All Chapters of The Luna He Gave Away : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Lyra's POVThe window was open.Just open, a careful gap letting the frost in, and on the stone floor beneath it, a faint boot print where snow had blown through and melted slightly on the warmer stone inside.Kael crossed to the shelves without speaking.He ran his hand along the spines the way someone does when they already know what they're looking for and are confirming what they fear. His fingers stopped. He pulled them back slowly, leaving a gap where two volumes should have been."The genealogical record," he said. "And your mother's petition."I looked at the empty space on the shelf.My mother's handwriting. My grandmother's name. They were the closest thing I had left to hearing her voice. The only physical evidence inside Blackthorne that connected me to the bloodline the scholar had spent three days confirming.Gone."Everything else?" I asked.Kael scanned the surrounding shelves. "Untouched."That was the part that sat wrong. A general theft would have taken more, older

Lyra's POVSera was already outside when I got there.She was standing in the middle of the outer training ground with her arms folded and her breath making small clouds in the cold morning air, watching me cross the courtyard with the particular expression she wore when she had already decided something and was waiting for everyone else to catch up."You're late," she said."By two minutes.""In cold weather, two minutes is the difference between warm muscles and pulled ones." She turned and walked to the center of the ground. "Come on."Three days after the lockdown, the keep had settled into a tighter version of itself. The gates were still controlled. Movement through the corridors was still logged. But the work continued: council matters, patrol adjustments, and the daily weight of running a territory that didn't stop requiring attention because someone had stolen two books and left a window open.Sera had decided, with the logic that was entirely her own, that this was precisely

Lyra's POVNobody told me about the Oathfire Ceremony.Not because it was secret; Gretel had mentioned it in passing three days ago while organizing the household's evening schedule, and two of the kitchen staff had been making extra bread since morning, which meant food for a gathering. I had simply not asked, and no one had thought to formally invite me.Or rather—and this was the part I was still getting used to—invitations weren't how Blackthorne worked. You came or you didn't. The pack didn't manage people's attendance.I came.The gathering space was on the outer grounds, past the training yard, where the land opened up before the tree line. By the time I arrived in the late afternoon, fires were already burning in a loose ring across the space, not arranged in neat rows, not positioned according to rank, just present the way people were present wherever they had chosen to stand.Every family had one flame.I learned that from watching, not from being told. A man and a woman lig

Lyra's POVI was still thinking about four words when dawn came.I should have asked.I had read the note three times before putting it inside the book. I didn't know which thing he meant: the library, the information he'd withheld, or something else entirely. And the not-knowing was its own particular thing to sit with, because it could mean something significant or it could mean something small, and I had spent enough of my life mistaking small things for significant ones that I had started to distrust my own reading of it.I got up before I had an answer and went to the training yard.The yard was empty at this hour except for me.Sera didn't start our sessions until after breakfast, but I had been coming earlier on my own for the past week. Snow on the ground from last night, fresh and unmarked. My footprints were the first ones in it.I worked through the defensive forms slowly, letting my body remember rather than forcing it. The sequence Sera had corrected twice this week. The

Ronan's POVThe dispatch from Blackthorne arrived with the morning correspondence.I almost didn't open it.I had been reading Blackthorne reports for months and had developed the specific habit of setting them aside until I had finished everything else. Not because they weren't important. Because I needed a particular kind of steadiness to get through them, and that steadiness was easier to find after the other work was done.I opened it.It was a routine report. Patrol adjustments. Pack council decisions. Resource allocation for the winter months. The kind of document that covered a territory's administrative functioning and told you, if you knew how to read between the lines, what kind of place it actually was.The Luna's recommendation on the winter supply allocation was implemented across all outer settlements. Distribution completed ahead of schedule.I read that line twice.The Luna attended the eastern boundary review alongside the Alpha and senior council. Her contribution to