All Chapters of CHASING HIS DEAD LUNA: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

ARIA’S POVI was already moving before I’d made the decision to move.Down the corridor, past Adrian’s room, toward the stairs, my phone still in my hand with the photograph on the screen, and I was running by the time I hit the landing, my feet on the stairs faster than was safe and I didn’t care, I couldn’t care, because the only thing in my head was that room, that corner, my son asleep in it while someone stood close enough to take a photograph and he didn’t even know.The sitting room door was open. I went through it and he was there, still in the same position, curled on the sofa with the book fallen to the floor and his face slack with sleep, and I crossed the room and put my hand on his back and felt him breathe and stood there for a moment with my eyes closed and just felt him breathe.Okay.He was okay.I stood up and looked around the room, at the windows, at the corners, at every shadow, and there was nothing, just the room, just the ordinary furniture and the low light an

ARIAThe Council building was not what I expected. I don’t know what I’d imagined, something cold and formal and designed to make you feel small but it was just a building.I stood outside it for a moment before I went in, just standing on the pavement with the morning around me, and I thought about everything I was about to do and whether I was certain. I had to be certain. I pushed through the door.The woman at the front desk looked up and I said Adrian Blackwood’s name and told her I needed to speak to whoever was conducting the meeting and she shot me a very strange look, I looked back at her steadily and waited, after a moment she made a call, said something into the phone I couldn’t hear and told me to take a seat.I didn’t take a seat. I stood in the lobby and looked at the door across from the desk and waited. Four minutes later it opened.A man came out, older, with the symbol of the Council on his jacket, he looked at me with the assessment of someone who was used to bei

ARIAI heard the car at five-fifty. I stood at the window of my room and watched Adrian walk out to it in a suit I hadn’t seen before, dark and precise and Cassian was with him, two others as well, they got in and the car moved down the driveway and I watched it until it was gone.Then I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at my hands. I’d spent the afternoon doing things to occupy my mind, it was the only option available to me, helping Eli with something he was building out of whatever he’d found in the garden, making food neither of us ate very much of, sitting in the sun until the sun moved away, and through all of it the clock had been moving and I’d been aware of it moving and had not said anything about it, to Eli or to anyone else.He’d asked about Adrian once. Where is he?, and I’d said he had things to take care of, and Eli had looked at me with those eyes and then looked away and not asked again, which meant he knew something was happening and had decided to give me the s

ARIAIt started with a rainstorm, by evening the garden was soaked and Eli had been pulled inside and was annoyed about it. He had thrown a little tantrums here and there, kept on complaining about how his little schedule was interrupted.Adrian had stayed. That was the thing I was still adjusting to, the ordinary fact of him being in the house in the evening, not performing a role or enforcing a contract or managing something, just there, in the sitting room while Eli complained about the rain, occasionally offering opinions on Eli’s complaints that were so dry and so perfectly timed that Eli would stop mid-sentence and look at him and then laugh despite himself.I watched it from the doorway and felt the ache that had taken up residence in my chest since yesterday settle into something more complicated, something that wasn’t entirely painful, something that had warmth threading through it that I didn’t know how to separate from the rest.After Eli went to bed, the house went quiet.I

ARIAThe window at the end of the east corridor was cold against my back, and I stood there and counted to ten before I let myself move again. Ten seconds. That was the rule I'd made for myself years ago, back when falling apart wasn't something I could afford to do on anyone else's schedule but my own.I heard him before I saw him. A low laugh, easy, trailing off from some call he'd just finished, and when he came around the corner and found me still standing there his whole face changed, the way it did now, the way it hadn't used to before any of this started."There you are." Then he actually looked at me. "What happened?"I opened my mouth to give him the answer I always gave. Nothing. I'm fine. It sat right there, ready, the way it had been ready for six years. But I thought about the hallway downstairs, about Liana's voice going soft right before the worst of it landed, and something in me just stopped wanting to hold the door shut."I need to tell you something," I said. "Don't