Todos os capítulos de The unloved Luna's one-night mistake : Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

I take the chain off the door with fingers that don't quite work.He steps inside without a word and closes the door behind him with a care I recognize: the way you close a door on a sleeping child. The cottage is small enough that he seems to fill it, his shoulders nearly brushing the low ceiling of the hall, the mist of the night still clinging to his jacket in tiny beads that catch the light of the single lamp I've left burning in the kitchen. He smells of cold air and pine and something faintly smoky, as though he's spent the last several hours walking the boundary of the territory."Is she asleep?" he asks, keeping his voice barely above a whisper."Finally." I pull my robe tighter around myself, suddenly and absurdly aware of my bare feet, my hair coming loose from its braid, the tearstains I know are still drying on my face. "She's a light sleeper. Talk quietly.""I will."I put the kettle on, because my hands need something to do and because my mother, for all her failings, ta

The night before the Council's document deadline, neither of us can sleep, and for once neither of us pretends otherwise.I'm on my porch step at half past eleven, wrapped in the old wool blanket Talia lent me, with the cottage door propped open behind me so I can hear Lyra breathing. The air smells of woodsmoke and wet leaves. A thin white moon hangs above the tree line.I've been sitting here for an hour with a cup of tea gone cold in my hands, running through everything Ostrander wants from me tomorrow, when I hear the gate latch click.I don't need to look up."You should be asleep," I say."So should you."Kael comes up the path slowly, hands in his jacket pockets. He stops at the foot of the step. In the dark, with the moon behind him, I can't read his face at all."I saw your light. I told myself I wouldn't knock.""There's nothing to knock on. I'm outside.""That's a loophole, technically.""I'm told those are the best kind."I shift over on the step, making room, without deci

Guilt, I discover, is a very specific weight.It doesn't press on my chest like grief. It sits low in my stomach and follows me from room to room, and it wears Kael's face.Every morning for a week after the snow, I wake at five with the memory of his hands opening at his sides as I walked out of his office, and I lie there staring at the ceiling, hating myself in three different directions.I hate that I kissed him.I hate that I pulled away.I hate most of all that some cowardly part of me is relieved to have an excuse to be afraid."You're doing the thing again," Lyra informs me over breakfast, spoon halfway to her mouth."What thing, baby?""The thing where you look at your tea like it said something mean."She considers me with grave gray eyes."Is Kael sad?"I nearly drop the teapot."Why would you ask that?""He didn't come to pup day. He always comes. And yesterday he brought me a cookie and he didn't stay to play."Her small brow furrows."Did you have a fight?""No. No fight

It happens on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of buttering toast, and it knocks the breath clean out of me.“Mama.” Lyra swings her feet against the kitchen chair, considering her plate with the serious concentration she gives to all important questions. “Is Kael my new daddy?”The knife stops halfway across the bread.I don't answer right away, because I can't. My mind goes very white and very loud all at once, a dozen things trying to come out of my mouth at the same moment and none of them making it past my teeth.Lyra waits, entirely untroubled by my silence, swinging her feet, waiting for the plain answer a plain question deserves.“What made you ask that, baby?” I manage finally, setting the knife down with great care.“Sophie has a new daddy. Her mama got married again and now Sophie has two daddies, her old one and her new one, and she gets presents from both.”Lyra considers this arrangement with evident approval.“You and Kael hold hands sometimes. And he plays w

The second letter from Ironclaw arrives on a Thursday morning, and this time there is no careful legal language at all.I'm at my desk when Marcus brings it in, and I know from his face before he says a word that whatever is inside this envelope is worse than the first. He sets it down in front of me without comment, and I see immediately that the Ironclaw crest at the top has been altered — the interlocking silver claws I once embroidered onto tablecloths are now crossed over a single drop of red, hand-inked, unmistakably deliberate.I open it with fingers that have gone numb.There is no legal citation this time. No mention of Article Nine, no reference to the Grand Council or the hearing Ostrander has spent two months preparing. There is a single paragraph, typed, unsigned except for the familiar cold slash of Killian's initials at the bottom.The Council moves slowly, and I have grown tired of waiting on it. You have taken what is mine and hidden it behind another man's borders, a