บททั้งหมดของ HIS FATHER'S LUNA: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

The riders returned on the fourth day, just past sunset, and Emma was already standing at the palace gates before Naya could finish telling her the carriage had been spotted on the road.She'd barely slept in four days. She'd counted every hour by the position of the sun through her window, by the careful, measured updates Jasper's messengers brought back from the road. The carriage made good time through the eastern pass. Your Majesty, they should arrive by evening. She'd told herself, over and over, that she would be calm when this moment finally came. She would be composed, careful, every inch the Queen she'd spent weeks learning to become.She had not once, in four days of waiting, allowed herself to think seriously about what it might mean to see her father again. She'd

Emma spent the morning at her mother's bedside, watching the color slowly return to Helen's face, watching her breathe easier with every hour that passed. The physicians seemed genuinely pleased, careful optimism replacing the grim caution of the night before, and Emma let herself hold onto that small mercy even while the rest of her mind kept circling back to a war room and the conversation she had with Jasper. She'd expected many things from Jasper last night. Coldness. Dismissal. Another flat, practical explanation that left her exactly as confused as before. She hadn't expected honesty, raw and unpolished, admitting he didn't understand his own fury any better than she understood it herself.It should have comforted her. Instead, it had kept her awake half the night, turning the admission over like a stone she couldn't quite find the underside of."You're doing that thing again," Helen said weakly from the bed, her voice stronger than it had been in days. "Frowning at nothing. Em

Emma waited until the palace had gone fully quiet before she pulled the floorboard free.The journal sat exactly where she'd left it, wrapped in the old scarf, untouched. She carried it to the window seat and sat with it in her lap for a long moment before she opened it, the way she always did now, some part of her still half-expecting to find the words changed, or gone, or revealed as something she'd imagined entirely during a week when grief had made everything feel unstable.They hadn't changed. They were exactly as damning as she remembered.Victor smiles too easily for a man carrying the burdens he claims to carry.Lucien knows more than he has ever admitted.Emma read them again, slowly, the way she'd read them perhaps forty times by now, hoping some new meaning might surface if she looked hard enough at words she'd already memorized.None did. That was the trouble with two names and nothing else. She had suspicion without direction, accusation without evidence, the certainty th

Emma hadn't seen her father in six days. She'd timed her visits to Helen carefully around that fact, coming early in the morning when she knew Richard preferred the afternoons, leaving before the hour he usually arrived.She hadn't decided if that was cowardice or simply self-preservation. Maybe both. Today she'd lost track of time.Helen was asleep when Emma arrived. Emma stood in the doorway a second too long before she noticed the second chair.Her father was in it. He hadn't shaved. A book lay in his lap, open to a page he clearly wasn't reading, his eyes on Helen's face, the same way they used to be when Emma was small, had a fever, and he'd sit up all night pretending he wasn't scared.He looked up. Neither of them said anything.It's strange how many things a person can think in three seconds of silence. Emma thought about leaving. She thought about the disownment papers, which she still hadn't burned, which were folded in the bottom of a trunk she hadn't opened in months becau

Emma didn't go straight back to her chambers. She walked the long way, out through the east garden, because she needed a few minutes where nobody could look at her and ask what was wrong, because nothing was wrong, not really, and she didn't trust her own face to make that clear.Her father's hand had felt strange in hers. Warm. Bigger than she remembered, even though he hadn't grown. She had just been small the last time she'd held it and meant it.She sat on the low wall by the fountain and let herself just breathe for a minute. The water made its small, stupid, endless noise. Somewhere a bird was doing something loud and pointless in the hedges. Ordinary sounds. She'd forgotten how much she needed ordinary sounds lately.He's here. He's actually here, and he cried, and I let him hold my hand.She kept turning it over like a stone in her pocket, testing the edges, waiting for it to cut her the way everything else in this palace eventually did. It didn't. It just sat there, warm, a s