جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 90

AnaraThe sunlight dimmed through the curtain straight down to my face. Slowly I opened my eyes, my hands searching for Kaelen,he had no way to be found. Searched again, while slowly opening my eyes, he was no way in the room to be found.“Where could he have been this early morning!” I questioned myself, sat up in the bed sluggishly.Last night was really stressful and now there is no way to be found. Could it be that he went out to train? No! It's too early for that.“Kaelen! Kaelen?? Where are you?” I called out, sluggishly standing up from the bed as I walked to the door. Opened the bathroom door yet he found no way to be found.“ Where could he be?” Not again this early morning!Standing there for a while, my mind runs through where he could be. Something seems off but I couldn't place my hand exactly where and what it was. I just knew something is wrong with the pack and I need to see Kaelen now. So I can speak to him about it.Or was I over-thinking it? Maybe, I was just overth

Anara"He's two floors down."That was the first thing I knew when I opened my eyes. Not the time. Not how long I had slept. Kaelen. Two floors below me, already awake, his focus settled on something with the kind of quiet that meant he had been up for hours before I stirred.I lay still and stared at the ceiling.The bond sat differently from Seraphis. That was the first thing I tried to work out in those first strange moments of waking. Seraphis was mine, old and familiar and woven into me so deeply I sometimes forgot she was separate. What I was feeling now was not that. It was something additional, something sitting at the edge of my awareness the way you sense a person in a dark room before you see them. Kaelen's location. His mood, focused and contained, carrying something underneath it I couldn't name yet. The specific quality of his attention, pointed elsewhere but not unaware.I could read him the way you read weather before it arrives.I stared at the ceiling for another few

Kaelen"He asked about her twice," Nyx said. "In thirty minutes.""I counted," I said.Riven Nightfall sat across the council table with his hands folded and his expression entirely correct, every word out of his mouth aimed precisely where it needed to land to sound like diplomacy. He was good at this. I had understood that since the clearing in the northern forest when he had called off a war with the same quiet certainty that other men used to start them. He was intelligent and controlled and politically precise and sitting across from him now I was finding all three of those qualities considerably more irritating than I had on the battlefield.He had asked about Anara twice. Once under the cover of discussing pack security arrangements, slipping her name into a question about border patrol schedules as if it were a natural part of the discussion. Once under the cover of congratulating me on the formal Luna declaration, his voice staying even and his eyes staying on me and the ment

Anara"Tell me exactly what he said."Not a demand. Not raised or heated. Kaelen's voice when he was working very hard to remain level, which I had come to understand was considerably more serious than Kaelen's voice when he was simply angry. Anger was manageable. This careful control over something beneath the anger was a different thing entirely.We were in the bedroom with the door closed. He was standing at the window with his back half turned and I was near the foot of the bed and the bond between us was carrying the kind of frequency that meant both of us were feeling it clearly and neither of us was filtering it.I told him everything. Every word Riven had said, in the order he had said it, without softening a syllable. I had learned early in this marriage that partial truths with Kaelen were always worse than the complete version and I was not going to start managing his information now, not about this.When I finished he was quiet.I counted the silence. Twelve seconds. For a

AnaraThe bond woke me before the moon was fully up.Not gently. A wave of something that hit me across the chest from the inside and sat me upright in bed before my eyes were properly open, my hand pressed flat to my sternum against the impact of it. Not my pain. His. Coming through the bond the way heat came through a wall, unmistakable and building and not something that was going to diminish by being ignored.Kaelen was not beside me.The space where he had been was still warm and the sheets were disturbed and on the table his side of the bed his phone showed two in the morning. I was out of the room before I had made any conscious decision about it, pulling on the first thing my hands found in the dark, his shirt from the chair, moving barefoot down the corridor with the bond pulling me forward like a current.Down the back stairs. Along the lower corridor where the lamps were dimmed for the night and the pack house was breathing in its deep, night-settled way. To the room at the