Home / Werewolf / HIS FATED LUNA DOCTOR / Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

All Chapters of HIS FATED LUNA DOCTOR : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

91 Chapters

CHAPTER 71: WHAT CANNOT BE LIVED WITHOUT

IRENEI do not sleep.I lie in my quarters for hours after the celebration finally quiets beyond my window, the mark against my shoulder settled back into its familiar, low warmth, and I turn the evening over and over in my mind, searching for some angle that makes what happened easier to accept than it currently feels.It was only a first kiss, I tell myself, staring up at the dark ceiling. First kisses are often awkward, unfamiliar, clumsy in ways that settle with time and practice. I was exhausted from Tom's crisis, still raw from days of pouring myself into someone else's survival, hardly in any state to judge whether a kiss felt right or wrong. The mark reacted the way it reacted because it is possessive, ancient, unreasonable, not because it carries some deeper wisdom about who I am actually meant to want.I believe none of it, even as I construct it, brick by careful brick, in the quiet dark of my own room.The hollowness I felt the moment Daniel's lips met mine was not the awk

CHAPTER 72: WHAT SIMON WON'T LET HIM HIDE FROM

ASHFORDFour days pass, and I do not seek her out once.I tell myself the work justifies it. Simon has been chasing the second witness Marcus and Prisha demanded, and I have buried myself in every piece of the investigation I can reasonably claim requires my direct attention, reviewing ward logs long after Simon has already reviewed them twice, sitting in on council sessions I would ordinarily delegate to Marcus, training warriors well past the hour exhaustion should have sent me to my own quarters. I eat my meals alone, or standing, or not at all. I do not walk past the medical wing if I can help it, and when pack business forces me near it regardless, I keep my eyes fixed forward, unwilling to risk catching sight of her through a window, unwilling to test whether four days has done anything at all to steady the wound the kiss carved into me.Simon finds me on the fifth evening in the training yard, well past the hour any sensible warrior would still be running drills, and I am aware

CHAPTER 73: WHAT SHE WILL NOT LOSE AGAIN

LYRAI stood at the edge of the celebration for Tom's recovery and watched an entire pack fall in love with a woman I have spent a year systematically destroying, and I do not think anyone standing near me that night understood what it cost me to keep smiling through it.Naomi wept openly, cradling Hazel against her chest, thanking Irene for the third time that evening as though gratitude this large required constant, repeated expression to remain believable. Warriors who trained under my father, men who once looked at me with something close to reverence simply for carrying his blood, stopped instead to press Irene's hand between both of theirs, murmuring thanks for a healing gift none of them fully understand and none of them seem inclined to question. Even Marcus, careful, exacting Marcus, who has never once offered me anything beyond formal courtesy in all the years I have sat across from him in council, watched her that night with an expression I have not seen him wear toward any

CHAPTER 74: SOMEWHERE HE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN

IRENESleep has become an unreliable friend these past weeks, arriving in short, fitful stretches that leave me more tired most mornings than if I had simply stayed awake entirely, and tonight is no exception, my mind circling restlessly through everything Margaret told me in the library, the sacrifice requirement, the impossible weight of a price neither Ashford nor I have fully reckoned with, until I finally give up on rest altogether and dress quietly to walk the quiet corridors instead.I do not have a particular destination in mind. I simply move, the way I have learned to move through difficult nights this past year, letting my feet carry me while my thoughts sort themselves into something more manageable, and it is well past midnight when I find myself passing the narrow corridor that leads toward the council archive, a section of the lodge I have rarely had reason to visit, tucked away behind the main hall where only elders and senior warriors typically have any business at al

CHAPTER 75: WHAT CELESTE IS AFRAID TO SAY

SIMONI have spent eleven days chasing a name that kept dissolving every time I got close enough to hold it properly, and it is only through a stroke of luck I am not entirely comfortable admitting to Ashford that I finally track Celeste down to a small cottage on the eastern edge of a human settlement two days' ride from Crescent Moon territory, tucked far enough from any main road that I suspect she chose the location deliberately, the particular caution of someone who has spent the past year making certain she would be difficult to find.I do not approach her directly at first. I spend the better part of a day simply watching the cottage from a distance, cataloguing her routines, the small, ordinary rhythms of a woman who sells herbal remedies to human neighbors who have no idea what she truly is, and I find myself, more than once, wondering whether the plain, unremarkable life she has built for herself out here is a genuine retreat from her old profession or simply another kind of

CHAPTER 76: THE OATH SHE CANNOT BREAK

CELESTEWe make camp the first night on the road back toward Crescent Moon territory, Simon building a small, careful fire against the deepening cold while I sit wrapped in my own cloak, watching the flames catch and settle, my stomach tight with a dread that has only grown heavier with every mile we have covered since I agreed to leave my cottage behind.I have spent a year telling myself I made peace with what happened that night. I have not. I understand that now, sitting across a fire from a man who represents an Alpha's authority I have spent considerable effort avoiding, watching the flames while the truth I have carried silently since that ritual presses harder and harder against the back of my teeth, wanting release in a way I did not fully anticipate when I agreed, back in my own cottage, to finally tell it."You have been quiet most of the day," Simon says, settling across from me, his voice carrying the same careful patience he offered at my door, though something in it now

CHAPTER 77: WHAT THE OATH COULD NOT HOLD

ASHFORDSimon brings her to the council archive rather than my study, a choice I understand the moment I see her, this small, exhausted woman standing in the doorway with the particular wariness of someone who has spent a year expecting exactly this confrontation and dreading it in equal measure. The archive's thick walls and heavy door offer a privacy my study cannot match, and whatever Celeste is about to release into this room, Simon has clearly decided it deserves walls that will hold it in until we understand its full shape."Celeste." I keep my voice deliberately gentle, aware of how much authority already sits in the room simply by virtue of what I am, without needing to add unnecessary weight to it before she has even had the chance to sit down. "Thank you for coming. I understand this has cost you considerably already, and I understand there is more it may yet cost you before tonight is finished.""Simon told me you would be able to break the binding." Her voice carries a thi

CHAPTER 78: WHAT SHE NEVER LOST

IRENEAshford finds me in the medical wing just after dawn, and something in his face stops me mid-motion, a bandage roll still held loosely in my hand, because I have not once, since the night of my return, seen him look quite so carefully, deliberately composed, the particular stillness of a man holding something enormous behind a door he is not yet certain how to open."I need to speak with you," he says. "Somewhere private."I set down the bandage and follow him without argument, some old instinct recognizing that whatever he has come to tell me will not fit comfortably into the open, busy space of the medical wing, and he leads me to the small garden alcove behind it, empty at this hour, the morning light still soft and grey across the stone benches."You are frightening me," I say, once we have settled, his hands restless in a way I have rarely seen from him, opening and closing slightly at his sides as though he is uncertain what to do with them now that he has finally brought

CHAPTER 79: WHAT REVERSING WOULD COST

IRENECeleste is sitting up in bed when Ashford leads me into the small guest room off the healer's quarters, and the sight of her, small and visibly exhausted, dark circles pressed beneath her eyes, does nothing to soften the fury still burning tight in my chest from everything I learned only an hour ago.She looks up as we enter, and I watch her flinch, small but unmistakable, at whatever she reads across my face in that first instant, and some part of me is glad for it, glad that she understands, immediately and without needing to be told, exactly how much of a reckoning I have come here to demand."You are the one who did this to me." My voice comes out low, controlled in a way that costs me considerable effort to maintain. "You stood over me while I lay on that table, and you took my wolf away, and you let me believe for an entire year that she was gone forever.""Yes." Celeste does not flinch away from the accusation, meeting my eyes directly despite the visible exhaustion still

CHAPTER 80: THE TWO DOORS

IRENEThe corridor between the healer's quarters and my own is not long, perhaps a hundred paces, and I have walked it so many times these past weeks that my feet know it without my permission. The third flagstone rocks slightly beneath any weight. The window at the bend lets in a single blade of moonlight. The iron sconce outside my door burns low and smells faintly of tallow. Tonight every one of these small, familiar things feels like it belongs to someone else, to a woman who walked here believing her only task was to escape.Ashford follows three paces behind me. I know the distance exactly, because I can feel it, the muted thread of the bond drawing taut when he lags and loosening when he closes the gap, a sensation I have spent weeks pretending not to notice. He does not speak. His footsteps are careful, almost apologetic, and somehow that is worse than if he had said something.I stop at my door with my hand on the latch and do not turn around."Did you know," I say. "Before s

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