All Chapters of HIS FATED LUNA DOCTOR : Chapter 41 - Chapter 45

LYRAThe meeting place is not on any pack map, which is precisely why I chose it, a collapsed stretch of old mining tunnel three miles past the western boundary, close enough to reach on foot before moonrise and far enough from patrol routes that no one will stumble on what I am about to do here. I have told myself, walking out here alone in the fading light, that this is simply strategy, the kind of cold, necessary calculation that separates women who become Luna from women who spend their whole lives waiting to be chosen. I have told myself this so many times in the last week that I have almost stopped hearing how thin it sounds.They are waiting when I arrive, three of them visible at the tunnel mouth, though I know there are more stationed somewhere in the dark beyond it, because rogues do not survive long by trusting a single meeting to go as planned. The one who speaks calls himself Korrin, and he has the particular look I have come to associate with rogues who have been outside

IRENEI go to the archive because Ashford told me, once, in the quiet after the council adjourned, that whatever he shielded me from in that stone chamber would not stay hidden much longer, and something in the careful way he said it has been sitting in my chest since like a stone I cannot quite swallow. He would not tell me what Simon found. He asked me to trust him a little longer, and I said yes, because I did not know what else to say to a man who had just spent his own standing in that room to buy me time I had not asked him to buy.But trust does not mean idleness, and if there is a truth coming that I am not ready for, then I would rather meet it having done everything I can to arm myself first. So I go to the archive, not the restricted library with its locked door and its unmaking ritual, but the ordinary records room in the lodge's administrative wing, where the pack keeps birth registries and land deeds and the mundane paperwork of generations. I go looking for anything tha

ASHFORDI find Lyra in the training yard at dusk, running drills with two younger warriors who scatter the moment they see my face, some instinct in them reading the weather of my mood before I have said a single word. Lyra does not scatter. She finishes the drill she was correcting, unhurried, deliberate, and only turns to face me once the younger wolves have retreated toward the far fence, out of easy earshot."You look like a man carrying something heavy," she says, and there is nothing in her voice but mild, easy curiosity, the tone of a woman who has known me since we were both children running these same yards, who has earned, across years of loyalty, the right to speak to me without the careful formality most of the pack still uses.I do not answer immediately. I take a moment to look at her instead, really look, the way I have not let myself look at her in longer than I want to admit, searching her face for something I am no longer certain I would recognize even if it were the