All Chapters of TOO FAT TO BE LUNA: Chapter 81 - Chapter 87

ARIA'S POVWe took prisoners.Eleven of them — wounded, contained, held in the secured lower level of the mansion that Kael had converted to a holding facility in the second week of preparations. Marcus had overseen the conversions with the thoroughness he brought to everything, which meant the facility was exactly what it needed to be and nothing about it was improvised.The battle had lasted four hours.At the end of them, the Purity Pack had retreated — not routed, not destroyed. Retreated. The organized withdrawal of a force that had achieved what it came to achieve and was now executing the next phase of a plan that clearly extended well beyond a single night.Thirty-one of our warriors injured.Six dead.I knew all six names before Marcus finished the report. Had learned them over three months of integration — their faces, their pack origins, their specific capabilities. The particular person each of them had been.I sat with that for a long time before I allowed anything else t

ARIA'S POV We left before dawn. The neutral territory was three hours east — open ground that belonged to no pack, the kind of land that existed in the spaces between territories and was used, by ancient custom, for exactly this. Disputes that required witnesses. Decisions that required the weight of collective observation to make them binding. Marcus drove. Elena beside him. Kael and I in the back with the specific quiet of two people who had said everything that needed saying the night before and had nothing left to add. I held his hand for the first hour. Then I let go, because holding on felt like the wrong energy for what the next several hours required, and Kael understood without me explaining it. He turned his hand over briefly — acknowledgment — and then we sat beside each other in the dark and watched the territory give way to the spaces between territories and didn't speak. The twins were with Dr. Chen. East wing. Single door. Full rotation. Morgana present, which I

KAEL'S POVThaddeus died on a Tuesday.By Thursday we had interrogated every captured Purity Pack member in our holding facility. By the following Monday we had our first confirmed cell location. By the end of the first week we had seven.Aria conducted the interrogations herself.I had offered to take them — had made the case, practically, that she was still recovering, that the bond push during the duel had cost her reserves she hadn't fully rebuilt, that there were other ways to extract the information that didn't require her to be present for every session.She had listened to the entire argument.Then she had walked into the first interrogation room and sat down across from the prisoner and looked at him with the specific quality of someone who has run out of patience for the distance between where things are and where they need to be."Where are the cells," she said.The Royal command underneath it — not the full weight, not the forced compliance she was capable of. Something mo