All Chapters of THE TRUE LUNA IS A FATSO! : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Zane's POVI want to be clear about one thing.Crossing into Blackthorn territory without authorization was not my first choice. It was not my second choice. It was the choice that remained after every other option had been examined and found wanting, and I made it with full awareness of what it risked and the specific grim acceptance of a man who understood that the right decision and the comfortable decision were frequently not the same thing.I took four warriors. Bram, because he was the best I had. Reed and Harker, because they moved like shadows and thought like tacticians. And Senna, because she'd proven herself twice in the last twenty four hours and I trusted her judgment in unpredictable situations more than I trusted warriors with three times her experience who had never been tested the way she'd been tested this week.We left before dawn.The border between Silverpeak and Blackthorn territory was marked by a ridge of old stones, placed generations ago when the territorial

Zane's POV I have never run like that in my life. Not in training. Not in any territorial emergency in the eight years I'd been Alpha of Silverpeak. Not in any situation that had previously presented itself as the kind that required everything a person had and then asked for more on top of it. The signal from Joss had reached me when we were twenty two minutes from the packhouse. Four words. *Mark reversing. Come faster.* I looked at Bram. He looked at me. Neither of us said anything because there was nothing to say that running wouldn't say better. We ran. The forest blurred. The border stones passed beneath my feet without registering. The southern packhouse approach, familiar enough that I could have covered it blind, felt like foreign ground because familiar ground didn't move fast enough and I needed everything to move faster. Seventeen minutes from Joss's signal to the packhouse gate. The gate guard had it open before I reached it. Someone had been watching from the wa

Bella's POVNobody moved for a moment after I said it.The room held its breath. The corridor held its breath. Even Joss, who had just spent the last several minutes doing things with her hands that I had no clear memory of but that I understood had been the difference between me being here and not being here, went completely still with her hands still resting on the treatment table.Zane was the first to speak."Tell me," he said.Not what did you see or are you sure or are you alright first. Just tell me. The specific directness of someone who understood that what I was carrying was more urgent than the questions that could wait.I looked down at the heart stone in my hands. Still warm. Still glowing its soft steady light. My grandmother's presence inside it felt like a hand on my shoulder, not pushing, just present. Confirming."When my heart stopped," I said slowly, "I didn't go dark. I went somewhere.""Where?" Wren asked from the doorway."I don't have a name for it," I said. "I

Elder Crest's POVI had called the emergency council session for one reason.We needed to be in the same room at the same time with everything we currently knew laid out between us so that we could stop responding to individual pieces of a situation and start responding to the whole shape of it. Every hour of the last several days had produced new information faster than we'd been able to integrate it and the result was a pack that was reacting well but not yet acting with the kind of coordinated intentionality that the situation demanded.That needed to change tonight.The council chamber felt different now that we knew about the listening stone. Even with the stone still in place, still sending whatever it sent to wherever it sent it, the room carried a new quality. The self-consciousness of a space that knew it was being observed. We'd moved our genuine strategic conversations to Darian's secondary chamber as planned but this session needed to happen here, in the formal council spa

Bella's POVDarian knocked on my door at five in the morning.I was already awake. I'd been awake since three, lying in the dark with the heart stone warm against my chest where I'd taken to resting it while I slept, or tried to sleep, feeling the pulse of it matching my own heartbeat in the way that had become as familiar in the last two days as my own breathing.Three days had become two.I opened the door before he finished knocking.He looked at me, took in the fact that I was already dressed and alert and had clearly been awake for some time, and nodded with the satisfaction of someone whose expectations had been confirmed."Good," he said. "Come."We went to the old east courtyard, the one with the uneven flagstones and the split training post I'd cracked on the first morning we'd worked together. Someone had replaced the post since then. The new one stood in the same spot, same height, same weathered wood, and I looked at it as we entered the courtyard and felt something that m