Alle Kapitel von THE LUNA THEY NEVER WANTED: Kapitel 51 – Kapitel 60

CHAPTER 52DAWN AT THE QUARRYXANDER’S POVWren woke up screaming and we didn’t have time to let her finish.“How long until dawn,” I said, already moving, already shouting for Marcus, for horses, for anyone still awake enough to fight.“Two hours,” Caleb said, checking the sky through the window. “Maybe less.”Two hours to save a woman I hated, in a place none of us had ever seen, against a man who could apparently reach into my own sister’s chest from miles away and make her scream on command. Great odds. Love it!!“We’re not handing her over,” Elena said, already pulling on boots, already thinking three steps ahead the way she always did when things got bad enough that panic stopped being useful.“I know,” I said.“Then what’s the plan?”“We go to the quarry. We don’t bring Wren. We bring everyone else, and we take Elaine back the hard way.”“That’s not a plan,” Caleb said. “That’s a suicide run with extra steps dear. Let’s not be foolish.”Everyone gave him the look.“You got a be

CHAPTER 54RIGHT OUTSIDE THE WALLS ELENA’S POVEveryone moved at the same time.“Get her inside,” Xander said, pointing at Wren. Two guards grabbed her arms and pulled her back through the gates before she could argue.“Seal the perimeter,” Marcus shouted, already running toward the guard towers. “Full lockdown. Nobody in or out.”I stood over Elaine’s body for one more second. The arrow hadn’t moved. Her eyes were still open, staring up at nothing.“Elena.” Xander’s hand found my shoulder. “Inside. Now.”“I’m not running from him,” I said.“I’m not asking you to run. I’m asking you to think.” His eyes were hard, focused, the same look he got right before a fight. “If he’s close enough to make that shot, he’s close enough to make another one. I’m not losing you standing in the open arguing about it.”I hated that he was right. I moved.We got behind the wall just as the towers lit up, torches blazing along the top of the gate, warriors scrambling into position. Caleb climbed the ladd

CHAPTER 56WHAT’S LEFT TO LOSE TRENT’S POVSloane found me in the training yard at dawn, the same yard where I used to drill my father’s guard before I burned it down myself, piece by piece, without ever touching a torch.“You heard,” she said.“About Elaine?” I set down the practice sword I’d been swinging at nothing for the past hour. “Yeah. I heard.”“She’s really gone.”“Yeah.”Sloane sat down on the low wall bordering the yard, wrapping her arms around herself even though the morning wasn’t cold. She’d looked different since the valley. Thinner. Older around the eyes. I noticed things like that now, the way people carried what happened to them, because I’d spent enough time carrying my own weight to recognize it in someone else.“I keep waiting to feel something,” she said. “She raised me half my life. Fed me. Trained me to want things I never actually wanted for myself.” She looked at her hands. “I should feel something.”“You don’t have to feel anything specific,” I said. “Gri

CHAPTER 58THE ROAD TO THE CIRCLE ELENA’S POVWe left Gerafil at first light, and nobody looked back at the gates.I understood why. Looking back meant thinking about who might not walk back through them, and none of us had room left for that kind of thinking, not this morning, not with the ceremony grounds waiting two days’ ride ahead of us and a man who’d spent twenty-three years preparing for this exact moment somewhere out there in the hills.The column stretched longer than any I’d ridden with before. Xander’s warriors, nearly forty strong, flanking the center where Wren rode between Talia and Caleb, the three of them close enough to reach each other fast if anything went wrong. Trent and Sloane rode near the back with what remained of Finnveil’s loyal guard, a small enough group that it made my chest ache a little, thinking about how much that pack had lost to get down to this.I rode beside Xander at the front, the way I had since the night he first found me broken outside Tre

CHAPTER 60FACE TO FACE XANDER’S POVI’d built this moment in my head a hundred different ways since my mother showed me that portrait in the locked room. None of the versions I imagined felt like this.He looked ordinary. That was the first thing that struck me, standing there in the torchlight with a hundred packs watching in dead silence. Not a monster… but some looming shape built from nightmares and dread. Just a man, silver haired, calm, with my own eyes set into his face like he’d loaned them to me before I was even born and finally came to collect interest.“You don’t get to call us that,” I said. “Children. You gave that up twenty three years ago.”“Did I,” Corvin said, unbothered, taking another slow step into the circle. “I’ve watched you both since the night I lost you. Every fight or scar. I know the exact day you learned to shift early, out of anger, tearing through your mother’s garden. I know the day Elena rejected Trent Black in front of his entire council, and I