body shut down out of protest, not peace.When I woke, gray light seeped through the curtains. The apartment was quiet in that fragile way of early morning—the world hadn’t decided yet whether to scream.For a second, I didn’t remember where I was.Soft surface under me. Warm weight behind me. An arm slung low over my waist, heavy and sure.The bond hummed, satisfied, tugging me back into my own skin.Daire.Memory crashed in—rain in alleys, silver in my bones, his mouth on mine, his hands on my skin, the words on his phone.I lay still, staring at the crack in the ceiling.This was the part that had always scared me more than the heat—the morning after. The part where you had to live with what you’d chosen in the dark.I’d spent years losing myself in him, letting his wants and his schedule and his walls define the edges of my li