All Chapters of His Rejected Luna Remembers Nothing: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Lena’s POV She called on a Friday. Four days after the meeting. I had been expecting it and still felt the specific jolt of seeing an unknown number at seven in the morning and knowing immediately who it was. I answered. Selene Voss, I said. A pause. You answer with your full name, she said. I learned to, I said. Another pause. Shorter. I have been thinking about what to say since Tuesday, she said. I had three versions prepared. I am going to discard all of them and say the thing directly because I think that is what this conversation requires. I sat down at the kitchen table. Okay, I said. I have been on that elder council for four years, she said. In those four years I have voted against Calder Vane on seven formal matters. The filing against your daughter was the eighth. I did not know about the Brennan coordination when I submitted my dissent but I want to be honest with you about something. I waited. I suspected it, she said. Not Brennan specifically. But I suspecte

Cole’s POVFifty eight minutes.I had found Desmond Hale in forty minutes which left me eighteen to build something useful out of what I found and eighteen minutes was not a lot of time so I stopped thinking about the time and focused on the information.Desmond Hale. Thirty four. Operated out of the western fringe territory where the Council’s attention was thinner than it should have been and everyone who operated there knew it. His uncle had been sanctioned two years ago and Desmond had watched that happen from a careful distance and had learned from it the way people learned from watching someone else’s mistake. He had gone smaller. Quieter. Nothing that touched the Council directly. Nothing that left a clean line back to him.Except the line to Vane.That one he had not been careful enough about.I had the communication record between them going back three years. Financial transfers routed through two intermediaries that would have looked clean to anyone not specifically looking

Lena’s POVShe arrived with a plant.Not flowers. An actual plant in a terracotta pot, small and hardy looking, with dark green leaves and the specific appearance of something that had been grown from seed by someone who knew what they were doing.She held it out when I opened the door.For the garden, she said. If you want it. It was your grandmother’s favourite. I have been propagating it for fifteen years.I looked at the plant.Then at her.I took it.Come in, I said.She came in and the house received her differently this time. Less formal. The way a place receives someone on a second visit when the first one established that they were not a threat to its equilibrium.Mara appeared.Looked at the plant.Good choice, she said to Orla.Then made tea and left.Orla looked at the space where Mara had been.Does she always do that, she said.Always, I said.We sat at the kitchen table.The plant between us.I told her about the northern pack, I said. About Thursday. About the formal n

Lena’s POVThe northern pack house sat at the centre of the territory like it had always been there and intended to stay.Stone and timber. Three storeys. The kind of building that accumulated history in its walls whether the people inside wanted it to or not. A dozen cars in the grounds. People moving between outbuildings with the specific awareness of a community that had been told something significant was happening today and was pretending it had not.They all knew we were coming.Vane had made sure of that.Petra pulled up beside us and got out.She looked at the house.“He will be inside,” she said. “He does not come to doors.”“Good,” I said. “Neither do I.”Orla got out of the third car.She stood beside me and looked at the house and I looked at her looking at it and understood that she had stood in front of this building before under very different circumstances and that standing here now beside me was its own kind of reckoning for her.I did not say anything about that.She

Lena’s POVWe left the northern territory at four in the afternoon.Three cars again. Same order. Petra first this time. Then us. Orla behind.I sat in the back.Damien sat beside me.Cole drove.Nobody spoke for the first twenty minutes and nobody needed to. The specific quiet ofpeople who had been through something significant together and were letting it settlebefore they put words on it.The landscape moved past the window.Flat and old and unhurried.I looked at it.I had come from here.Not from the pack house or the council chamber or Vane’s thirty one years of carefulmanagement. From this. The actual land. The fields and the stone and the specificquality of northern light that was different to the light at the estate and that I recognisedwithout knowing I was going to.Something in my chest was doing something quiet and complicated.Not grief.Not relief exactly.The specific feeling of a door that has been closed a long time opening and the air fromboth sides finding ea