His Lesbian Luna

Chapter 10

Sera’s POV

I had approximately four hours before my life changed permanently.

I spent the first one sitting on the corridor floor.

Eventually I got up. Because the floor was cold and Demi would have said something devastating about it and I could practically hear her already. ‘You made a major life decision and then sat on the ground. Spectacular, Sera. Truly.’

“Shut up,” I said quietly to the empty corridor.

I went back to the room. Washed my face. Looked at myself in the mirror long enough to say out loud, to my own reflection, like a person who had completely lost it - “You are going to be fine.”

My reflection looked unconvinced.

Sienna stirred. ‘The bond,’ she said softly.

‘I know.’

‘When he marks you—’

‘I know, Sienna.’

‘It will hurt and then it will—’

‘I know what it does,’ I said. ‘I know what it means. I know all of it.’

She went quiet.

‘Are you scared?’ she asked finally.

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and felt my own heartbeat.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She didn’t say anything after that. Just settled warm and close underneath my ribs. Which was, I was learning, how Sienna said ‘me too and I’m here at the same time.’

The knock came an hour before sundown.

Not Percy. Not Damon.

Mira.

She stood in the doorway in her usual grey, sharp eyed, unreadable, and looked at me for one long moment.

Then she said, “Come with me.”

I followed her without asking where.

She took me through a door I hadn’t been through yet, past the main corridor, down a short staircase, into a room that smelled like old wood and candle wax and something floral underneath it all. It looked small and private. A mirror along one wall. A chair. A low table with things on it I didn’t look at yet.

She closed the door.

“Sit,” she said.

I sat.

She stood in front of me with her hands folded and studied my face the way she always did, like she was reading something I hadn’t written yet.

“He told you what tonight is,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you agreed.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled the chair from the corner and sat directly across from me, which she had never done before. Mira always stood. Mira was always moving. Mira sitting down in front of me and being still felt like the world tilting two degrees.

“I have prepared three women for this,” she said. Her voice was flat but I could hear the compassion and hint of fear underneath it. “I dressed them. I sat with them before. I watched them walk in.” She held my gaze. “I buried them.”

The room was very quiet.

“I am not telling you this to frighten you,” she said.

“I know,” I said. Exactly what she had told me the first day I arrived. ‘I tell you so you understand what kind of house you have walked into.’

“He will not let it happen to you,” she said. “I have served this King for eleven years. I know the difference between what he does because he must and what he does because he has decided.” She looked at me steadily. “He has decided.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. So I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and nodded.

She stood. Moved to the table. Lifted something from it.

A dress.

Deep green. Simple. The kind of simple that costs more than it looks like it should.

“This was not sent by the King,” she said. She set it carefully across the back of the chair. “This is from me.” She straightened it with both hands. “The other three wore white. I always thought that was wrong.”

My throat did something I was not expecting.

“Mira—”

“Don’t,” she said briskly. Already moving. Already efficient again. “You have an hour. I’ll send someone to do your hair.”

She was at the door.

“Mira.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.

She stopped. Turned.

“Thank you,” I said.

She looked at me for one beat. Then she nodded once, sharp and quick, and walked out.

I sat in the chair and stared at the green dress and did not cry. Crying felt too small for what I was feeling.

Demi. Again. Everywhere.

They brought me to him at sundown.

Not the great hall this time. A smaller room where there was fire, two witnesses I didn’t know, Percy standing near the wall with his hands clasped and his face arranged into careful neutrality.

Damon was standing at the far end.

He had changed. Dark clothes. No jacket. He looked… he looked like himself, which was the problem, which was the thing I was not going to let myself finish thinking.

He looked at me when I entered.

His eyes moved over the dress. Then back to my face.

Something shifted in his jaw.

I crossed the room and stopped in front of him and we looked at each other and neither of us said anything for a moment.

“You came,” he said quietly.

“I said I would,” I said.

“I know.” A pause. “I know you did.”

He held out his hand.

I looked at it. At the palm turned up, open, waiting. I thought about the first night in the great hall. The silk pooling at my feet. His eyes moving over me like a document to be checked for errors. I thought about the soup. The knocked door. ‘It stopped being only my room.’

I put my hand in his.

His fingers closed around mine. Warm. Steady. Like last time in the gathering hall, a message but this one wasn’t for the room.

“It will hurt,” he said quietly. “The mark. I won’t—” He stopped. “I won’t make it worse than it has to be.”

“I know,” I said.

“Sera.” His voice dropped lower. “If at any point—”

“Damon.” I looked up at him. “Just do it.”

Something moved across his face.

Then he nodded.

And he did.

It hurt.

I won’t dress it up. It hurt the way I imagine being remade hurts, a sharp and total pain and then spreading out warm from the point of it like something unlocking that had been locked for a very long time.

I made one sound.

Just one.

His hand tightened around mine when I did. His other hand came up to the back of my head and held me there and I pressed my face against his shoulder and breathed through it and he said nothing and held on.

When it was done the room was very quiet.

I became aware slowly of several things. His hand still in my hair. My fingers gripping the front of his shirt in a fist I didn’t remember making. The witnesses murmuring to Percy. The fire. The pain subsiding into something warm and humming that settled in the mark and stayed.

I straightened.

He let me.

We stood there and looked at each other and the room felt different than it had sixty seconds ago. Everything felt slightly different. Like the air had rearranged itself.

“Okay?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. My voice came out rough. “You?”

He looked faintly surprised that I’d asked. Then, the almost-smile. There and gone.

“Yes,” he said.

Percy stepped forward quietly. “Elder Croft has been notified,” he said. “The grievance is formally dismissed.” He looked at me. Something warm in his eyes that he was mostly covering up. “Congratulations, my Luna.”

My Luna.

I had heard that title for weeks. It had always felt like wearing someone else’s coat.

This time it landed differently.

I didn’t know what to do with that either.

The corridor outside was empty except for the two of us.

He walked beside me back toward the wing, unhurried, hands clasped behind his back. I walked beside him and felt the mark on my neck like a warm ember and tried not to think about the full moon. Three weeks. He had said three weeks.

“She’ll know by morning,” I said.

“Voss?” he said.

“She has eyes in every corridor,” I said. “She’ll know tonight, probably.”

“Yes,” he said.

“She won’t stop,” I said.

“No,” he said. “She won’t.”

I looked at him. At his profile. At the jaw and the dark eyes aimed forward and the particular stillness of a man who is thinking four moves ahead of everything he’s saying.

“What are you going to do about her?” I said.

“What I always do,” he said. “Wait until she makes a move I can use.”

“And if the move she makes is at me?”

He looked down at me then. For just a moment.

“Then I would suggest,” he said quietly, “that she has significantly miscalculated.”

Something in the way he said it.

Like it was just a fact.

I looked away before my face could do whatever it was building up to.

We reached the door to the wing.

He stopped.

I stopped.

“Sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow will be—”

The sound hit before I could process it.

A crash from inside the wing. Glass. And then a voice, high pitcched and sharp that I recognized immediately.

Voss.

Inside the wing.

Inside our wing.

I looked at Damon.

His face had gone very still.

He pushed the door open.

Voss was standing in the corridor with two of her women behind her and something dark and spreading on the stone floor at her feet — a shattered bottle, something that smelled sweet and chemical and wrong. Her eyes found me the second the door opened.

Then they dropped to my neck.

To the mark.

Her face did something I had never seen it do before.

“You—” she started.

“Lady Voss.” Damon’s voice. “You are in my wing.”

She pulled herself back together in less than a second. Impressive, actually. “I was looking for—”

“You were not invited here,” he said. Still quiet. “And whatever that is—” His eyes dropped to the shattered bottle, to the spreading liquid, and something in his expression went cold in a way I had never seen before. Colder than cold. “You will explain it. Now.”

Her chin lifted. “I don’t answer to—”

“You answer to me,” he said. “In this pack, in this territory, in this corridor, you answer to me!”

The two women behind her had gone pale.

Voss looked at him. Then at me. At the mark on my neck. At the bottle on the floor.

And for the first time since I had arrived in this fortress, for the first time in every exchange, every corridor, every public room and private calculation

Lady Voss looked afraid.

She covered it in less than a second. But I had seen it.

Sienna had seen it too.

‘Remember that,’ Sienna said softly.

“The bottle,” he said. “What is it.”

He wasn’t asking and she knew it.

Her chin lifted. “I don’t know what you mean. I was carrying—”

“Rendal.” Damon didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t need to.

Rendal stepped out of the shadows at the end of the corridor, he had been there the whole time, I realized, still and silent as furniture and crouched beside the spreading liquid. He dipped one finger. Brought it to his nose.

His face went very still.

He looked up at Damon.

“Bonding suppressant,” he said quietly. “Concentrated. Enough to dissolve a fresh mark within the hour.”

The corridor went absolutely silent.

I understood before I finished understanding.

The bottle hadn’t been dropped by accident. She had been here. Before us. Waiting. She had known about the bonding before we did it, which meant someone in that room had told her, which meant—

I felt it before I could finish the thought.

A wave of heat rolling up from the mark on my neck, sharp and sudden and wrong.

I put my hand to it.

My fingers came away clean.

“Damon,” I said.

He was already looking at me. Already reading my face. His eyes dropped to my hand against my neck and something happened in his expression that I had never seen there before.

Something that looked, for just one second, like panic.

“How long,” he said to Rendal. His voice was very quiet. “How long was she in here before we arrived.”

Rendal stood. Met his eyes.

“Long enough,” he said.