All Chapters of The Luna They Erased: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"I'm not fidgeting.""You're breathing too much.""Mother, that's generally encouraged."She gave me the look that had terrified me as a child and made me laugh as an adult, and I felt my shoulders loosen a little.Then I made the mistake of looking around the hall.Every face was turned toward the altar. Pack Alphas and their Lunas. Elders with silver in their beards. Children perched on their fathers' shoulders for a better view. The archivists from my department, crammed together in a back row, grinning and waving at me like idiots. Old Master Halloran, who had taught me to read Old Northern, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief.And near the eastern pillars, apart from everyone, was a man I didn't recognize.He wore the black of the High King's royal guard, a heavy fur cloak thrown over his shoulders and pinned with a gold wolf's-head brooch, but none of the silks or jewels the pack wolves favored. He was tall and broad, his dark hair falling in loose, untidy waves, his jaw shadow

The hall seemed to fall away around me."What?"My mother pressed a trembling hand over her mouth. Tears stood in her eyes, real ones, the kind I had heard through closed doors on those nights when she said she didn't know why she was crying."How could you know about her? Who told you about my girl?""I didn't die," I said. "I'm standing right here. I'm right here."Her face twisted, grief and fury fighting for the same space. "My daughter is dead. I buried her. I buried her."Daniel pulled her down a step and put himself between us."Mother, don't listen to her."He looked up at me, and he wasn't confused anymore. He was furious, with the cold kind of fury he had inherited from her. As though I had walked into his home and deliberately torn open an old wound.A wound that, until tonight, had never existed.Run, Mira, Lyra whimpered.I couldn't move.My mother remembered having a daughter. She remembered losing her. She remembered a grave.But she didn't remember raising me. Twenty y

Mira's POVI took his hand.I don't know why. Perhaps because there was no one else left in the world to take it. Perhaps because Lyra had already bowed, and some part of me trusted her more than I trusted myself.Elias didn't run for the main doors. He crossed to the wall beneath his own portrait, pressed his palm flat against the carved wooden panel below the frame, and pushed.The panel swung inward.I had catalogued this hall a dozen times. I had measured its windows and recorded the condition of every frame. I had never known that door was there."After you," he said.Behind us, torchlight flooded the bottom of the staircase. I ducked through the opening. Elias followed and drew the panel shut, and the dark closed over us like water.We were in a narrow chamber, barely larger than a wardrobe. It smelled of dust and old wax. As my eyes adjusted, I made out shelves along the walls, crowded with small wooden boxes, and a single slit of moonlight high in the far wall."The old Seal R

It was a simple question. But his voice had changed again, gone low and rough at the edges, and my pulse stumbled.I nodded.He released me at once and stepped back, and the cold rushed in where he had been."There's a drop beneath that stone," he said, all business again. "Stay to the left."I edged past the gap, furious with myself.Two hours ago, the man I loved had torn our bond out of my chest in front of seven packs. I had no business noticing another man's hands. Least of all a man who wore the uniform of the people hunting me, and who had told me to my face that he intended to drag me to the capital as his prisoner.But when Kael moved past me to check the floor ahead, I caught myself watching him.The breadth of his shoulders, filling the narrow tunnel. The quiet, controlled way he moved, as though his body had been trained out of making any unnecessary sound.And beneath the torn collar of his uniform, at the base of his throat, a dark mark on his skin.Not a scar. A brand.

Mira's POV"Say something."My voice came out thin and strange, as if it belonged to someone else.Elias Blackmoor stood on the far side of the stone table, the lantern throwing his shadow huge across the broken walls. He looked at the register. He looked at me. He did not speak."Tell me it's a mistake," I whispered. "Tell me someone stole your seal. Tell me it was forged. Tell me anything."His silence was the only answer he gave.I laughed. It was a horrible sound, cracked and hollow, and it echoed off the stones."Of course," I said. "Of course it was you.""Mira—""Don't." I stepped back from the table. "Don't say my name like you have the right to it."Beside me, Kael shifted his weight. I barely noticed. I couldn't look away from the dead king."You stood in that hall and told me someone wanted to destroy my life. You showed me my name in your little black book. You took my hand." My voice shook. "You let me believe you were saving me.""I am trying to save you.""Then why is y