Rebirth and Revenge:Lycan King’s Feisty Luna のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

[Eileen’s POV]Alaric came to my door well past midnight, the same restless hour he’d come on the first week of our marriage, except this time he didn’t wait for a servant to announce him.He just stood there when I opened it, still dressed from whatever meeting had kept him occupied all evening, looking like a man who’d walked the length of the palace deciding what to say and hadn’t landed on anything by the time he arrived.I almost didn’t let him in. Two days of silence between us had built its own kind of wall, one I wasn’t entirely sure either of us knew how to climb back over. Curiosity won out over pride, in the end. It usually did, with him.“It’s late,” I said.“I know,” he replied. “Is something wrong?” I asked. “Yes.” He didn’t move to come in. “No. I don’t know anymore, Eileen. That’s rather the problem.”He looked past me into the room, hesitant in a way that didn’t suit him at all, this man who’d once killed an intruder with his bare hands without so much as a flicker

[Eileen’s POV]The door hit the wall hard enough to knock the painting beside it crooked, and Alaric was across the room before I’d even pushed off the edge of the bed.I hadn’t undressed. Hadn’t blown out the candle either, some stubborn part of me was certain he’d come back tonight even after a guard had dragged him away mid-sentence.“Alaric…”He didn’t let me finish. Both hands found my face before I’d gotten his name all the way out, like he needed to touch me to believe I was actually still standing there.“Kade wants Lumi.” His voice came out wrecked, none of the careful control he usually kept wrapped around every word he gave me. “Not you. Never you. I wasted two days on nothing, Eileen. Two whole days deciding my own brother wanted my wife, and the entire time it was written all over his face and I was too much of a coward to just ask him.”“I noticed the two days.”“I know you did.” His thumb dragged along my jaw, rough, unsteady, like he hadn’t fully decided whether he tru

[Kade’s POV]My feet took me to the old wing before the rest of me caught up to where I was going.I hadn’t set foot in that hallway since I got back. Three weeks in this palace and I’d found a hundred reasons to walk the long way around it, and now here I was at midnight, knuckles still aching from how hard I’d had them fisted in that gallery, standing in front of a door I used to know better than my own name.It wasn’t locked.Light spilled out from under it, thin and gold, and for one stupid second my chest did something painful before I remembered I wasn’t the only one with a key.I pushed it open and found Alaric on the floor, back against my old bed frame, a bottle of our father’s whiskey open beside him, half gone, a small carved wolf turning over and over between his fingers.He looked up, neither of us said anything for a long moment.“You come here a lot?” I finally asked.“Enough.” He didn’t look ashamed of it, which somehow made it worse. “Every year on the day the letter

[Selena’s POV] Four ruined pages already sat crumpled on the floor by the time I got the fifth one right, one of them torn clean through where I’d pressed the pen too hard trying to force the wrong sentence into working. The inn’s one candle had burned crooked, dripping wax onto the table faster than any candle had a right to, and my knuckles were stained with ink from crossing out the same opening line three separate times. Dear Lucian looked wrong. So did the version where I’d tried nothing at all, just his name and a blank space under it like I expected him to fill in the rest himself. The room smelled like tallow and someone else’s stale ale, nothing like the rosewater and cedar I’d trained myself to keep burning in my chambers for three straight years, and my hands were still raw from the reins. I picked the pen back up and didn’t let myself stop this time. Three hours on a borrowed horse had left my thighs raw and my temper worse, and every time I closed my eyes I saw the

[Alaric’s POV]The doors were still swinging on their hinges when I got through them, and the first thing I saw was Eileen standing close enough to Selena that I could have crossed the gap in a single stride if either of them had needed me to.Too close. Fists curled white at her sides. A voice coming out of my own wife that I barely recognized, low and even and somehow more dangerous than shouting would have been.“…and I would sleep perfectly fine afterward.”“Is that a threat, my Luna?”“It’s a promise.”I crossed the hall fast enough that both of them turned. Selena’s composure snapped back into place the second she saw me, that same careful mask she’d worn walking through the doors an hour earlier, but Eileen’s didn’t. Eileen looked at me like she’d just remembered how to breathe.“Selena.” My voice came out flat, final, the tone I usually saved for enemies rather than women who’d once shared my table. “Chambers. Now. You’ll give your explanation to the full council in the mornin