All Chapters of TOO FAT TO BE LUNA: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

KAEL’S POV The medical wing smelled like blood. Aria’s blood. I’d been covered in it since I’d carried her through the mansion doors, her weight too still in my arms, her heartbeat a thread pulled so thin I’d had to press my ear to her chest to be sure it was still there. I’d left handprints on two walls and a doorframe. I hadn’t noticed until now, standing under the harsh medical lights watching Dr. Chen move with the controlled urgency of someone who was scared but couldn’t afford to show it. That scared me more than anything else. “Talk to me,” I said. “Not helpful right now, Kael.” “Talk to me, Sarah.” She didn’t look up from the monitors. “Blood pressure is sixty over forty and dropping. Heart rate irregular — she’s throwing PVCs every third beat. Oxygen at eighty-one percent.” A pause, hands moving. “She lost too much blood from the fall, and the Royal power usage accelerated her body’s deterioration. The curse turns her own energy against her when she uses i

DEREK’S POV I should have been sleeping. It was past midnight, the pack house was quiet, and Celeste was beside me breathing in the slow, even rhythm of deep sleep. I had a council meeting at seven. A patrol report at nine. A border negotiation that had been delayed twice already and couldn’t be pushed again. I had every reason to sleep. Instead I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, and thought about Aria Winters for the fourteenth night in a row. I’d stopped counting after the first week. Started again when I realized the counting was the only honest thing I was doing. Too fat to be my Luna. The words came back the way they always did — not with the conviction they’d carried the night I’d said them, but with something that had started to feel uncomfortably like shame. I remembered saying them. Remembered the crowd’s reaction, the way the words had landed like I’d scored a point in a game whose rules I hadn’t examined closely enough. I remembered Aria’s face. I rolled ove

DEREK’S POV The key had been in my father’s desk drawer for eleven years. I’d never thought about it. It was just there — a small iron key on a plain ring, sitting in the back corner of the drawer beneath old correspondence and a broken watch he’d never gotten fixed. I’d moved it aside a hundred times without registering it. I registered it now. I’d been in his old office for three hours, working backward through pack records I should have examined six months ago, following the thread of questions that had stopped letting me sleep. The gaps in my memory. The decisions in my own handwriting I couldn’t remember making. Vivian’s name appearing in pack finances in amounts that had been recorded in categories that didn’t quite make sense. Security consultation. Two thousand, dated four months before she’d arrived at Crescent Moon with Celeste in tow. Reputation management. Five thousand, six months before that.

DEREK’S POV I woke up counting stones. It was the mind’s way of establishing reality when reality had become unreliable — find something concrete, something you can number, something that doesn’t move. The ceiling of my cell had forty-seven stones. The wall facing me had thirty-two. The floor, which I was currently lying on with my cheek pressed against cold damp, had more than I could count from this angle. I stayed on the floor for a while. My head felt like something had been removed from it and replaced with something heavier and slightly wrong — the particular wrongness of a mind that had been handled. I’d felt versions of this before, I realized. Milder versions. The mornings when I’d woken with decisions already made, certainties already in place, the day’s first thoughts arriving pre-formed and fully committed. I’d thought that was leadership. Clarity. Decisiveness. I understood now what it actually was. The examination room came back in pieces. Dr. Okafor’s face. The

ARIA’S POV The curse broke in pieces. Not all at once — I’d imagined it would feel like something snapping, a single clean release. Instead it came apart the way ice did in spring, gradually, unevenly, sections giving way while others held. Some mornings I woke with my hands glowing faintly and the power so close to the surface it felt like breathing. Other mornings the old suppression pressed back down and I moved through training with my body fighting me the way it had for twenty-three years. Marcus had learned to read which kind of day it was by the time I reached the training yard. Good days: he pushed harder, introduced new techniques, ran drills designed for someone operating at Lycan-Royal capacity. Bad days: he pushed harder in different ways. Made me train through the resistance, taught me to function at reduced capacity, built the habit of continuing when the power wasn’t cooperating. “You won’t always have access to full strength,” he said, on the fourth day of a dif