REBORN: THE BEAST LORDS' CONTRACT

The stone floor was cold under Luna's cheek, and she thought, distantly, that it was strange to notice something so small while she was dying. Five husbands. Five vows. She had believed, once, that five men bound to protect her meant five times the safety. She understood now that it had only ever meant five times the blame. "She has to go," Kade said. He wasn't looking at her. He never looked at her anymore, not since the harvest fire, not since he'd decided — with no evidence, only the animal certainty of a wolf who trusted his own gut over his own wife — that she'd let it burn on purpose. "The Pact is failing because of her." "The Pact is failing because you keep bleeding it dry with your paranoia," Sylas said, and even now, even with her blood cooling on the floor between them, his voice carried that same silken amusement, as if her death were simply the latest court intrigue to be enjoyed from a safe distance. Ronan said nothing. Ronan hadn't said anything in months. He stood by the window with his enormous shoulders bowed, and she had loved him — actually loved him, once, more than the others — and even he did not cross the room to help her breathe. Corvin was already gone. He'd left an hour ago to send the letter that would tell House Marrow exactly where to find the weakest point in the Ashwood wards, a betrayal she'd only understand in the final minute of her life, when it was far too late to matter. And Draven — Draven was the one whose claws were still red. He hadn't meant to. She knew that even as her vision blurred, even as the enormous shape of him knelt over her with something like horror finally breaking through the ten years of rage he'd never learned to name. He hadn't meant to. That was the cruelest part. Nobody in this room had ever meant to kill her. They had simply meant everything else — the suspicion, the silence, the slow accumulation of small cruelties — right up until the night one of those cruelties had claws. "Luna." Draven's voice cracked around her name like it was the first time he'd ever really said it. "Luna, look at me. Don't — " "You're the fifth," she whispered. Blood in her throat now, thick and final. "Five blades. I counted every one." She wanted to say more. She wanted to tell them that she had married five monsters and loved at least three of them despite everything, and that dying at their hands felt less like an ending and more like the last page of a story that had been written wrong from the very first line. She wanted to ask why none of them had simply asked her the truth, not once, in ten years. Instead, the room folded into a soft, endless dark, and somewhere in that dark, a voice that was not human and not entirely kind said: You have one more page, Luna Ellery. Don't waste it the way you wasted the last hundred. She didn't understand. She would.