All Chapters of The Luna He Gave Away : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Lyra's POVThe first sign was the grain wagon.It was supposed to arrive by midmorning from the southern settlement. By noon it still hadn't come, and the rider sent a boy ahead on foot with a message for Gretel: the southern road was blocked. Palace riders. Official inspection. Two to three days before he could move.Gretel brought the message to me in the council room."When did they start?" I asked."The driver said they were already in position when he arrived this morning," she said. "Before dawn."I folded the message.Before dawn. While we were reading Ronan's warning, while we were processing the removal authorization, the riders had quietly repositioned onto the southern road and begun their inspections before the keep had opened its gates for the day.I set the message on the table and went back to the welfare requests. But I was reading them differently now.By midday, the effects had started reaching the keep.The kitchen sent word to Gretel that the flour delivery hadn't

Lyra's POVGareth pulled the wolf's file before dinner.He came to find me an hour later with the kind of expression that confirmed what I had been sitting with since the records room—the glance at the tree line was probably not nothing."His transfer documentation from the southern territory is incomplete," Gareth said. "The originating pack reference checks out, but the packmaster who supposedly signed his release has been dead for fourteen months. " He paused. "The transfer was processed after the packmaster's death."I looked at him."Someone used a dead man's authority to place a wolf in Blackthorne," I said."Eight months ago," Gareth said. "Before any of the current operation began. Before Isolde filed the challenge. Before the riders appeared on the eastern road."Another planted contact. Another patient, long-lead placement, the same way Torvin had been placed years before."Where is he now?" I asked."Kael has him."I started toward the door."Luna," Gareth said it quietly.

Lyra's POVKael was in the covered walkway mid-afternoon.He was alone, which was unusual. Most of his day was spent with other people. He had stopped at one of the open arches overlooking the training ground below, where the afternoon patrol rotation was running drills in the cold.I came and stood beside him.We were quiet for a moment. The drills continued below. The cold air moved through the arches."I've been thinking about yesterday's conversation," I said."So have I," he said."I don't want to have the same argument again." I looked at the training ground. "I want to finish it."He turned slightly toward me. He was not facing me fully—just enough to indicate he was listening."You came to me before you sent the instruction to Gretel," I said. "You explained your reasoning. You accepted conditions." I paused. "That was different from how things have gone before. I want you to know I noticed."He was quiet."And I still want to tell you something," I said. "Not as an argument.

Lyra's POVThe blizzard arrived hours before anyone expected it.The morning patrol had flagged dropping pressure, and the kitchen had been told to prepare for a cold night. But the forecast had said overnight. What arrived was mid-afternoon, moving fast from the northwest, the kind of storm that didn't announce itself properly because it was moving too quickly to send ahead.I was two hours north of Blackthorne when the sky changed.Renn saw it first. He stopped mid-stride on the trail and looked northwest, and the expression on his face was specific enough that I stopped without being told to."How far is the nearest shelter?" I asked."Twenty minutes," he said. "If we move now."We moved.The hunter's shelter was a permanent stone base with a solid roof, stocked for exactly this kind of emergency. Wood by the door, dry provisions on the upper shelf, two rooms divided by a heavy curtain. The outer room was larger, the inner one smaller, with a fire pit that still had ash in it from

Kael's POVThe box had been in the restricted archive since the year my father died.Not the official records—those I had gone through immediately, because Blackthorne needed an Alpha and an Alpha needed to know what he was inheriting. The official records were thorough. My father had been a careful man with paperwork.The personal box was different.I had opened it once, the week after the funeral, looked at the handwriting on the first page, and closed it. There had been a border dispute that needed resolving and a succession challenge from a neighboring territory and approximately forty-seven other things that needed immediate attention, and the box had gone into the restricted archive and stayed there for eleven years.I took it out now and sat at my desk with it in front of me and opened it.His handwriting was worse than I remembered.Abbreviated, cramped, written fast in the shorthand of someone who was recording things for his own reference and not for anyone else to read. He