All Chapters of CHASING HIS DEAD LUNA: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

ADRIAN“What,” I said, and my voice came out wrong, too rough, too much in it, “are you doing in my bed?”She blinked, still half-asleep, hair everywhere, and then her eyes sharpened and she looked at me the way she used to when I’d said something she found spectacularly stupid.“You were whining,” she said flatly, “like a pathetic child. I came to check on you and then you wouldn’t let me go.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “You’re welcome, by the way.”“I didn’t ask you to come in here.”“No, you just grabbed me and held on like I was the last solid thing on earth.” She swung her legs off the bed. “My mistake for having a conscience.”I wanted to argue. I had the words ready, lined up, reasonable and cold, but the problem was she wasn’t lying and I knew she wasn’t lying because I knew exactly what the dream had been, the same dream it always was, the house and the smoke and her name tearing out of my throat while the fire ate everything, and I knew exactly how my hands behaved

ARIAThey didn’t even let me touch him. That was the part that stayed with me, that was the part that kept replaying as I stood in that corridor watching the guards carry my son out, Eli’s arms reaching back for me over one of their shoulders, his face wet, his voice saying mommy, mommy, mommy in that way that meant he was scared and I kept saying I’m here, baby, I’m here, it’s okay, I’ll come for you, I promise I’ll come, and the words felt like nothing because he was getting further away with every second and my promises weren’t stopping anything.The hospital doors swallowed them and then it was just me in the corridor and the silence and the hollow feeling of a room that had just had something essential removed from it.I stood there for one second, two, and then I turned around. I found him in a private dining room off the main ward, sitting at a small table by the window, cutting into a plate of food with the calm focus of a man who had just had a perfectly ordinary morning and

ARIAThe woman in the mirror didn’t look like me. That was the first thing I thought, standing in front of the full length mirror in the back of the mall while the attendant made small adjustments to the hem and another one finished pinning my hair up and the whole thing felt like something happening to someone else.The dress sat differently now, styled properly, and my face was done in a way I hadn’t seen it done since I couldn’t remember when, and I looked at myself and felt something complicated move through me that I didn’t want to acknowledge .When last had I looked like this? The answer came before I could stop it, one of those evenings with Adrian, early in their relationship when everything still felt new and slightly unbelievable.When he used to look at me across a table like I was the most interesting thing in the room and I used to pretend I didn’t notice, and the memory arrived with a sort of sharpness that meant it had been kept somewhere carefully preserved even when

ARIA’S POVAlpha Voss looked between Adrian and me with the kind of careful, measuring stare that made me feel like a piece of evidence at a trial I hadn’t been told I was attending, and Adrian, to his credit, didn’t flinch, just inclined his head toward the older man with the kind of formal respect that made it clear they hadn’t seen each other in some time.“Alpha Voss,” he said. “It’s been a while.”“Too long,” the man said, though his eyes hadn’t left me yet. “And who is this?”“Aria,” Adrian said.Something shifted across the old man’s face, recognition arriving slow and then all at once, and whatever filter he might have once possessed clearly hadn’t survived into old age because his expression went straight from confusion to something close to distaste without bothering to pass through anything polite in between.“Aria,” he repeated, like he was testing whether the word tasted as unpleasant as he expected. “The Aria. The one you were so in love with.” His eyes narrowed slightly

ADRIANThe car hadn’t even fully stopped before I was out of it, moving fast through the entrance of the house, past the guards who scrambled to keep up, my phone still gripped in my hand with the message glowing on the screen, fever spiking, breathing labored, doctor requesting immediate consultation.I heard Aria behind me, her heels slapping against the floor as she ran to keep pace, and some part of me registered that I should slow down for her and the rest of me didn’t care, didn’t have room to care, because the only thing that existed right now was the corridor ahead and whatever was waiting at the end of it. The doctor met us outside the room.“What happened?” I said, before she’d even fully turned around.“His fever spiked about twenty minutes ago. Came on fast.” She was already moving, talking as she walked, the particular clipped urgency of someone who had done this exact thing a hundred times and still hadn’t learned to find it easy. “We’re managing it but his oxygen levels