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Home / Werewolf / His Contract Luna Says Goodbye / Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Contract Luna Says Goodbye : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

97 Kabanata

21.

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

22.

ARREN.She was already asleep when I got home.I stood in the doorway of her room for longer than I needed to, just watching her.She was on laying on her side with her hands pressed together under her cheek.She'd been crying before she fell asleep.Her cheeks were reddened and tear stained.I looked at that for a while, feeling my chest tightening as my eyes trailed over the tracks.Then I looked around the room.Every single thing I'd sent was as sent.Untouched.The boxes unopened. The flowers in their wrapping. One bouquet had started dying on the dresser, the petals going soft at the edges.She hadn’t thrown it out. She'd just let it sit and go to waste, which felt, somehow, more pointed than if she'd put it in the bin.I sat down on the sofa at the foot of her bed.I reached over and picked up the dying bouquet, pulling one rose out and turning it between my fingers. The petals were almost gone.Whatever I was sitting with right now, I deserved it.My gaze trailed over her form

23.

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

24.

ELLARIA.The ceremony was exactly what I expected and nothing I needed.Every surface was draped in something expensive. Every person in the room was wearing something that cost more than most wolves earned in a month, and everyone understood the assignment even though nobody acknowledged that out loud.This was werewolf high society.The giltz and glamour of it all was choking.I was very good at performing by now. At least there was that.Mirela had disappeared toward the drinks table about ten minutes ago, which I couldn't hold against her because the drinks table was genuinely the most interesting thing in this room. I stayed at Arren’s side, close enough that we looked the part and far enough that nothing about it felt real.We did the greetings, although there were a few people I didn’t recognize, like the broad older Alpha from a territory in the west who had known Arren’s father and kept looking at me like he was trying to work something out. It was annoying.After that we me

25.

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

26.

ELLARIA.I didn’t go back to find Mirela.I walked straight out of the main hall and down the corridor toward Arren’s office without slowing down once. A week.He had known for a full week and said nothing, and I was done waiting for him to decide when I was ready to hear the truth.The office door was unlocked. I pushed it open, not caring who or what I was interrupting in the process. I stopped cold at the sight of his desk. It was the first thing I saw. My footsteps faltered in an instant as I stared at the items on it. There was a scarf on it, worn and folded so carefully, a deep shade of blue my hands remembered before my brain caught up. There was a jewelry set right beside it, I’d recognize that set from anywhere because it sat in the very chest that was on Arren’s table. I remembered that wooden chest from my childhood vividly. A few other things were scattered around them, specifically things I knew belonged to someone dear to me. They were my mother’s things. My hands

27.

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

28.

ELLARIA. Four years in the Western Sector and I still wasn't used to how quiet the mornings were. I stood at the nurses' station with my coffee going cold in my hand, watching the early shift filter in through the double doors. The hospital had a rhythm to it that I'd learned to read. Tuesdays were slower than Mondays. The pediatric wing was always busiest right after school let out. It was nothing like the chaos of the Eastern Sector clinics. Nothing like the way people used to look at me when I walked through those halls. Here, they called me Dr. Ellaria. One of the lead attendings. The woman who'd taken their pediatric mortality rate from concerning to the lowest in the western territories. I'd worked for that title. I’d spent four years learning everything I could, taking every shift that was offered, and proving over and over that I belonged here. Some days I still couldn't believe it was real. "You're doing it again," Nurse Petra said as she walked past with a stack of c

29.

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

30.

ARREN. The Western Sector looked too fucking clean. That was the first thing I noticed when we crossed the border. The roads were maintained. The buildings were intact. There wasn't a single body lying in the street waiting for someone to collect it. My pack was dying and these wolves were living like nothing was wrong in the world. I sat in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle and tried to keep the bitterness out of my chest. It wasn't their fault. They hadn't caused the bleeding sickness. They'd just gotten lucky enough not to have it spreading through their territory like wildfire. Kade was driving. He'd been quiet for the last hour, which meant he was thinking hard about something he didn't want to say out loud yet. "How many did we lose last night?" I asked. "Forty-three." I closed my eyes. Forty-three wolves in one night. We'd been losing them faster every day for the last month. The healers had tried everything they could think of and nothing worked. People were

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