Semua Bab Thalia’s Unbecoming: From Killer To Cancer Luna: Bab 121 - Bab 127

CHAPTER 120I woke on the last day of the falling action and did the inventory one more time, and this time I did it slowly, because I wanted to enjoy every item on the list. The room was mine, with a door I opened myself. The contacts case sat on the table beside the bed, the quiet record of everything I had stopped hiding, and my mother’s journal lay next to it, fully read at last. The mark on the back of my hand glowed faintly in the morning light, permanent and real, and the compact sat warm in my chest like a second heartbeat.Rael was two corridors away, already moving toward his day, and Valerie was down the hall waking with the same early habit the compact site had given her. Through the window I could see the east tower standing in the pale light, its ward settled and resting, my mother’s work finished exactly as she had planned it. I thought about the dungeon, with its locked door and its guard breathing in the dark and the mate word spoken only once, and I let myself feel h

CHAPTER 122Rael ran the morning council session the way he had run a thousand of them over three centuries, with a steady hand and a clear head, and yet he found that this morning was different from every session that had come before it. The business itself was the same as always, the weighty ordinary business of a large pack, with supply logistics, boundary reports, and a territorial question from the western neighbour that Talos had marked as needing a formal answer. The difference was in the feeling underneath it, and he noticed it in every item on the table.For three hundred years he had governed from a place of complete authority and a particular kind of loneliness, the loneliness of a man who was responsible for everything and answerable to nothing except the long chain of consequences that his own decisions had produced. The compact had changed that. He was governing a pack that lived in relationship with its land, and the land answered him, so that his choices were no longer

CHAPTER 124The second Omega birth after the curse happened on a Tuesday morning, and Rael heard about it from Talos in the same way he had heard about the first one. Talos came into the study wearing the particular expression he saved for important good news, which was very different from the face he wore for everything else, and Rael set down his pen before Talos had even opened his mouth.“The Omega wing,” Talos announced, closing the door behind him with unusual gentleness.“The second,” Rael breathed, and his chest went tight.“The second,” Talos confirmed, and a rare, wide smile broke across his weathered face. “Mother and daughter, and both of them well.”Rael set down the document he had been holding and stood up slowly, because for a moment his legs did not feel entirely like his own. “Tell Imogen I will come to the wing whenever she says it is a good time,” he instructed, and his voice came out rougher than he expected.“She anticipated that,” Talos told him, grinning. “She