The Luna Who Wasn't His To Lose

Chapter 5

Something else had noticed I was here.

The thought hadn't finished settling before the stitches on my side pulled tight, unbidden, like a hand closing around them from the inside. I gasped and pressed my palm against the wound. Beneath my fingers, the skin shifted again, knitting itself further without a single thread of Resonance deliberately drawn from me. I hadn't asked it to do that. I hadn't asked it to do anything.

Somewhere below the floor, faint enough that I might have imagined it, something hummed.

I stayed still and listened. The sound came again, so low that I felt it more than heard it. A vibration beneath the stone, steady and almost rhythmic. I lifted my hand from my side and waited, but the sensation faded before I could decide whether it had been real.

Kade came back within the hour, his boots loud against the stone. He carried a folded paper in one hand but didn't offer it to me immediately. He looked different from when he'd left, not visibly shaken, but more guarded, as though whatever he'd found in those records had given him another reason to be careful around me.

“The marking's been seen before,” he said.

I looked at the paper.

“Not often. Twice in my lifetime. Both times before an attack, and both times followed by people disappearing from the eastern border. My father's records call it a warning sign. Nobody ever worked out what it was a warning for.”

“Disappearing?”

“People. Sometimes entire families.”

The answer settled heavily between us.

“They weren't trying to kill me,” I said. I'd been turning it over since the fight, and now the pieces finally settled into words. “If they wanted me dead, they had three against one and I was already bleeding. They wanted me alive. Contained. Somewhere specific.”

Kade's jaw worked once, but he didn't argue. That bothered me more than an argument would have. A man like him didn't seem like someone who surrendered a point easily, which meant he'd probably reached the same conclusion before I said it.

“Why me?” I asked, half to him and half to the empty air.

“I don't know.”

I believed him. It was the uncertainty in his voice that made me trust the rest of what he'd told me. He wasn't trying to give me an answer simply because silence made people uncomfortable.

I thought of the vellum, folded small in my coat where I'd left it.

If it resists you, it is not gone. It only sleeps, same as mine did, until it was needed.

“My mother,” I said slowly, “might have had something like this. Whatever this is. She never told me. She never told anyone, as far as I know.”

Something moved behind Kade's eyes, quick and unwilling, the look of a man recognizing a shape in the dark before he wanted to.

“What did she call it?” he asked.

“She didn't call it anything. She just wrote that it slept. Until it was needed.”

He didn't answer immediately. His gaze dropped to the folded paper in his hand, then returned to me.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That wasn't a nothing face.”

One corner of his mouth almost moved, but the expression disappeared before it became a smile.

“I don't know enough yet.”

That answer was becoming familiar. He looked like a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the sum of. I had the distinct impression that whatever he was adding together, I was one of the numbers.

I should have felt relief at not being alone in this. I didn't. I felt the opposite, a cold drop settling low in my stomach that had nothing to do with the child and everything to do with it at once. If whatever hunted me had wanted my mother too, and my mother was gone, that left only one person carrying whatever this was forward. Two, if you counted the one who hadn't been born yet.

Hiding the pregnancy from the Voss family had felt, until tonight, like the whole of the danger. Now it felt like half of it.

“If they find out I'm carrying,” I said, “does that change what they want from me?”

“I don't know that either.”

He said it plainly, with no comfort offered, which I found I trusted more than comfort would have.

“But I won't let it. Whatever it turns out to be.”

Not mine to protect. Not I claim you. Just a flat statement of intent, and something in my chest reacted to it anyway, a warmth I hadn't asked for and didn't want. The same pull from the border road returned the moment he stood close enough.

I stepped back, and he noticed. Neither of us mentioned it. Instead, his eyes dropped to the hand I'd pressed against my side.

“How long has it been doing that?”

“What?”

“Healing.”

I looked down. The edge of the wound was almost completely closed.

“I don't know.”

“That isn't normal.”

“I know.”

His expression tightened.

“Neither is what happened when you touched me,” I said.

His eyes lifted to mine.

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Then the floor hummed again.

This time it was louder.

Kade's head turned toward the corridor before I'd even finished registering the sound as real. He took one step toward the door.

“That's not the wind,” he said.

“No.”

The vibration came again, travelling through the stone beneath our feet.

Kade opened the door, and we followed it down two flights of stone stairs I hadn't known existed, into a corridor that smelled of cold and old iron. The farther we went, the stronger the humming became. It wasn't loud, but there was something unsettling about its consistency, as if whatever made the sound had been waiting for someone to come close enough to hear it.

At the end of the corridor stood a door set directly into the rock.

It looked as though it hadn't been opened in a generation.

“It wasn't there before,” I said.

“It was.”

Kade ran his fingers over the stone beside the frame. “I've walked this corridor hundreds of times. I knew the door was here. I just never knew it could open.”

“It wasn't open yesterday.”

“No.”

We stood before it, listening.

The door wasn't locked. It didn't need to be. Whatever had sealed it wasn't a mechanism I recognized. A thin seam of pale light had appeared along the frame, the door cracked open by no more than an inch.

I looked at Kade.

He pushed it.

The door moved without resistance.

Inside was a small stone chamber lined with shelves gone soft with age. Dust coated almost everything, disturbed only by the narrow path of light falling through the doorway. On the far wall, carved deep into the rock itself, were the same three curved lines meeting at a point.

The same symbol.

My stomach tightened.

“This has never opened,” Kade said quietly. “Not in my father's time. Not in mine.”

“Then why now?”

He looked at me.

Neither of us had an answer.

I crossed to the shelf beneath the carving. Most of the records had deteriorated so badly that their covers came apart when I touched them. Then I saw one leather-bound record sitting alone near the back, untouched by whatever dust coated everything else.

It looked less forgotten than preserved.

As if it had been waiting.

I reached for it.

Kade didn't stop me.

The cover was cold beneath my fingers. When I opened it, the leather creaked softly and the faint smell of old paper rose from the pages.

Names. Dates. A column of short notations written in an old, careful script. Most of them meant nothing to me. Names of people I'd never heard of and places I couldn't identify.

Then one entry near the middle caught my attention.

It was ringed in the same faded ink as the symbol above it.

I leaned closer.

A description of a healer's mark.

My breath caught.

I read it once.

Then again.

Every detail matched the way my Resonance had always worked. The sensation of heat beneath my skin. The way a wound responded when I focused on it. The strange difference between healing another person and healing myself. Even the warning attached to it, written in a hand that had clearly been copied from an older record.

The mark may remain dormant until awakened.

My fingers tightened around the page.

“What's wrong?” Kade asked.

I couldn't answer immediately.

I read the name beside the description twice before I let myself believe it.

It was my mother's.

I stared at the page until the letters blurred.

My mother had never told me. Not about the mark. Not about the symbol. Not about whatever had apparently been waiting beneath the surface of my own body for years.

And suddenly the line she'd written on the vellum made sense in a way I hadn't wanted it to.

If it resists you, it is not gone. It only sleeps, same as mine did, until it was needed.

My hand began to shake.

Kade stepped closer, but he didn't touch me.

“What does it say?”

I looked up at him.

For the first time since I'd entered his keep, I didn't have an answer I could hide behind.

“It says my mother had it.”

The humming beneath the floor stopped.

The silence that followed was somehow worse.

Because whatever had awakened in me hadn't simply noticed that I was here.

It had been waiting for me.