All Chapters of THE LUNAR THAT WASN'T ENOUGH : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Nobody told her he would be there.That was the part she kept returning to, later, when she was trying to reconstruct the day into something she could manage. Whether it was an oversight or a decision someone had made for her, she didn't know yet. But she intended to find out.The Westfield Summit happened every eighteen months. Twelve packs, two royal representatives, one very long agenda about territorial agreements and trade protocols that nobody actually disagreed about but everyone needed to be seen discussing.Leila had attended twice before.Never like this.Darius had the car prepared at seven.She came downstairs at five past, coat already on, the particular armor of a woman who had learned that looking composed was half the battle before the battle started."Full attendance list?" she said."On the tablet." He held the door. "Fourteen pack representatives confirmed."She took the tablet. Scrolled.Blue Moon Pack, Representative TBC."TBC," she said."As of yesterday." Darius

The rain started properly around the motorway interchange.Not the tentative kind — the kind that announces itself gradually, giving you time to adjust. It arrived all at once, the way February rain did when it had been holding off all day and finally stopped bothering. Against the window it sounded like static. Like something being erased.Leila watched it and felt, distantly, grateful.Rain meant looking at the window was reasonable. Rain meant the blur outside was the weather's fault. Rain gave her somewhere to put her eyes that wasn't Darius, who was sitting with the particular quality of stillness that meant he was watching her in his peripheral vision and deciding, again and again, not to speak.He had been deciding not to speak for eleven minutes.She knew because she'd been counting. Not deliberately. Her mind had needed something to do other than replay the corridor, so it had started counting the silence in the way anxious minds found traction in the measurable.Eleven minut

Harry Voss had a rule about principals.It was not a written rule. It was not in the royal household security handbook, though the handbook covered most things with the thoroughness of a document written by people who had learned its lessons expensively. It was a rule he had developed himself, over eleven years of close protection work, through observation and a few near-misses with the kind of professional entanglement that ended careers and, more importantly, compromised the people you were supposed to be protecting.The rule was simple.You do not become the person they talk to.Not the primary one. Not the one they reached for when the day had been difficult or the news had been bad or it was late and the apartment was quiet in the specific way that quiet became a presence of its own. There were people for that. Families, friends, partners, therapists — a whole architecture of personal support that existed precisely so that the person standing between them and harm could stay in t

The office was smaller than he'd expected.Adrian didn't know what he'd expected, exactly. Something more clinical, maybe. Something that announced its purpose more clearly — the particular sterility of professional spaces designed to hold difficult things. He had been in enough boardrooms and pack halls and legal offices to have developed a working theory about how rooms signaled their function, and this room was not following it.It was just a room.Two chairs, angled slightly toward each other — not facing directly, which he noticed, the specific geometry of not-quite-confrontational. A low table with nothing on it. Bookshelves along one wall, the books actual and read-looking rather than decorative, cracked spines and misaligned heights. A window with the blinds half-open, letting in the grey February light in a way that was neither dramatic nor deliberately dim. Just light, doing what light did.A plant in the corner that was slightly too large for its pot.He looked at the plant

The offices were on the fourth floor of a building that had no signage at street level.This was deliberate, and Leila had noticed it the way she noticed deliberate things — with a specific, quiet approval. A family law practice that served clients who valued discretion had understood, at some point in its history, that the first act of discretion was not announcing yourself. The building was on a street of similar buildings, professional and unremarkable, the kind of street that existed in every city to house the serious work that didn't require a facade.She had arrived four minutes early.She was always four minutes early — not five, which read as anxious, not two, which read as careless. Four was the interval of someone who managed their time well and respected other people's. She had developed this calculation in her early twenties and had never revised it because it had never been wrong.Darius was downstairs.She had come up alone.Miriam Osei's assistant — young, precise, the