All Chapters of The Bastard Luna: His Unwanted Mate: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Selene's POVThe custody facility was formal and cold and smelled of institutional cleaning products that did not quite cover what they were covering.I had been here once before, years ago, accompanying my mother on a pack administrative visit. She had walked through it with the efficiency of someone who found all spaces equally manageable. I had thought at the time that this was composure. I understood now it was practice.They brought her into the meeting room at two o'clock.She looked the same. That was the first thing — I had expected something different, some visible mark of what had happened, the tribunal and the charges and three days in custody. There was nothing. Same posture. Same careful arrangement of her face. Same hands folded on the table in the way they always folded, which I had spent twenty-three years reading without understanding what I was reading.She looked at me across the table."Selene." Her voice was warm. Practised warm, the kind I now heard differently t

Elara's POVCalder Vantage was not what I expected.I had built a picture from the background check — mid-fifties, the third Alpha from the founding family bloc, politically measured, the one who had stayed quiet throughout the tribunal rather than joining either faction. Aldric had described him as cautious. Dessa had described him as watchful.What he actually was, when he walked into the Silverpeak-arranged neutral room and looked at me across it, was tired.Not physically. The specific tiredness of someone who has been carrying a private weight through every public room they've ever been in and has decided, finally, to put it down.He shook my hand. "Ms. Ashford." He looked at me for a moment — the same assessment everyone gave me now, the recalibration of someone who had built a picture from coverage and was meeting the actual person. "Thank you for agreeing to meet.""Thank you for calling," I said. "Sit down."He sat. Aldric took the chair to my left. No one else in the room."

Damian's POVSomething was different.I noticed it when she opened the door. Not what she said — she said the same things she always said, let me in, offered tea or coffee, told me Renn had spent the afternoon trying to convince the kitchen chair to move on its own and had not yet accepted that it wouldn't. All the usual. But something in the way she looked at me before she stepped back — a beat too long, something running under the surface of it that hadn't been there the week before.I didn't ask. I went in.Renn was already asleep. Late Thursday start — the assembly ran long, I'd texted to say so, she'd sent back *fine, door's open* and I'd let myself in with the key she'd given me two weeks ago, which we had also not discussed.She made tea. I sat at the table. Normal.Except it wasn't quite."How was the assembly?" she said."Dray is still filing procedural objections. Bret handles them before they reach me now." I looked at the table. "Three founding family statements this week

Elara's POVMara Fenn arrived on a Tuesday with a cardboard box and no warning."I've been meaning to bring this," she said. "I kept finding reasons not to."I stepped back.She came in and put the box on the kitchen table. Renn looked at it from the floor. Looked at Mara Fenn. She sat in the chair she had claimed as hers over months of kitchen sessions and he returned to whatever he had been doing, which was trying to fit a spoon into a cup it was too large for."Tea?" I said."Please."I made it. Set it in front of her. Sat down.She looked at the box."Forty years," she said. "Some of it is mine — the research, the training records, the Ashford lineage documentation I compiled from what Corrin gave me and what I found afterward." She paused. "Some of it is older.""How old?""The oldest piece is from the founding period." She put her hand on the box. Not opening it — just resting her hand on it the way you'd put your hand on something before you handed it over. "Letters between the

Lena's POVThe office smelled like coffee and paper and something that took me three days to identify as the specific quality of a workplace where people actually wanted to be there.I had worked in two places before this. A kitchen in the omega block, which smelled of institutional cleaning products and resentment in equal measure. And a summer stint in a human café when I was seventeen, which smelled of burnt milk and other people's conversations and had been fine but not interesting.This was interesting.Petra gave me the desk by the window on my first day without making a point of it, which meant she had thought about it beforehand. She showed me the filing system — physical and digital, cross-referenced in a way that was meticulous enough to indicate someone with a very specific type of mind had designed it — and then she said: "Elara will explain the compliance division when she gets in at nine. Until then, read the standing contracts in the third folder."She pointed at a fold