Semua Bab The Luna He Chose Was My Cousin : Bab 31 - Bab 40

(JASON’S POV)I stayed in that room until everyone else had left it.Not because I had anything left to say. I had not said anything at all, which was its own kind of statement that I suspected the elders had noted and filed away in the same category as everything else that had happened in the last twenty minutes. I stayed because my legs had stopped cooperating properly and the wall at my back was doing useful structural work, and because somewhere between watching Laila lay down three documents and watching Darius walk across that room to stand behind her chair without once looking at me, something had cracked open inside my chest that I had not yet figured out how to carry.The room emptied around me.Marcus was the last to leave.He stopped beside me on his way out, his hand settling briefly on my shoulder the way it always did when he wanted me to understand that something was being managed, that I did not need to worry, that the capable hands were already on whatever problem had

The laughter had not even finished leaving my chest when a second knock landed, softer this time, the knock of someone who did not want to be the one delivering the message.It was a house attendant, holding a folded card with Selena's seal pressed into the wax. A formal welcome, it read, in her careful, practiced handwriting, arranged in your honor, within the hour. Attendance expected of the full pack.Violet read it over my shoulder and made a sound somewhere between a laugh and disgust."She is hosting a party for you," she said, "the same week she tried to have your daughter labeled a threat to pack safety. I have to admire the nerve, honestly.""I do not have to attend.""No," Violet agreed, already reaching for my closet like the matter was settled. "But you are going to. I can see it on your face."She was right. I was not going to give Selena the satisfaction of watching me hide, or let her describe my absence however suited her story best.I dressed carefully. Not for her. F

Grief has a particular weight when it arrives eight years late, and I felt all of it the moment Gideon placed the letter in my hands.But that came later. First there was Kael, sitting me down at the small table in our room, a bowl of warm water between us, dabbing carefully at the split at the corner of my mouth with a cloth so gentle it did not match anything else about him. The lamp threw soft gold light across the table, and the whole room still smelled faintly of the training ground, sweat and dust and something underneath it that was simply him."Hold still.""It is barely bleeding anymore.""Hold still anyway." His thumb brushed my jaw, tilting my face toward the light, and something in the careful way he did it made my chest go soft in a manner the fight had not managed to touch at all. "You went down harder than you let on.""I have gone down harder than that plenty of times.""I know." He wrung the cloth out, unhurried, and set it aside before his hand found my cheek again,

"We are not taking our eyes off her again," Kael had said, and I had barely finished agreeing with him when the ground beneath the entire territory changed shape without either of us noticing.It started as a pressure. A weight in the air that had nothing to do with weather, the kind of pressure a wolf feels in the base of the skull long before the mind catches up to what is causing it. By the time we reached the main courtyard, half the pack had already stopped what they were doing, shoulders dropping, eyes lowering without being told to, the unmistakable current of Alpha presence rolling through the grounds like a tide nobody had invited in. Even the birds had gone quiet, the specific silence that settles over a territory when something ancient and dominant walks through it uninvited."Three of them," Kael said quietly, reading it the way he read everything, fast and certain. "Strong ones.""Visiting summit," Darius said, appearing beside us with the particular tightness of a Beta c

"We will be ready," Kael had said, and by the time Lyra was finally asleep, worn thin from a day that had asked far too much of an eight year old, the two of us were already back at the small table with every one of Gideon's documents spread across it again.The night stretched on slowly after that, comfortable in a way I did not expect danger to ever allow. We worked through the timeline of Marcus's movements year by year, disagreeing twice over a date that did not line up cleanly, agreeing on almost everything else without needing to say so out loud. There was something steadying about it, the two of us bent over the same papers, his shoulder close enough to mine that I could feel the warmth of him without either of us commenting on it. The candle burned down once, then twice, and somewhere in the space between one page and the next, I stopped noticing how late it had gotten at all.I did not decide to close my eyes. I simply remember the warmth of the room going soft and distant, m