All Chapters of HIS FATED LUNA DOCTOR : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

45 Chapters

CHAPTER 11: THE WEB OF LIES

IRENE.The first sign that something was wrong came on the morning I found the rogue tracks.I had risen before dawn, unable to sleep, and decided to walk the perimeter of the pack grounds. The forest was quiet, peaceful, the kind of stillness that usually calmed my racing thoughts. I had been walking for nearly an hour when I noticed them, footprints, fresh and deep, pressed into the soft earth near the eastern border.They were not pack prints. I had learned to recognize the difference during my year away. Pack wolves moved with purpose, with confidence, their tracks straight and deliberate. These were different. These were the tracks of wolves who were hiding, creeping, watching.Rogues.My blood ran cold. I crouched down, examining the prints more closely. There were at least five of them, maybe more. They had been here recently, within the last few hours. And they had been watching the pack grounds.I needed to tell Ashford.I turned to leave, and that was when I saw her.Lyra st

CHAPTER 12: POISON IN OUR MIDST

IRENE.The first incident happened four days after the rogue tracks.I was in the pack kitchens, grabbing a late dinner after a long day in the medical wing, when a commotion erupted outside. Shouts, running footsteps, the sound of someone screaming in pain.Finn burst through the kitchen door, his face ashen. "Doctor, you need to come. It's Marcus. He collapsed during training."I followed him outside, my heart pounding. Marcus was one of the pack's senior warriors, a man in his forties with a reputation for being unshakeable. Now he lay on the ground, his body convulsing, dark veins spider-webbing across his exposed skin.The curse.It was the same pattern I had seen in Tom. But this time, it was different. This time, it was moving faster, spreading through Marcus's body like wildfire."Get him inside," I ordered. "Now."The warriors carried Marcus into the medical wing, laying him on the nearest bed. I pushed through them, my hands already reaching for his chest."Everyone out," I

CHAPTER 13: THE WEIGHT OF WHISPERS

IRENEThe first sign was small enough that I almost missed it.Breakfast.For eleven days, the pack omegas had brought my meals without being asked. A tray outside my door in the morning, hot and covered. Lunch delivered to the medical wing. Dinner left on the desk in my quarters with a small wildflower tucked beside the plate, something I had come to suspect was not pack custom but Ashford's quiet instruction.On the twelfth day, the tray did not come.I waited longer than I should have before going to the communal kitchen myself. I told myself it was nothing. People forgot things. Routines slipped. I had no reason to read meaning into an empty doorstep.But when I pushed open the kitchen door and found three omegas already inside, Petra, the young one with the braid, and two others whose names I had not yet learned, the way they went still told me everything.It was not the stillness of surprise. It was the stillness of people who had been waiting to see what I would do."Good mornin

CHAPTER 14: THE FADING LIGHT

IRENEWe sat in the fading light, and neither of us spoke for a while, and it was the most at ease I had felt in days.It was two mornings later when everything changed again.I was crossing the main courtyard just after seven, medical bag in hand, heading to the wing where Tom was doing his morning exercises. The pack was already moving around me, warriors heading to the training ground, omegas carrying baskets toward the kitchen, a cluster of children chasing something small and fast across the cobblestones.I had almost made it to the far archway when I heard the gates.The sound of a vehicle on the gravel road outside. Tires on stone. An engine cutting out.I would have thought nothing of it. Packs had visitors. Deliveries arrived. I had learned not to pay attention to the rhythms of the gate.But then I heard the voice.And my feet stopped moving of their own accord."....appreciate you meeting me. I know it's short notice. I'm Dr. Daniel Reid. I believe someone on your staff may

Chapter 15: Before the Words

IRENEI opened my mouth.And the door to the main house swung open.She moved the way she always had, like the world was a stage and she had been given the only script. Lyra Cross did not walk into rooms. She arrived in them. Head high, dark hair loose over her shoulders, wearing a coat that probably cost more than my monthly salary at St. Aurelius had been. She was beautiful in the way that had always made me feel slightly less of everything, not because she tried to diminish me, but because her very existence seemed to rewrite the standard by which women in our family were measured.She had not seen me yet.Her eyes were on Ashford."Alpha Ashford." Her voice was warm, composed, precisely calibrated. "I apologize for arriving at this hour. I know it's irregular. But I was told you were still receiving visitors, and what I have to say is important."Ashford did not stand. He was still beside me on the wall, and the fact that he did not immediately rise and orient himself toward her,

CHAPTER 16: THE EASIER THING

IRENEDaniel Reid made excellent coffee.It was such a small thing that I was almost embarrassed by how much I looked forward to it. Every morning, without discussion or arrangement, a cup appeared on the counter of the medical wing before I arrived. Black, strong, no sugar. Exactly right. I had never told him how I took it. He had simply paid attention, the way he paid attention to everything, quietly, without making a production of it.The first morning I found it there, I stood holding the cup for a long moment before I drank it.The second morning, I stopped standing and just drank.By the end of the first week, I stopped noticing that I had stopped noticing.Tom was well enough now to sit in the chair by his window for several hours each day. I found him there one afternoon with a book open in his lap and his eyes on the training ground below, watching the warriors run drills with the particular expression of a man who wanted badly to be among them and was making peace, daily, wi

CHAPTER 17: THE SPACE BETWEEN

IRENEAshford opened his mouth to speak.My phone rang.I pulled it from my pocket. St. Catherine's Referral Line."I have to take this," I said."Of course." His expression closed off and he stepped back.By the time the call ended, a referral inquiry, nothing that couldn't wait until morning, he was gone. The east door stood slightly ajar. I stood alone on the grass with my phone in my hand, then went inside.I didn't sleep well.I lay in the dark feeling Ashford somewhere above me, awake, the bond steady and persistent. I thought about what he had been about to say until thinking about it became pointless, and then I lay there anyway.Tom was restless the next morning."I walked the corridor and back," he announced when I came in."Margaret told me.""She said I was slow.""You were a little slow."He submitted to the examination without much argument, which was its own sign of progress. When I was done he looked at me with those eyes of his."Ashford was up before five," he said.

Chapter 18: The Burning

ASHFORDThe mark started three days after the courtyard.Not the baseline warmth I'd carried since the moment I saw her, that had always been there, steady and manageable. This was different. This was the mark waking up angry.The first time it hit I was in a meeting with Finn, going through border reports. A deep searing pulse radiated from my shoulder down through my arm. I gripped the desk hard enough that the wood creaked.Finn stopped mid-sentence and looked at my hand."Keep going," I said.He kept going.It came in pulses after that. Irregular. Tied to something I couldn't always identify from a distance.I said nothing to anyone.Margaret left a poultice on my desk one afternoon without a word. I used it. It helped with the physical burn. Nothing else.Finn watched me the way he watched things he was waiting to become problems. He quietly added a recovery day to the training rotation after I went through three of our best warriors in one session and Callum ended up with a brui

CHAPTER 19: SALT IN THE WOUND

ASHFORDThe mark did not stop after that night.I had hoped, foolishly, it turned out that the conversation in the sitting room had settled something. That Irene's hand against my shoulder and the things we had said to each other in the lamplight had shifted the ground enough that the wolf would quiet.It quieted for one day.Then Reid brought her coffee in the medical wing and laughed at something she said before she'd finished saying it, the easy laugh of someone who knew how her mind worked, and the mark came back like it had never left.I stopped trying to hide it from Finn.Not because I chose to tell him, but because on the third morning he walked into my office and found me standing at the window with my hand pressed flat against my shoulder and my jaw tight enough to ache, and there was no reasonable explanation I could have given that he would have believed.He closed the door.Sat down.Waited."It burns when they're together," I said, without turning from the window. "When

CHAPTER 20: EVERYTHING SHE HELD BACK

ASHFORDI heard her laugh from the corridor.I pushed the door open and walked in.Reid stood the moment he saw my face. Picked up his jacket, looked at Irene once, and walked past me without a word.Irene watched him go. Then she looked at me.She was still in the chair, legs tucked under her, the book closed in her lap. She didn't move. Just watched me come into the room with an expression that started careful and was already becoming something else."Ashford…""How long are you going to let this continue."She went still. "Let what continue.""You know why he came here. It wasn't medicine. And every day he's here you let him further in."The careful expression left her face entirely."Excuse me," she said quietly."I'm not attacking you. I'm asking…""You walked in here because you heard me laugh." She unfolded herself from the chair and stood. "That's what this is.""That's not…""That's exactly what it is." Her voice was still low but something under it had shifted. "You've been

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