All Chapters of EVEN ALPHAS KNEEL: The Rejected Mightiest Luna : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Chapter Eighty Two POV: ZaraI watched the moon above the clearing brighten on the night of the ceremony from the eastern tree line and I stood there until the elders finished the blessing and the crowd began to move and then I turned and walked back into the dark because there was nothing left for me in that clearing and I was done pretending otherwise.She had chosen him. I had known she was going to choose him. I had known it since the campaign and the clearing with Mordecai and every moment since that night when the way Kael moved through spaces changed, that specific shift that happened in a man when something he had been fighting finally stopped being something he was fighting. I had known and I had still walked to her house and said the things I said and I had still stood at the edge of the clearing and watched it happen and felt every single piece of it land.I went back to the guest quarters that had been my confinement and I sat on the bed and I looked at the wall and I br

Chapter Eighty FourPOV: Sera AshwoodThe morning after the ceremony I woke up before dawn and lay there in the dark and felt the bond warm and present in my chest and thought that this was what it was supposed to feel like, this steady certain warmth that did not ache at the edges and did not bleed and did not remind you every single second of what it had cost to get here. It just felt like something that had always been true finally being allowed to be true out loud and I lay there and breathed through it and thought that I had spent a year learning how to breathe through the absence of this and now I was going to have to learn how to breathe through the presence of it and that was going to require a completely different kind of practice.I stayed still for longer than I needed to, just to feel it, just to let myself have the thing without immediately turning it into work. It would not last. I already knew that. Whatever the day was going to demand of me, it was going to demand it

 Chapter Eighty SixPOV: Kael DravonThe council meeting was at midday and I arrived early because arriving early to things that mattered was a habit I had never managed to break and I sat at the head of the elder's council table and looked at the empty room around me and thought about everything that had changed in the past seventy two hours and what it meant for everything that came after it.The bond was real. That was the thing I kept returning to, not because I doubted it but because the reality of it still sat in my chest with the specific weight of something I had been reaching for so long that having it felt different from what I had imagined having it would feel like. Not smaller. Just different. More ordinary in the best possible way, like something that had always been supposed to be there and was simply there now, and the extraordinary part was not the thing itself but the fact that it had taken this long and this much damage to

Chapter Eighty Eight POV: ZaraThe tribunal was set for three days after the council meeting and I sat in the guest quarters and I thought about three days and what I could realistically do with three days and arrived at the honest answer that three days was not enough time to do anything except prepare for what was coming and prepare carefully for what came after it, because what came after the tribunal was the thing that actually mattered and I was not going to waste the three days I had by spending them panicking about something I could not stop from happening.I had known the moment Kael looked at me in that corridor that the administration had felt. I had known from the way his eyes changed in that specific half second before he managed his face back into the flat dangerous expression he used when he had already decided something and was in the process of delivering the decision rather than making it. The distortion had worked in the sense that both of them felt it at the same

Chapter Ninety POV: Kael DravonKelvin put the morning report on my desk and sat across from me with that expression he wore when he had something to say that he had already decided how to say and was waiting for the right moment to say it."Talk," I said."Reuel Ashton has been at Sera's gate every morning since the ceremony," he said. "Without exception. Different food each time. He has been there before she sends any messages for the day and he stays approximately forty minutes each visit."I looked at the report and did not say anything."This morning you were there as well," Kelvin said carefully."I am aware I was there this morning," I said. "I was there.""I am simply noting that the pattern is consistent and deliberate," he said. "He has done his research on her schedule and he is positioning himself in the part of her day when she is most herself and least performing anything for anyone."I looked at the ceiling and breathed through what was happening in my chest and though