All Chapters of His Rejected Luna Remembers Nothing: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Damien’s POV He filed with the Council on a Thursday. Petra brought the notification to the war room at seven in the morning with the expression of someone who had been expecting this and was still unhappy about it arriving. She put it on the table. I read it. Then I read it again. The filing was precise. Carefully constructed. The language of someone who had spent fifteen years waiting and had used that time to build something airtight enough to at least force a response. Brennan Voss was challenging the legitimacy of Eli’s Council recognition. His argument rested on three points. First. That the circumstances of Eli’s birth and early years involved significant irregularities that the Council had not fully examined. That the recognition had been granted on the basis of testimony from parties with direct interest in the outcome and had not been independently verified. Second. That the Alpha of this pack was operating under a formal Council censure for catastrophic failure of

Mara’s POVI have been in this house for forty years.I want to say that first so the rest of it makes sense. Forty years of watching this family make decisions and live with them. I watched Damien’s father lead this pack with the specific combination of strength and blindness that characterises men who are genuinely good at most things and assume that makes them good at all things. I watched Damien grow up under that and absorb the good parts and the blindness in roughly equal measure.I watched the night of the rejection.I was in the hall. I heard every word. I watched Selene’s face.I have been thinking about that face for two and a half years.So when she came back I said nothing. I made coffee and I made soup and I put three plates on the table and I watched. Because watching was what I knew how to do and because the thing that was happening in this house was something that needed room and not commentary.But I know things.I have always known things.I knew about Brennan before

Lena’s POV He came on a Wednesday. Cole had arranged it. Neutral location had been the rule for the coffee shop meeting but this was different. This was about building testimony. About going through everything Rowan knew in the systematic way that testimony required and that needed time and space and documents. Cole had argued for a hotel. I had said the estate. Damien had looked at me. I want him here, I said. I want to see how he is in this house. In the place where all of it happened. That tells me something a hotel room does not. So the estate. Rowan arrived at ten. He stood at the entrance the way people stand at the entrance to a place that means something to them. Taking it in. Not performing the taking in. Actually doing it. I watched from the doorway. He had been here before. When he was young. Pack gatherings. The ordinary occasions of pack life. He would have known this house when it was his cousin’s house and not the site of everything that had happened since. I

Damien’s POV He came himself on a Friday. No messenger this time. No intermediary. His car on the private road at eleven at night and our gate security flagging it immediately. I was in the library when Cole found me. I was out the door before he finished telling me. Selene was behind me. I turned. Stay with Eli, I said. She looked at me. I know you want to come, I said. But one of us needs to be with Eli and this is a conversation I need to have with him alone. She held my gaze. One minute, she said. Then I am coming out. One minute, I agreed. I went to the gate. He was standing outside his car. Fifty four years old. The family resemblance that I had looked at my whole life without seeing what it meant. The face of someone who had decided that fifteen years of patience had run out and that direct action was necessary. He looked older than the last time I had seen him. At the Council hearing. Watching from the back of the building. He had watched everything. Damien, he

Lena’s POV Eli asked about him on a Sunday. Not by name. Eli did not know his name. But Eli had radar that I was learning to take seriously and on Sunday morning over breakfast they looked at me with the grey eyes and said is someone trying to take me away. The kitchen went very quiet. Mara at the counter stopped moving. Damien’s hand on his coffee mug went still. I looked at Eli. No, I said. They looked at me. I held their gaze. No one is taking you anywhere, I said. I want you to understand that clearly. You are here. You are ours. No one is changing that. Eli held my gaze with the specific searching quality of a child running a truth assessment. Then they said okay. And went back to their breakfast. I exhaled slowly. Mara went back to the counter. Damien looked at me across the table. I looked at him. We said nothing. But the thing that passed between us was clear. We were done with this. Whatever the Council decided. Whatever the process required. We were done