Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Rejected Luna Remembers Nothing: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

Lena’s POVThe mug slipped.I watched it fall in that weird slow-motion way your brain does when it already knows something’s about to shatter. And then it did. Right on the kitchen tiles, coffee spraying across my bare feet in a burning arc that made me hiss through my teeth.“Damn it.”I crouched down, grabbed the biggest piece, and immediately cut my finger on the edge. Because of course I did. That was the kind of morning it was. The kind where everything that could go small and wrong did, in quick cheerful succession, like the universe was just warming up.I pressed my finger to my lips and stared at the mess around me. Brown liquid was still spreading slowly toward the cabinet. I was going to need paper towels and probably a better attitude.Ria was going to lecture me about buying nicer mugs again. She had this whole theory that cheap mugs were a form of self-sabotage and that my relationship with quality kitchenware reflected my relationship with self-worth. I’d told her that

Lena’s POVRia arrived the next morning unannounced with pastries and the energy of someone who had already decided to be angry on my behalf.She did that. Showed up physically when she felt the situation required more than a phone call. It was one of my favorite things about her and also occasionally exhausting.She put the pastries on the table, sat down, looked at me and said “tell me everything.”So I did.She listened without interrupting which meant she was taking it seriously. Ria interrupted everything. Silence from her was not peace it was concentration.When I finished she was quiet for a moment.“He cried,” she said.“On the street below.”“After leaving your apartment.”“Yes.”She picked up a pastry, put it down, picked it up again. “Okay so either this man genuinely knew you and is carrying something enormous or he is the most elaborate and committed creep in this city’s history.”“I know.”“The two years of looking is the part that gets me,” she said. “That’s not casual.

Lena’s POVI stared at the photograph for a long time.The woman in it looked happy in a way that felt almost naive. Like she had no idea happiness was something that could be taken from you overnight. Like she’d never learned that particular lesson yet.I put it face down on the table.“Who else knows you found me,” I said.Damien’s jaw tightened. That small movement I was already learning to read like a tell.“My Beta,” he said.I looked up. “Your what.”A pause. Brief but loaded. “My second in command. At work.”Something about the way he corrected himself snagged in my mind like a thread caught on a nail. I filed it away.“Anyone else.”“One other person.” His voice changed on that. Flattened out in a way that was different from his usual careful control. This was something else. Something that tasted like a name he didn’t want to say.“Who,” I said.He looked at the photograph lying face down between us.“Her name is Nadia,” he said.The name landed strangely. Like a sound I’d he

Lena’s POVIt wasn’t a house.It was an estate.I stared through the passenger window as we turned off the main road onto a private track lined with trees so tall they blocked the sky. The track went on for nearly a mile before the trees broke open and the building appeared and I felt my mouth open slightly.Stone. Old stone, the kind that had been standing long enough to grow its own history. Three stories. Wide windows. Grounds that stretched out in every direction into dark treeline. Lights burning warm and amber behind the glass.“Security firm,” I said flatly.“It belonged to my family,” Damien said. “We work out of here.”“How many people work out of here.”“Forty or so on site. More off.”I looked at him. “That’s not a firm. That’s a compound.”He didn’t answer that.He parked in front of the main entrance and got out and I sat for a moment longer looking at the building. Something was happening in my body that I didn’t have language for. Not recognition exactly. More like the

Damien’s POVI ran until my lungs burned.Which in this form took longer than it should have because the wolf didn’t tire the way the man did and tonight the wolf was furious and grief-ridden and not interested in stopping.She had put her hand on the glass.I had seen it from the treeline. Her silhouette in the window and then her palm flat against the cold glass and everything in me had gone absolutely still. The wolf and the man and every complicated ruined thing in between.She was here.She was actually here and she didn’t know me and she was the bravest person alive and she’d packed a bag and come anyway and now she was upstairs in a guest room instead of our room because I had dismantled everything we were with one night of blind stupid rage and I deserved every inch of that distance.I shifted back at the edge of the trees.Pulled on the clothes I’d left folded on the boulder I’d been using for that purpose for three years. Old habit. Selene had laughed at me for it once. Said