All Chapters of Thalia’s Unbecoming: From Killer To Cancer Luna: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

THALIA- I woke to the soft, rhythmic sound of breathing and the low hum of the morning wind against the windowpane. For a few seconds, I simply lay still, floating in the rare warmth of actual rest. The heavy furs wrapped around my shoulders felt soft and heavy, holding in the heat of the night we had just shared. But as my eyes adjusted to the bright morning light spilling across the wooden floorboards, I saw Rael. He was sitting in the high-backed wooden chair near the window. He was fully dressed in his dark tunic and leather trousers, sitting completely still with a small piece of folded parchment resting across his knee. His broad hands were resting on the armrests, his dark eyes fixed on me with a heavy, quiet intensity. He had the distinct look of a man who had been sitting with a complicated truth for an hour, patiently waiting for me to join him in the waking world. I sat up slowly, pushing the thick blanket down to my waist. I did not bother with pleasantries or sof

THALIA- The corridor leading to Elder Elodie’s private quarters was quiet, dark, and chilled by the midnight draft creeping through the narrow arrow-slits. Rael walked beside me, his long, heavy strides keeping pace with mine. He didn't speak, and neither did I. He had told me everything in my study ten minutes ago—every word from the companion, the mention of the logbook, and the courier dispatch sent three days ago on the very night Nara uncovered the 412 ratification annex. When we reached the arched heavy oak door at the end of the stone hallway, I stopped. I turned to look at Rael. "I am going in alone," I said softly, my voice firm despite the cold knot tightening in my stomach. Rael’s dark eyes searched my face for a long, heavy second. His jaw flexed, the Alpha instinct in him screaming to stand as a wall between me and any potential threat. But he knew who I was, and he knew what Elodie represented to me. She was the one who had guided my hands over the sacred flam

RAEL- The great hall was packed to capacity for the morning assembly, but the atmosphere was far from normal. There was no usual rustle of trade ledgers, no quiet murmurs of housekeepers or guards shifting post. A heavy, suffocating silence hung beneath the high stone arches, broken only by the crackle of the central hearths. Gerard stood on the raised dais at the front of the hall. He had completely shed his usual procedural tone, abandoning the measured, bureaucratic language he had used for weeks. Today, his voice boomed through the rafters, soaked in calculated theatrical panic. "We can no longer mince words under the guise of court diplomacy!" Gerard declared, his hand slamming down onto the carved wooden podium. "What occurred on the night of the full moon was not a royal private affair. It was a breach of the fundamental laws that govern this pack!" I stood near the heavy iron doors at the back of the hall, my arms crossed over my chest, watching him with a cold, unyielding

THALIA The morning air carried that sharp and biting chill that usually preceded a heavy frost across the northern courtyards, but inside the main archive room the atmosphere was thick with the familiar scents of old paper, binding glue, and the lingering warmth of the hearth fire. I sat at my usual heavy oak desk with a cup of cold tea resting untouched near my right hand, my attention completely absorbed by the parchment reports spread out before me when the message from Valerie finally arrived through Talos. It was a remarkable piece of communication delivered with all the chaotic ingenuity I had come to expect from my sister. She had somehow found a way to dispatch word from the remote compact site using a method that Talos described with a mixture of professional bewilderment and exhaustion. I understood immediately what had happened. Valerie had undoubtedly spent the last forty-eight hours being so relentlessly, cheerfully personable to the escort wolves that refusing to carry

THALIA'S POV Imogen stood at the front of the main gathering hall at nine in the morning, and she was not wearing the ornate green dress of her official office. She wore a plain, unadorned dark woolen dress instead. It was the exact same style of simple dark dress she had worn to my room on the evening she had dropped the formal, distant version of herself and arrived as simply who she was. She stood at the head of the hall without any of the usual ceremonial fanfare, but the pack filled the room anyway. They filled it completely, flowing into the gallery above and standing shoulder-to-shoulder along the stone walls the exact same way they filled the hall for every monumental address in Great North history. The air in the room was dense with tension, cold from the morning drafts blowing off the northern ridge, and heavy with the weight of decades of unsaid things. "I have been in this pack for eleven years," Imogen began. Her voice was not raised, but it carried into every quiet