All Chapters of CHASING HIS DEAD LUNA: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

ARIAI stood in the middle of the private dining room with a box of candles in my hands and told myself, for what felt like the hundredth time that afternoon, that I could do this, that I had done harder things than light candles for a man I loved to sit across from someone who wasn't me, and I almost believed it, right up until I actually had to strike the match.Aaron hadn't asked me to do this because he needed a date night arranged. He had a staff of people whose entire job was logistics, an events coordinator on retainer, an assistant three floors down who could have handled reservations in her sleep, and he knew that, and I knew that, and the fact that he'd handed it to me anyway, in front of Adrian, with that soft, satisfied voice, told me everything I needed to know about what this actually was.It wasn't a task. It was a test, dressed up as one, and the cruelty of it sat so plainly on the surface that a furious part of me almost respected how little effort he'd put into hidin

ARIACome back downstairs.I read it four times, like the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense, like there might be a reason hidden in there that didn't feel like walking straight back into the exact fire I'd just climbed out of, and I sat there on the floor with Eli's weight warm against my arm and felt the whole evening tilt sideways all over again."Who is it?" Eli asked, not looking up from his book, the way he asked most things, half interested, half somewhere else entirely."Work," I said, and the word came out steadier than I felt, which was becoming something of a specialty of mine tonight."You always go back to work," he said, and there was nothing accusing in it, just an observation."I'll tuck you in when I get back," I said. "Promise."He shrugged, already back in his book, already fine, because he was seven and resilient in the unbothered way only seven-year-olds managed, and I pressed a kiss to the top of his head and told the babysitter I'd

ARIAThe knock came before my alarm did, sharp, three times, and I surfaced out of a sleep that hadn't been deep enough to begin with, my whole body still holding the memeory of last night, his hand on my jaw, the two inches of space that had almost closed. I looked at the clock before I looked at the door. Six in the morning. Nobody knocked on anything at six in the morning unless something was wrong.I crossed the room still half tangled in the thought of him, and opened the door without thinking about what I looked like, without thinking about anything except the possibility that Eli's monitors had gone off somewhere down the hall, and it wasn't a nurse standing there, and it wasn't Cassian.It was Adrian.He'd clearly come straight from his own room, no shirt, just a pair of pajama pants sitting low on his hips, his hair still doing whatever it did when he'd been running his hands through it all night instead of sleeping, and for one full second neither of us said anything, becaus

ARIAThe silence was the answer. I didn’t need anything else, didn’t need words, didn’t need explanation, just that silence, just the way he stood there with his mouth open and nothing coming out, and I felt it move through me and settle somewhere permanent and cold. I stepped back.“Aria—” His voice came out slightly broken, something rough at the edge of it that I hadn’t heard before, and I turned away from him completely because I couldn’t look at his face right now, couldn’t look at the thing in his eyes and keep myself together at the same time.My chest was aching in a way that was almost physical, a pressure behind my ribs that had no release, and my throat had gone tight and thick and I was fighting it, fighting the tears that were sitting right there waiting for me to stop clenching my jaw long enough to let them through, and I was not going to do that, I was not going to stand in my own room and fall apart in front of him.“Leave,” I said, and it came out whispered and broke

ARIA’S POVI stared at him.“The only thing you could live with,” I repeated, and my voice came out strange, like it belonged to someone standing slightly outside the room watching this happen to someone else. “Adrian, do you understand what you just did?”“Yes.”“The Council—”“I know.”“Your father—”“I know, Aria.”“Liana is not the kind of woman who walks away from something like this quietly,” I said, and I heard the panic in my own voice and couldn’t stop it. “She has things, she has photographs, she has resources and people and she made threats that were very specific and I have a son—” I stopped.“I have a son who has been through enough and I cannot have her coming after us because you said no to a marriage in my bedroom at six in the morning —”“She’s not going to touch Eli,” he said.“You don’t know that.”“I do know that,” he said, and his voice was steady in a way that mine wasn’t. “Because I know things about Liana’s father and his arrangement with the Council that he wo