All Chapters of The discarded Luna rises: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Chapter 22The Password Was Her BirthdayThe dining room of the Silver Moon private residence is exactly as I remember it.Same long table, dark wood polished to a mirror shine, grain so deep I used to be able to see my own reflection in it during the long silent dinners of a marriage already dying before I ever understood what was killing it. Same heavy chairs, carved at the backs with the Silver Moon crest, the wood worn smooth at the armrests from decades of hands that came before mine and will come after. Same surface where, in another life, a glass of milk once sat in front of me, steam curling off the top while a small, careful boy watched to see if I'd drink it, his eyes doing exactly what he'd been taught to do, waiting on an answer he'd been coached to want.I take the seat I was once given as wife, the chair pulled out for me by a servant who doesn't know any better, who has no idea this room once watched me die slowly over the course of four years before the hospital bed fi

Chapter 24The Coldest Thing He's Ever DoneMorning finds me still in the Silver Chamber, having never actually slept, the hours since the ambush blurring into one long, unbroken stretch of concentration I haven't let myself step back from. The drive containing the final missing data sequences sits open in front of me, every ratio I've chased since the night I woke up a year in the past finally complete under my own hands, laid out clean and whole for the first time in either life I've lived. The real work begins today. I enter full lockdown and start the last stage of synthesis before the sun has even fully cleared the trees outside, lamps turned up brighter than usual against the fatigue sitting heavy behind my eyes.Kael doesn't come to the adjoining suite. He doesn't appear in the kitchen. He doesn't acknowledge my existence when our paths cross in the upper corridor on my way out to the car, not even a glance, not even the flicker of gold I've grown almost accustomed to catching

Chapter 26The Sound of BreakingI wasn't there.I need that understood before I tell you any of it, because what happened inside the Silver Moon residence that night has a way of making me feel I was. Ines gave it to me later, in pieces, in a voice with no air in it. Micah gave me the rest, the flat, careful way children report the worst things. And the study itself gave me the remainder, the day I finally stood in the wreckage with my own two eyes.So I'll tell it the way it lives in me. As if I'd been standing in the corner, unable to look away.* * *Night had fully claimed the house.Down the east wing, behind the study, the private laboratory was lit by nothing but the harsh overhead fluorescents, white and merciless, the kind of light that makes everything look like evidence. Papers lay scattered across the floor in drifts. Glass glittered in the gaps between them.Adrian stood in the middle of it.His chest heaved. His tie was gone. His eyes were wide and unfocused, the whites

Chapter 28Only TodayThe clock on my nightstand said 2:17.I'd watched it turn over from 2:16, a small red click in the dark, and I had hated it. In the morning I would take a syringe in my own hands and push the second dose into my father's veins.The first drop had bought him time. That was all it was. A few borrowed hours, a few steadier lines on a screen. The second dose would decide what that time became. A future, or a final delay.I had been staring at the ceiling for hours. I knew every hairline crack in the plaster. The knowledge sat on my chest like a stone slab, and with each breath I had to lift it.I turned onto my side. Onto my stomach. I pressed my face into the pillow and breathed in clean cotton and my own fear.Exhaustion had been dragging at my bones for days, and it still couldn't win. Fear was louder.I gave up.I threw the blankets back and pulled a thin robe over my shoulders. The floorboards were cold under my bare feet. I stepped into the dark corridor and di

Chapter 30Do You Trust MeThey were close enough now that I could hear their boots.Not the gunfire. Under it. A measured, unhurried crunch of heavy soles on broken glass, getting nearer with every heartbeat, the sound of men who knew the fight was already won and were only walking the last of it.Gunfire hammered on without a break. It came from every angle, a wall of noise that had stopped being sound and become pressure, a hand pressing on my chest. Beside the car, one of my last remaining men slammed back against the door and slid down it, his mouth open, his eyes surprised. Blood bloomed across his chest, spreading through his shirt in a slow dark flower. He looked at me through the broken window.He tried to say something.Then he didn't.I held the case.It was locked against my body, the strap cutting into my shoulder, the corner grinding my ribs. Cold seeped through my jacket from the steel. It was the only cold thing in the world. Everything else was heat, smoke, hot brass,