REBORN: THE BEAST LORDS' CONTRACT

CHAPTER 9 — Six Days

The city of Veyth spent the six days before the Pilgrimage the way it spent every major Crown announcement — with festivals, wagers, and an unseemly amount of public speculation about the bride who'd refused her vows at the altar. Luna spent them differently.

She spent them training.

"You want to what," Iris said, on the first morning, watching Luna drag a practice blade out of a dust-covered trunk that had belonged to her late brother.

"Learn to use this properly," Luna said. "I have six days and a journey through the most dangerous stretch of wilderness in the kingdom ahead of me, and last time I did this, I spent every one of those seven days being protected by men who eventually turned around and used the same strength against me. I'd like an option that doesn't depend on any of them."

She was terrible at it, at first — her body remembered nothing of the sword drills her brother had once shown her as a girl, and her arms ached for two full days before anything resembling technique began to emerge. But she kept at it with a grim, unglamorous discipline that had nothing to do with destiny or magic and everything to do with a woman who had decided, once and for all, that she would rather be exhausted and capable than beautiful and helpless.

The husbands noticed, each in his own way.

Kade found her in the training yard on the third morning and said nothing for a long while, simply watched her drill footwork with an intensity that made her skin prickle, until finally: "Your stance is wrong. You'll break your wrist the first time you actually connect with something." He didn't offer to fix it. He simply stood there, arms crossed, until she asked him to show her — and when she did, he corrected her grip with a careful, almost reverent precision that had nothing in common with the possessive grip she remembered from her first life, and she filed that difference away too, alongside everything else.

Ronan brought her water on the fourth day, unasked, and sat at the edge of the yard reading reports from House Ashgrave's harvest lands while she trained, present without hovering, a quiet company that asked nothing of her and offered nothing beyond itself.

Sylas, predictably, tried to turn her training into a game, appearing on the fifth day with two practice blades and an insufferable grin, daring her to actually land a hit on him — and when she finally did, hard enough to bruise, his delighted laugh had sounded, for one unguarded second, almost like respect instead of amusement.

Corvin didn't come to the yard at all. She noticed that too, and noticed the careful way his letters to House Marrow — the ones she had no way of knowing about yet, but suspected on principle, because some patterns repeated no matter which life you were living — went curiously, uncharacteristically unanswered that week.

Draven came every single day, said almost nothing, and simply watched her work with an attention so focused it occasionally unsettled her more than his temper ever had.

By the sixth night, the eve of the Pilgrimage's departure, Luna stood in the training yard alone in the dark, her whole body sore in ways that felt, for the first time in either of her lives, entirely earned rather than inflicted, and looked up at the moon hanging low and heavy over the city.

Tomorrow, she thought, the clock starts. Seven days. Five husbands. One chance.

She had spent six days learning to hold a blade and reading five different men for the cracks in the story she already knew. She still didn't know which of them, if any, could actually become someone different from the one who'd killed her.

What she knew, standing alone under that moon with a sword calloused into her palm and a bargain sealed in blood-magic ticking down somewhere in the dark, was simpler and far more dangerous than any of that.

She was no longer entirely certain she wanted to sever all five contracts when the seven days ended.

And that terrified her more than the Ashwood Reach ever could.