All Chapters of The Unwanted Plus-Size Luna: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The clearing had gone quiet, the last attacker's retreat already swallowed by the trees. Four bodies lay still in the trampled grass. Wren sat down hard on a fallen log, legs finally admitting they'd had enough, and made herself look at the wolves once before she let herself look away."What do we do with them," she asked."Leave them for now. We'll send word back for a burial party once we've reported this." Darius crouched beside the nearest wolf-form body, studying the markings along its shoulder with the same focus he'd given the tracks that morning. "This one's young. Barely past his first shift, from the size of him.""That's grim.""It's meant to tell you something about who sent them, not to feel good." He moved to the second body, checking hands, checking teeth, methodical in a way that told her this wasn't the first time he'd done this kind of accounting. "Black Fang doesn't usually send green wolves on anything that matters. Sending them here, at all five of them, means eit

"I don't know," Wren said, though even as she said it, some instinct in her already suspected that wasn't entirely true. "Darius, maybe. We were close during the fight.""Close doesn't leave a scent this deep." Ilsa didn't step back. If anything she leaned closer, her nostrils flaring again, cataloguing something with the same intensity she'd give an unfamiliar poison. "This isn't proximity. This is something else entirely.""What do you mean, something else?"Ilsa reached for Wren's wrist instead of answering, pressing two fingers against the pulse point, counting silently, her lips moving faintly with numbers Wren couldn't follow."Your pulse is steady. Too steady, given everything that's happened to you today." She released the wrist, stepping back only far enough to study Wren properly, up and down, the way she might study an injury she hadn't decided how serious to treat yet. "Power overflow from a hard fight makes the body erratic for hours afterward. Racing heart, shallow breat

(Darius's POV) Darius remained at the fence long after her footsteps had faded past hearing, running the conversation back through his mind with the same discipline he applied to everything else that mattered. Every word. Every pause. The precise moment her voice had shifted from asking to deciding. She had wanted honesty. He had given it to her, or as close to it as he'd ever managed with anyone. The question was whether honesty had cost him more than he'd accounted for. Four names sat behind his ribs, unspoken tonight the same as every other night. He didn't call it love when he turned the word over privately, not because the feeling hadn't been real, but because he'd never fully trusted himself to name it that cleanly. Care was safer. Care didn't demand the same reckoning that love did when it ended without explanation, four separate times, four separate silences he'd never managed to fill with anything resembling an answer. "Coward," he said quietly, testing the word aloud t

Darius reached the room before the runner had even finished the sentence, shouldering past the doorframe with a force that cracked the wood along one hinge. Ilsa was already on her knees beside Wren, two fingers pressed to her throat, counting a pulse that refused to hold still long enough to measure properly. "Get her onto the bed." He lifted her without waiting for permission, careful despite the speed of it, and laid her against the pillows with a gentleness that looked strange coming from someone built for violence. Wren's back arched slightly, a fresh wave of pain tearing a sound from her throat that neither of them had heard from her before, raw and involuntary. "Darius." "I'm here." Her fingers found his sleeve, gripping hard. "It won't stop. It's not stopping like the others did." He took her hand without asking, wrapping both of his around it, and the change was immediate. The rigid li

Morning arrived through a gap in the curtain, a single stripe of gold crossing the floor and climbing the edge of the bed. Wren woke slowly, aware first of warmth, then of the fact that Darius was exactly where she'd left him the night before, awake, alert, watching the door the way he always did, as if sleep were a small inconvenience he'd simply never found a use for. His hand still rested loosely around hers, unmoved since she'd drifted off.She watched him for a moment before he noticed her watching, something unguarded in his face that vanished the instant he registered she was awake."You stayed," she murmured."You didn't ask me to leave," he replied."I didn't ask you to stay either.”"No. You didn't." He rose from the chair, rolling one shoulder simply out of habit rather than any real stiffness, the motion of a man built for stillness rather than someone recovering from it. "I decided that one on my own, without waiting for