All Chapters of CHASING HIS DEAD LUNA: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

ARIA’S POVI read the message twice. The words didn’t change the second time, they just settled deeper, and I stood there in the stairwell with Adrian’s phone screen still angled toward me and felt something go very cold and very clear in my chest, the specific clarity that comes when you’ve been waiting for the next thing and it has finally arrived.“She’s moving fast,” I said.“She’s moving now,” Adrian said, and he was already typing back to Cassian, his jaw tight, the warmth from thirty seconds ago completely gone. “Which means she called her family’s counsel before my father even left this house.”“She probably called them while he was still on the stairs,” I said. He looked at me, and something in his face acknowledged that, the specific way it acknowledged things he didn’t want to be true but couldn’t argue with.“She can’t remove you,” he said. “The contract predates her household authority, legally she has no standing to—”“Adrian.” I kept my voice even. “We both know that le

ARIAHe stayed for an hour. He didn’t talk much, and I didn’t push him to, because I understood, better than most, what it felt like to be handed something enormous and need time to just hold it before you could do anything else with it, so we sat in the silence of my room with the morning doing its thing outside the window and I let him have the silence.When he finally stood to leave, he looked at me for a long moment, the way he looked at me when he was past performing, when he’d run out of energy for anything except the actual thing, and he said, “Don’t tell him yet. I want to be there.”“Okay,” I said.“And don’t tell Jason,” he said, and there was something in his voice when he said it, not anger exactly, just the rawness of a man who was working out where to put a lot of complicated emotions and hadn’t finished yet. “Not until I’ve had time to—” he stopped.“Just not yet”“Okay,” I said again.He left, and I sat on the edge of my bed in the quiet he’d left behind, and I thoug

ARIAI didn’t sleep again, which was becoming something of a pattern. I laid in the dark and thought about what he said, stop being slow about it , the way he’d said it, quiet and certain, I thought about what slow had looked like, the careful underground thing he’d been building for weeks, the lawyers and the document and all the patient work that Aaron had apparently watched from a distance and then neatly buried with a staged death, I thought about what faster looked like and whether faster was safe and whether safe was even the right thing to be reaching for anymore.Eli coughed once down the corridor, just once, and my body was half out of bed before it didn’t happen again, before the silence came back and told me it was nothing, and I lay back down and pressed my hand flat against my own sternum and told myself to breathe, which I did, but not particularly well.The thing about living inside a situation like this one was that the fear never fully left, it just found different s

LIANAI heard them in the garden. I wasn’t trying to, I’d come downstairs for water and the kitchen window was open and his laugh carried through it, and I stood there with my hand on the tap and listened to that laugh and felt something in my chest that I didn’t have a name for yet, something that wasn’t grief exactly but lived in the same context.I’d heard Adrian laugh before, of course I had, at dinners and events and the carefully arranged evenings my father had orchestrated over the years, but it had always been the performance of a laugh, the social thing, the sound you make when you’re in a room full of people who expect you to be human, and this was not that, this was the real one, unguarded and sudden, and it was coming from a man standing in a garden with a woman and her son and looking like someone who had just remembered something he’d forgotten about himself.I didn’t watch for long. I got my water and went back upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed in the room that ha

LIANAAaron’s message sat on my phone all morning and I didn’t go to see him.I told myself it was because I had things to do, which was partly true, and because I needed to think first, which was entirely true, and because walking into a room with Aaron Blackwood when he said he had something important to tell you was the kind of thing you did carefully or not at all.I went for a walk instead. The estate grounds were large enough that you could walk for twenty minutes without seeing the house if you took the right path, and I took that path now, my hands were in my jacket pockets and I thought about my father and the counsel and the filing and all the plans I’d set in motion over the last week.I thought about whether any of it had actually been for me or whether it had just been what was expected of me. That was the question I kept coming back to and kept not finishing.I’d wanted this marriage. Adrian was supposed to be the solution to all of it. He was supposed to be my saving gr