บททั้งหมดของ His Contract Luna Says Goodbye : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

ELLARIA.The voice never came back.I waited for it those first few days after I woke up on that clinic floor. I'd lie in the dark, just listening.There was nothing there. It was just my own head in there, which was already loud enough.Two weeks later I went and talked to a doctor about it.She was kind about it. She sat across from me and listened to the whole thing without interrupting. Then she told me gently that what I'd experienced was most likely a hallucination. She said extreme grief did things to the mind that felt completely real. She said it wasn't unusual, given everything my body had been through.I nodded and told her that made sense, because it did. It made complete sense logically.There was still this part of me that didn't buy it.I couldn't explain that part. I just knew that the voice had called me by my very own name and spoken about things I'd never been told.Hallucinations born from grief didn't usually know things you didn't know.But I had no way to prove

ARREN.She opened her eyes and found me there.I was still on the sofa with the dead rose between my fingers, and for a moment she just looked at me.Not with surprise exactly. More like she'd half-expected this and was deciding what to do with my presence.Then she sat up slowly, pushing her hair back from her face, as she looked at me properly. "Stop sending me things," she said tightly.I set the rose down.The word okay sat in my mouth and I let it out quietly. That was all I said, because there wasn't anything else that would have helped.She was right.The gifts had been a way of doing something when I didn't know how to do the actual thing she’d needed.She'd seen through that, and she’d left every single one of them untouched.She looked at me for a moment longer. Then she lay back down and turned toward the wall.I stayed on the sofa.This was the first time I'd been in the same room as her in two weeks.I’d been surviving on two weeks of guard reports and secondhand updates

ELLARIA.Arren had disappeared somewhere between the third and fourth round of formal greetings.I’d watched him head out with a group of Alphas, all of them moving with the energy of men who had just found a good reason like a necessary meeting to leave, and I didn’t blame him. I’d have done the same.But I couldn’t, so Mirela and I walked the event instead, gossiping through our teeth about every single overly dressed, high ranking member of werewolf society we laid our eyes on. She had colorful little opinions about everything. The centerpieces were trying too hard. The string quartet was playing something depressing for what was supposed to be a celebration. One of the elder wolves from the northern territory was wearing a hat that she felt strongly needed to be discussed at length, and at some point I had stopped listening properly and just started nodding, which she either didn’t notice or graciously pretended not to.A couple minutes into our banter, I was laughing at someth

ELLARIAPacking wasn’t going to take much.I grabbed the nearest bag, filled it with some clothes and the things that were mine before any of this started. I moved through the bedroom quickly because stopping to think meant stopping to feel, and I done feeling things in this place.I had lived in this room for almost five years. I’d woken up in it thousands of times, made the bed in it, sat by that window when I couldn’t sleep, which had been most nights recently. I looked around it one last time and felt nothing that surprised me. It had never fully felt like mine. Even the things I had brought into it over the years sat in it like guests.I was zipping the bag closed when I heard her footsteps slowing down as she reached the doorway. Mirela looked heartbroken when I glanced up and met her gaze. She looked at the bag, then at me. She understood immediately, the way she always understood things about me before I said them, and my eyes were already burning before either of us spoke

ELLARIA. Three weeks had passed and I couldn't stop thinking about the patient. The one who'd bled from his eyes and ears and walked out of my hospital before I could study what had saved him. The one who’d said people were dying in Arren’s pack by the hundreds. I'd tried to let it go and focus on the patients in front of me who I could actually help. But it sat in the back of my mind during every shift, nagging at me when I should have been sleeping. I kept thinking about that disease. About how fast it had worked and how quickly my treatment had reversed it. If it was spreading the way he'd said it was, then people needed help. Real help. Not just luck and a half-remembered case study I'd pulled from the back of my brain at two in the morning. "You're doing it again," Petra said as she walked past my office. It felt like déjà vu. I looked up from the medical journal I'd been reading for the third time. "You’re calling me out again? Don’t you get tired of observing all the t