All Chapters of Second Chance for the Discarded Luna : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Nessa's Pov I hadn't slept properly since the night I lied.I told myself it would fade, the way most guilt does if you give it enough time and enough distraction. It hadn't. If anything it had gotten worse, sitting heavier in my chest with every day that passed since I watched them drag Elena out of that healer's room and lock her out of the only home she'd built with her own two hands for three years. I still saw her face sometimes when I closed my eyes. Not angry. That would have been easier to carry. Just quietly, devastatingly betrayed.I hadn't wanted to lie. I needed that to be true, needed it the way I needed my next breath, because the alternative was admitting I'd simply been too afraid to do anything else.Lyra had found me two nights before it happened, cornered me in the linen store room where no one else could hear, and told me very plainly what would happen to my younger brother's position in the pack if I didn't say exactly what she needed me to say when the moment ca

Four days into simply resting, I understood exactly why Doran had once told me I'd wear a path in the floor if anyone let me.I loved my garden. I loved the quiet mornings with my father and the slower rebuilding of everything I'd lost inside myself since Blackthorn. But there was only so much idle rest a person could take before the mind started circling the same worries over and over with nothing else to occupy it, and mine had begun circling dangerously close to memories I didn't want to sit with all day."You look like you're about to climb the walls," Kellan observed over breakfast, watching me push the same piece of bread around my plate without actually eating it."I need something to do," I admitted. "Something useful. I can't train the way I used to, not now, and I refuse to spend the next several months simply waiting for my body to finish what it's doing while my mind slowly unravels from boredom."He considered this for a moment, then set down his cup with the particular l

The trade office grew busier as the week wore on, merchant caravans arriving ahead of the coming season, and by Wednesday I found myself buried in correspondence that left little room for Petra's simmering suspicion or my own quiet nerves about the days still counting down toward the court gathering. I was grateful for the distraction, honestly. Work had always been easier to sit inside than my own thoughts."We've a delegation arriving this afternoon," Corin announced, moving through the office with the particular brisk energy he took on whenever something important was coming. "Border patrol, requesting supply allotments for the coming month. I need someone who can handle the figures quickly and accurately while I deal with the formalities. Elena, you're with me."I looked up, surprised at being singled out over Petra, who I could feel bristling from her desk without even needing to look at her directly. "Of course."The delegation arrived an hour later, a handful of Ravenspire warr

Marcus's point of viewThe pack felt different without her in it.I told myself that would pass. Told myself a Luna was replaceable, that Blackthorn had survived worse losses than one wife who couldn't give me an heir, and that Lyra's pregnancy was proof enough that I'd made the right decision, whatever the cost. I'd told myself a great many things over the past weeks. Most of them were starting to feel thinner every time I repeated them."You're distracted," Finn said, dropping into the chair across from my desk without waiting for permission, which was exactly the kind of thing I'd started appreciating about him since I'd pulled him up to second beta. Damon never would have said something so directly. Damon had a way of circling a concern three times before landing anywhere near it, and lately he seemed to circle without ever landing at all."I have a pack to run," I said, not looking up from the reports scattered across my desk, half of which I'd been staring at for the better part

One day.I stood in front of the mirror in my chambers that evening while Camille adjusted the last pins along the hem of the midnight blue gown, silver thread catching the candlelight every time I shifted my weight. Tomorrow I would walk into Ravenspire's full court as Princess Elena, and the trade office, Petra's growing friendship, Corin's steady trust, the warrior whose name I still didn't know, all of it would exist afterward under an entirely different light."You're not going to disappear," Camille said, apparently reading something in my expression as she worked. "Whatever changes tomorrow, you're still going to be the same woman who's spent two weeks proving herself in that trade office. A title doesn't erase two weeks of honest work.""I know that," I said, though some anxious part of me wasn't entirely convinced. "I suppose I'm more worried about how everyone else will see it. Petra especially. She only just started trusting me for who I actually am, not who she assumed I w