บททั้งหมดของ THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS DAUGHTER : บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 57

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Fifty-Three — The Eyes He RememberedDamon POVI treat my own memory the way I'd treat a patient who can't be trusted to say where it hurts. I don't ask it how it feels. I ask what it can prove.For weeks, it has proved very little. Dark hair, loose. A low, careful voice. One sentence about not belonging that hit harder than it should have. A figure in the east corridor carrying something wrapped in dark cloth. I've laid those pieces side by side more times than I can count, and they've told me what a list of symptoms always tells you when you want one diagnosis badly enough: nothing, until something new arrives.I've done what I can with what I have. I stood in front of the whole pack and told my father his decree had no evidence behind it, and I lost. I know exactly how little that counts against what I did to Sophia. It's something. It isn't nearly enough.I take the servants' passage to dinner because it's the only route that

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Fifty-Five — The Pattern She ChoseSophia POVI stop sleeping badly on purpose.It takes me three nights to understand what the men outside my door are actually looking for. They don't care what I do. They care when. A light under the door past the settling bell, footsteps on the stairs at the wrong hour, a servant awake when servants should be asleep. Anything that breaks the pattern gets written down, and anything written down can be read later by someone cleverer than the man holding the pen.So I stop giving them anything to write.Bed at the second bell. Up at the fifth. The same stairs, the same corridor, the same pause at the kitchen door to let the cook's boy through ahead of me. I walk the route of an ordinary girl until it's so ordinary that even I stop noticing it. Boredom is a kind of armor. Nobody reads a ledger that says nothing forty times.Nights are the hardest. I lie still on my back and listen to the wood outsi

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Fifty-Seven — A Step Too CloseSophia POVOn the sixth afternoon, the guards are standing in the wrong place.I see it from the far end of the kitchen garden, basket on my arm, shears in my hand, working down the row of bitter-leaf at exactly the pace I've worked it every day since I began. For five days a single guard has stood at the post by the wall, bent over the little book on its slanted desk while the next man walked up the path to relieve him. Five days of the same few breaths, the same turned back.Today there are two of them, and they're standing at the end of the rosemary row, forty paces closer to me than the post ever was, and neither one is looking at a book.The desk is still there. Nobody's bending over it.I don't stop cutting. I lay a stalk in my basket, take the next one, and let my face stay as plain as the leaf.It's what Lyra taught me, though she'd never claim it. You don't announce what you've noticed. Yo