All Chapters of The moon goddess chose wrong: twice: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

NinaI felt it before anyone told me.A shift in the way I felt, something was wrong, the way pressure changes before a storm arrives. It wasn't exactly painful but I felt something was terribly wrong. More the particular quality of Enzo’s attention sharpening into something focused and cold and entirely directed outward, the way it got when he had stopped thinking about a problem and started moving toward it.I set down the tea I had been holding and looked at the window.The morning had been deceptively quiet. The kind of quiet that followed hard nights and carried the temporary peace of exhaustion rather than genuine stillness. The pack was moving through its routines with the careful deliberateness of people who knew more was coming and were using the interval to restore themselves everyone was preparing.Max appeared in the doorway of the small sitting room where I had been going through Kai’s debriefing notes.One look at his face told me everything.“What happened?” I said.“Bo

NinaThe western forest was entirely different from the eastern docks. No salt water. No industrial decay. Just trees and morning light and the particular silence of woodland that knew something was moving through it and had gone respectfully still.We moved in single file, Tessa at the front with two warriors, I and Kai in the middle, three more warriors behind. The formation was deliberate, I was not at the point and not at the rear, surrounded on all sides because Jessica was mainly after me. I accepted being protected but it made me feel cowardice, which I had accepted without argument partly because Enzo had asked and partly because the middle of a formation was where you could see everything and respond to anything, and mainly because he didn't want anything happening to me.Kai moved silently beside me, I had noticed something different with Kai, over the past day his silence was different from before. Most people who went quiet were either processing or suppressing. Kai’s qui

Jessica.The shadow gift had been rising with the words and now it was very large and not entirely directed and I was aware, distantly, that this was the thing the mage had warned me about. The point where the emotion and the gift became the same thing and neither was under sufficient control.And I didn't learn to control myself and she warned me but I had to kill Nina, I don't care what it would cost me.I pushed it forward anyway. Not at Nina but At Kai. I needed her to be distracted and weak before I finally struck her.Because Kai was the freshest wound and he was standing three feet from her and the shadow gift was looking for something it could reach and he was unguarded in the way that people who are watching someone they care about are always unguarded, attention on the person not the threat. He was focused on Nina and not me, so he couldn't dodge or move out of the way.It hit him like a wave, I saw his face in the moment it landed, the particular sequence of a body understa

Nina I wasn't surprised by how Jessica was acting. The nod of someone having confirmed what they had always known and had simply needed to hear said plainly.Jessica has done so many evil things towards Enzo, cheating on him, rejecting him, and getting involved with Dexter who is his half-brother. And trying to kill me, there was no way in hell he loved her.“It wasn’t about you,” I said. “I want you to hear that clearly. It wasn’t that you weren’t enough. It was that the bond was never between you. The Moon Goddess doesn’t make those mistakes and she doesn’t correct them by force.” I paused. “What happened between you and Enzo five years ago was real and it was painful and he carried it for years. But it was never going to become what you wanted it to be. Not because of your failures. Because of the nature of what a mate bond is.”She looked at me.Something in her expression moved past the composure and past the careful dignity and found the rawness underneath, the thing that had

EnzoThe east docks smelled of salt water and old rust and something underneath both of those that was more specific and more recent.Fear.Not mine. The accumulated residue of people who had passed through this place carrying it, the particular scent that soaked into the walls and concrete over the years of Dexter using this location for things that left marks you couldn’t scrub out. I had read the ledgers. I knew what had moved through these warehouses. Standing inside the smell of it was different from reading about it on paper.Max walked behind me surveying the place. Ronan and Jax flanked us. Four more warriors held the perimeter, moving through the outer approach with the quiet efficiency of people who had been briefed thoroughly and understood exactly what was at stake, we might make it home or not.The central warehouse was ahead.Large, Industrial. Its corrugated metal walls catch the gray morning light without warmth. A single door on the south face stood slightly ajar, wh