All Chapters of HIS FATED LUNA DOCTOR : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

IRENETom walked into the main hall under his own power on a Friday morning.No cane. No arm to lean on. He came through the door at his own pace, which was slower than it used to be and steadier than any of us had dared hope two weeks ago, and the hall went quiet for exactly one second before it didn't.Margaret made a sound I had never heard from her before. Something between a laugh and something else entirely. She covered it quickly, pressed her fingers to her mouth, and looked away, but I had seen it and I filed it away as one of the things I would remember about this place long after I had left it.Tom looked around the hall with the expression of a man seeing a room he had not been sure he would see again.His eyes found me.I was standing near the doorway with my clipboard, because I had told myself I was here in a clinical capacity and the clipboard made that feel true. Tom looked at me across the hall with those careful eyes of his and shook his head slightly, as if he had s

IRENEI couldn't sleep.I lay in the dark for an hour, maybe longer, staring at the ceiling while the pack house settled into its night quiet around me. The celebration had wound down slowly, the way good evenings did, not ending so much as gradually becoming something else, people drifting off in ones and twos until the hall was just the cleanup and the last of the music.I had left before the end.Too much sitting in my chest to stay.Daniel's kiss. What it hadn't been. Ashford's hand at the small of my back, brief and careful and not nothing. The bond settling around me in the corridor afterward like something that had been waiting for me to stop fighting it.I got up at half past midnight, pulled on clothes, and went downstairs.The main library was dark when I pushed the door open.I didn't turn on the overhead light. Just the small lamp on the reading table, which threw enough of a circle to work by. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. That was the honest answer. I had come do

LYRAThe celebration for Tom's recovery should have been mine to enjoy.I had spent a year building the version of this pack that made room for me, that saw me as its future Luna in all but name, and for most of that year it had worked exactly as I intended. I sat through the endless deference and half-genuine warmth of people who did not entirely trust me but were smart enough to pretend, and I told myself that trust was a thing that accumulated, that time alone would eventually finish what my planning had started.Then she walked back through the gate wearing glasses and a stranger's name, and every certainty I had built began coming apart at the seams.I watched from the edge of the hall as Callum brought her a drink she barely touched. I watched Margaret, who had never once in a year offered me anything warmer than correct courtesy, speak to Irene like she mattered, like she had earned something. I watched Tom himself, walking on his own two feet for the first time in weeks, seek

IRENEAshford's blood was warm against my palms, warmer than blood had any right to feel with a body cooling this fast beneath it, and somewhere in the part of my mind that still functioned as a doctor rather than a woman watching a man collapse in front of her, I catalogued the wound with clinical, desperate precision. Silver poisoning, deep laceration, blood loss significant but not yet catastrophic, provided someone got the poison out before his own healing tried and failed to close the wound around it."Bandages," I said again, sharper. "And I need him flat, someone hold his shoulders, he's going to fight me even unconscious, wolves always do."Hands appeared. Margaret, I realized distantly, her face bloodless with fear but her movements steady, years of tending a pack through worse nights than this one showing in the economy of her motion. She pressed a folded cloth into my hands and knelt across from me without being asked, holding Ashford's shoulders down with a strength that b

IRENEI woke to sunlight that felt too bright for what my body had survived the night before, and for several long seconds I could not remember where I was or why every muscle in me ached as though I had been beaten rather than simply spent.Then I remembered.Callan's chest closing beneath my palms. The white light. The silence of an entire pack staring at me like I had become something they no longer had a name for.I lay still on the narrow bed in my quarters, staring at the ceiling, and took inventory of my own body the way I had learned to take inventory of a patient's, methodical and clinical because the alternative was to feel the full weight of what had happened, and I was not ready for that yet. My hands throbbed with a deep, bone level ache that had nothing to do with muscle strain. My head pounded low and steady behind my eyes. My mouth was so dry it hurt to swallow.I had never spent that much of myself before. Not even close.Someone had undressed me down to my slip and c