บททั้งหมดของ The Luna With Ruin: บทที่ 121 - บทที่ 130

Fenwick called on a Friday evening. Jasmina was in the nursery. Kira had been fussy for the past hour—not magic, just a baby having a bad evening—and she was walking her slowly around the room while Damoew sat in the corner chair with the patience of a man who had learned that sometimes the walking was the only thing.The radio on the side table crackled.Jetstar's voice: "Alpha Supreme. There's a call on the direct line. She says her name is Fenwick."Jasmina stopped walking.Damoew was already on his feet, hands out, taking Kira without being asked.She went to the radio.---Fenwick's voice was not what she'd expected.She'd built a picture from the intelligence reports—an isolationist Alpha, twenty-plus years managing Harrow's neutrality, deliberate and careful and hard to read. She'd expected someone guarded.Fenwick sounded tired."Alpha Supreme," she said."Alpha Fenwick." Jasmina kept her voice neutral. "I wasn't expecting this call.""I know." A pause. "I heard about the Gree

The briefing ran at seven in the evening. Not just the leadership—everyone. Warriors, alliance fighters, support staff, the senior women's council members who weren't on the warrior roster but would be managing civilian movement if the compound came under pressure. Two hundred and forty people in the main yard.Jasmina stood at the center.She didn't use notes."Three days ago I received intelligence that Gareth of Ironwood was accelerating his timeline," she said. Her voice carried across the yard the way it always carried now. "This morning the last piece of his coalition defected. By tonight he knows that." She looked out at the yard. "He'll move. Probably within forty-eight to ninety-six hours."The yard was very quiet."You know what's at stake," she said. "We've held this territory twice. The third time is different. He's not coming with a coalition that has political standing to lose. He's coming with contracted warriors and Ironwo

Stefan's casualty report came at 0510.She read it in the command room with her hands on the desk and took it in slowly.Four wounded seriously. Fourteen with minor injuries. No deaths.She read the last line twice.No deaths.Three battles. She'd lost three people in the first. Zero in the second. Zero now.She put the report down and pressed her palms flat on the desk for a moment. Just that. Feeling the surface of the desk.Then she stood up and went to work.---Gareth was being held in the secured room in the main building's east wing.Stefan had put two warriors on the door—not as a formality, as a practicality. A wounded Alpha in a room was still an Alpha.She went at 0630, after the medical team had assessed him.He was sitting on the floor against the far wall with a bandage on his right shoulder and a split above his eye that had been stitched. He'd shifted back from wolf form during the fight and taken a significant hit to the shoulder before Damoew had brought him down.He

The morning after Gareth signed the submission document, Jasmina slept until eight.Not because she'd decided to. Her body just didn't wake her. Kira slept too, which almost never happened past six, and Damoew was already up and gone when she opened her eyes. The compound outside the window sounded normal. Not quiet-normal, not after-battle-normal. Just normal, the everyday hum of people going about things, which was its own kind of strange after the weeks they'd had.She lay there for a moment and looked at the ceiling.Gareth was being transported back to Ironwood territory this morning. Stefan had organized it with two warriors and a vehicle and the minimum of ceremony. She hadn't gone to see him off. She'd thought about it and decided it would have been theater—the Alpha Supreme watching the defeated Alpha leave—and she had no interest in theater. She'd already said what needed saying in that secured room. The rest was logistics.She got up, fed Kira, dressed, and went to the offi

Lyanna told Damoew what she thought in the kitchen at six in the morning while Jasmina was still asleep.Jasmina heard about it secondhand, from Damoew, who told her while they were doing the dishes after dinner, three days later, because that was how Damoew worked—he held things and turned them over and brought them out when he'd decided what he thought about them. He said Lyanna had sat across from him with her tea and told him that what Kira was doing was consistent with what Sable had always described as the foundational trajectory, which was that this child was going to move fast and the job of everyone around her was not to manage the speed but to make sure she had ballast. He said Lyanna had used the word ballast, which he found slightly funny. He said Lyanna told him that his own instinct toward steadiness was the most useful thing he brought to this situation and that he should trust it and stop standing in the nursery doorway with the look he got.Damoew said he didn't know