All Chapters of His Contract Luna Says Goodbye : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

ARREN.I hadn't been out here in years.The road to the outskirts of the eastern sector was the kind that made you question whether you'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. Narrow and overgrown on both sides, the trees pressing in close enough that the light changed quality the further I went. Not darker exactly. Just different. Like the air out here operated by slightly different rules than the air everywhere else in my territory.My father used to make this drive like it was nothing. Comfortable behind the wheel, humming something tuneless, completely unbothered by the way the territory seemed to shift personality the closer you got to the edge of it.I'd never managed comfortable out here, not as a child and not now.I'd told myself for years that the unease was irrational. The old woman who commandeered this particular corner of the eastern sector had never actually done anything to warrant the wariness she produced in me every time I came within a mile of her property. She was territo

ARREN.The old woman's parting words had been sitting in my head the entire drive back.Bring him to me. Immediately.She'd shut down every question after that. I'd asked her three different ways and gotten the same wall each time. She wouldn't say more until the boy was standing in her cottage, which presented an obvious problem given that the boy was currently in intensive care on the other side of a sectioned wall.I pulled up to the faction gates and ran through the outer disinfection chamber. Waited out the full cycle, retrieved my phone and belt and shoes from the cubicle, then moved through to the second checkpoint. The second chamber ran longer. My throat pulled tight before it finished and I stood there until it cleared, then nodded at the guards on the other side and walked through.The clinic was my first stop.The staff moving through the halls were quiet in a particular way that had nothing to do with efficiency. They'd all seen too much in too short a stretch of time and

ELLARIA.The room had four walls and I'd counted them more times than I wanted to admit.Three other people sat with me. We weren't talking. Nobody in a room like this talked much, not when the thing tying you together was the possibility that something had gotten into your blood and was sitting there quietly waiting to announce itself.I'd coughed up blood.That was the fact I kept returning to. My palm red, my brain stopping completely, the nurse appearing within minutes because someone had been watching. Tests. The move to this room. The wait.I'd been inside my own body ever since in a way that was starting to feel obsessive. Every breath I took I measured it. Every shift in my chest I catalogued. I was searching for something and finding nothing and the nothing wasn't as reassuring as it should have been because I knew this disease and I knew it didn't always announce itself early.I had no shortness of breath. No fever. No progression of anything toward the specific sequence I'd

ELLARIA. I watched the color leave Arren's face.It happened fast. One moment he was sitting in that chair with the tension of our conversation still between us and the next he was somewhere else entirely, whatever had been in his expression replaced by something controlled and hard."Explain," he said to Kade.Kade walked further into the room. He was typing on his phone as he came in and his jaw was tight. He glanced at me briefly and nodded in greeting before turning back to Arren."She left through the main gates," he said. "An hour and a half ago."Arren was very still."I was getting my daily reports," Kade continued. "Waiting on transport information at the gate when they told me." He stopped typing and looked up. "As they put it. Your mate leaving with your son."I thought about the clinic hallway. Katerina's hands on Dalor's bed frame rolling it through the door while I was moving too fast to stop and think about what I was looking at. I'd seen it and kept walking.Before I

ELLARIA.I woke up before anyone else.I lay there for a while looking at the ceiling and letting the decision I'd made the night before settle into something real. Then I got up, washed my face, got dressed and went downstairs and made coffee and sat with it in the quiet of the kitchen before the house came alive around me.He came downstairs still in his pajamas with his hair going every direction. He climbed into the chair across from me and reached for the orange juice on the table and we had breakfast together just the two of us. He told me about a dream involving a dragon and a very large sandwich and I asked the right questions and laughed in the right places and let myself have it for a little while longer before I had to do the harder thing.Then I set my cup down."Tate," I said. "I need to talk to you about something."He looked up from his plate. "Okay.""I have to go away for a bit."He went quiet. "Where?""To find someone.""How long?""I'm not sure yet. Not too long if