Semua Bab Blessed Luna Rising: A Dark Medical Mate-Bond Revenge : Bab 81 - Bab 90

The committee room was smaller than the main Council chamber, but it felt more dangerous.Fewer cameras. Fewer witnesses. More teeth.A narrow table ran down the center. On one side: Eun‑Ji, two neutral‑pack councilors, and Park with a slim briefcase. On the other: Albrecht, a gray‑muzzled Luna from a conservative pack, and a junior liaison from Victor’s office whose hands shook every time he reached for his pen.Lyra took her seat at the far end, closest to Eun‑Ji. She could smell her own scent, faintly altered by heat and suppressants, under the fog of paper and perfume.She hated that.“We’re here,” Eun‑Ji said, “to address a pattern of behavior that could be reasonably construed as targeted surveillance of a Council advisor’s residence by Council staff.”Albrecht snorted.“Spare us the dramatics,” he said. “Two junior clerks got lost on their way home. It's hardly an assassination attempt.”“On three separate nights,” Park said evenly. “At four in the morning. Within two blocks of

The evening crowd in Lyra’s building knew better than to get in her way.She moved through the lobby on autopilot, nodding at the super, at the old woman with the cabbage-smelling apartment, at the college kid who’d once puked in her elevator after too much cheap vodka. Faces blurred. Elevator numbers blinked. Her wolf tracked only one point: home.Inside the apartment, chaos reigned in miniature.The couch had been turned into a fort—blankets draped over chair backs and stacked cushions, fairy lights stolen from the holiday box twined haphazardly around the structure. Luna sat proudly in the middle, the cardboard crown crooked, her stuffed wolf at her side like a furry advisor.Rhea knelt on the floor beside the coffee table, scissors and tape arrayed in front of her. Marcus leaned in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, watching it all with the grim fascination of a man who had stormed actual fortifications and found this somehow more stressful.“Mama!” Luna squealed, spotting Lyra. “Y

For three heartbeats, Lyra only heard her own pulse.The doorframe was cool under her palm. The house was silent the way prey woods went silent when a predator stepped in—every sound outside her walls, holding its breath.On the other side of the bedroom door, Aiden inhaled once, sharply.“Lyra,” he said, softer this time. “If you tell me to leave, I will. But I can feel you. You’re not okay.”His voice dragged along every raw nerve. Heat snarled, a tide surging up from her core, pushing sweat out onto her skin. Her wolf was pacing in frantic circles now, claws clicking on an invisible floor.*Mate. Ours. Open the door.*She squeezed her eyes shut, forehead pressing to the wood.It would be so easy.Turn the lock. Let the bond snap taut and drag him in beside her. Let biology and rage tangle until neither had edges anymore.“You don’t get to want him,” she ground out under her breath. “You don’t get to—”Her lungs jerked on a breath that tasted like burnt sugar and pine resin. His sce

Of course she hadn’t. Rhea was many things, including smart enough not to poke at a closed door in the middle of a bonded heat.Lyra scrubbed a hand over her face, feeling dried salt flake under her palm where sweat had cooled.Her body felt wrung out, emptied and overly aware in the afterglow of a heat that had been bled down but not fully exhausted. There would be more waves, later, lesser but insistent. This was only the first break in the fever.She could order him out now.She should.Before her treacherous endocrine system decided to reinterpret this moment as an invitation rather than a debrief.“You stayed,” she said, not sure if it was accusation or observation.His mouth twitched at one corner.“You opened the door,” he countered, equally ambiguous.Silence settled between them like a third presence.Her eyes landed on his thigh again. The muscle there jumped, a tiny, involuntary twitch.“Show me,” she said abruptly.He blinked.“What?”“Your leg.” She slid her feet to the f

Silence pressed up against them again, dense.His hand eased off the table edge by fractions. The cheap laminate bore shallow crescents where his nails had gouged it.“Three years,” he said. “You were…pregnant. Giving birth. Raising…” He broke off, jaw tightening as if the word itself might break a tooth. “While I was busy being the dutiful heir with the right fiancée.”He could see it now in the gaps.Her abrupt vanish. The way Rhea and Mei had closed ranks later. The unexplained hollow in Lyra’s scent when she’d first come back into his orbit, like something had been walled off and starved.He had walked into that Council chamber with a pen in his hand and nothing in his head about the life he’d already helped make.It wasn’t just betrayal anymore.It was malpractice on his own blood.The bond gave another violent jerk, no lag this time, like some internal line had finally found the other anchor it had been blindly groping for and hated what it saw.Lyra’s fingers flexed around the