Semua Bab His Luna Returned—So I Left With His Baby”: Bab 41 - Bab 50

The gurney-blocked corridor was only the rehearsal.The main act came later—after the lights, after Crowe’s voice wrapped around my name like a noose; after the cameras drank in every second of my “evaluation” and the donors learned the words *Lunaris vessel* with the same hungry cadence they used for *exclusive lot.*They didn’t drug me. Valen held that line.They didn’t cut me. Yet.They measured, and they hummed, and they pretended this was neutral science.Then they led me back out of the hall like a dangerous animal they’d just proven safe enough to sell.From the outside, it probably looked like a win for them. Calm subject. No broken bones. No explosions.Inside, every step rattled the bars in my head.***The exit route was never going to be through the front.They sent me down a side corridor, cameras still quietly blinking red. The handler walked at my elbow, Voss a few paces behind, the same two enforcers bracketing us with rifles slung.“Transport bay,” the handler said te

The Lunaris shackle closed with a sound that was too soft for what it was.Not a clank. It's more like a sigh—metal kissing skin and deciding to stay.Heat flared under the band, then sank inward, a heavy, smoldering ache that threaded through bone and tendon. The bracelet on my other wrist reacted at once, its silver veins brightening in jagged protest.For a heartbeat, I couldn’t breathe.Then the burn flattened into something worse: a steady, humming pressure, like a hand pressing down on my pulse from the inside. The glass-singing that had followed me since Frostveil dulled, as if someone had thrown a blanket over it.Crowe watched my face with professional curiosity. “On a scale of one to ten?” he asked. “Uncomfortable? Agonizing?”“Boring,” I said, though my voice came out thinner than I liked. “Did you get these off a clearance rack?”His mouth curved. “Bravado,” he murmured. “Always fascinating what people cling to when power slips.”He took the second shackle from the cabinet

The siren was a knife in the air.Red lights strobed in the corridor, staining the white walls pink with every pulse. The guard I’d thrown lay slumped against the far wall, hacking and wheezing, his eyes huge.“Code flare,” someone shouted from the end of the hall. “Lunaris containment breach!”Two more enforcers rushed in, rifles trained on me. I froze, chest heaving, the last sparking threads of power still tingling along my fingers.“I didn’t—” I started.“Down,” one snarled. “On your knees, now.”The Lunaris shackles were already cooling, runes dimming back to their usual ugly hum, but I could still feel the echo of that burst buzzing under my skin.“Stand down,” a voice snapped from the speaker grid.Crowe.The alarms cut mid-wail, leaving a painful silence in their wake. The red lights kept pulsing, slower now, more like a warning than a scream.Doors at the far end hissed open. Vaelen Crowe strode in, tie loosened, hair slightly mussed as if he’d been yanked away from a particu

They argued for another ten minutes.In the end, Elowen made the decision for them without even being in the room.Rae replayed a frozen frame—Elowen’s shackled hands, the faint glow under the Lunaris metal, Crowe’s voice describing her as “Lot One” like an item on a menu.Daire looked at the gray pass in Kieran’s hand, then at the screen. Something in his face settled.“You go,” he said. “You know the spine. You know their calls. You get to her first.”Kieran’s brows rose. “You’re sure?”“Don’t make me repeat it,” Daire growled.Kieran nodded once, fast. “Then we move now.”***The Tribunal complex loomed against the evening sky, all glass and stone, and self-importance. The benefit banners still fluttered near the main entrance, but the crowd was thinner; the first round of lots had already gone under the hammer.Rae’s diversion started as a whisper.A tweet here. A leak there. A shaky video of Nia’s “evaluation” filtered to an activist channel: her standing under harsh lights while

They didn’t go back to the pawnshop.Rae had two other boltholes for when things went from “messy” to “historic mistake.” This one was over a closed laundromat, the front windows blacked out, the back stairs narrow enough that Daire had to shoulder Elowen sideways to get her up them.He didn’t remember much of the run from the Tribunal to the car. Noise. Sirens. The iron taste of restraint in his own mouth as he didn’t turn and rip back through the doors when Crowe’s order echoed in his bones.He remembered Elowen’s weight under his hand, though. The way her steps stuttered but didn’t stop.Inside, the safe room was little more than four walls, a couch, a table, a bathroom with a flickering light. Everything smelled of detergent and cheap paint and the faintest trace of other scared people who’d hidden here before.As soon as the door locked behind them, Elowen’s legs gave out.Daire caught her before she hit the floor.The fight had been pure motion, pure necessity. Here, in the thin