All Chapters of The Substitute Luna’s Revenge: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Kenna’s POVI locked my door twice before I trusted it to stay shut.The pendant sat cold in my palm when I finally took it out, smaller than I remembered from the temple steps, its silver worn smooth in places like it had passed through a hundred hands before mine. I turned it toward the candlelight, tilting it in every direction, willing it to explain itself.“What are you,” I whispered, as if it might actually answer.It didn’t. It was just metal, a crescent shape wrapped in a symbol I didn’t recognize, three lines cutting through its center. No warmth. No light. Nothing but the weight of a dying man’s last request pressed into my hand.Keep it hidden. It’s the only thing that can lead you to the truth.Maybe he’d been delirious. Maybe a man bleeding out on temple stone said whatever his mind reached for, and none of it meant anything at all. I wanted to believe that. It would have been so much easier than the alternative.I nearly missed the inscription along the edge, a line of

Kenna’s POVI read the note so many times the words stopped looking like words at all, just shapes bleeding into each other in the candlelight.When the moon bleeds, go home… before they find you first.Home. I turned the word over until it went strange in my head, the way any word does if you stare at it too long. Babcock was the only place I had ever slept, ever eaten, ever learned the sound of my own footsteps in a hallway. And it had never once, not for a single day, felt like anything I could call home.My mother died before I was old enough to remember her voice. My father looked through me like glass. Every room I had ever lived in belonged to someone else first, a nursery meant for a legitimate daughter, a servant’s cot beneath the laundry racks, now Luna's chambers still hung with another woman’s portrait. If there was a home waiting for me somewhere, it had never once been here.Which meant somewhere, buried under twenty-three years of silence, there had to be an answer to

Kenna’s POVI knew where I stood the moment I saw the seating chart.Jenna’s name sat beside Jace’s, exactly where it had rested before the wedding ever happened, as if the four months in between had simply been folded up and tucked away. Mine had been moved three seats down, past two nobles I barely knew, close enough to overhear the head table but far enough to make certain I was never mistaken for belonging to it.Nobody explained the change. Nobody needed to. To everyone in that hall, this wasn’t a demotion. It was simply things returning to their rightful shape.“You must be so relieved,” one of the noblewomen said to Jenna, leaning across the table with her hand pressed to her chest. “After everything you survived. I can’t imagine the horror of it.”“The Goddess kept me safe,” Jenna said softly, lowering her eyes in a way that made the whole table lean in closer. “I only wish I could have spared everyone else the worry. Especially Kenna.” She glanced my way, warm and grateful.

Jace’s POVI waited until the guards’ footsteps faded completely before I asked again.“Kenna.” I kept my voice level, though it cost me more than I wanted to admit. “You left the estate alone, in the middle of the night, after everything that’s happened this week. I want to know why.”She didn’t answer right away. Her eyes stayed fixed somewhere just past my shoulder, and I watched her build the answer before she spoke it, the way a person does when they’re deciding how much truth to hand over.“I went to visit my mother’s grave,” she said finally. “That’s all.”“At midnight. Alone. Without telling anyone.”“I didn’t think anyone would notice if I asked permission.” Her voice had an edge under the exhaustion. “And I didn’t think you’d grant it if I did.”“You’d have been right.” I studied her face, pale, drawn tight, the kind of tired that came from more than one sleepless night. Whatever had happened in that cemetery, it had cost her something. “That’s not the whole reason, though.”

Jace’s POVI took the scroll from Callum’s hands before he’d even finished catching his breath. “Everyone but Kenna and the priest, out.”The room emptied fast enough that I barely registered who left. Kenna stood across the table, her eyes locked on the fragile parchment as I unrolled it with more care than I’d handled anything in weeks.Time hadn’t been gentle to it. Most of the ink had faded to a ghost of itself, but enough survived to read clearly. A female child, born twenty-three years ago inside the Alpha estate. The mother’s name written plainly, unmistakably, in careful script.Where the father’s name should have been, someone had taken a blade to the parchment and scraped it away until nothing remained but a raw, pale gouge in the paper.“That’s not damage,” I said, running my thumb near the edge of the tear without touching it. “That’s deliberate.”“There’s something else, Alpha.” Callum leaned closer, pointing to the bottom corner. “The seal.”I looked. He was right to fl