His Lesbian Luna

Chapter9

Sera’s POV

I woke up alone in his bed and my first thought was completely inappropriate.

My second thought was that I needed to stop having first thoughts like that.

I sat up. His side was untouched. Either he hadn’t slept or he’d slept somewhere else, which—good. Fine. That was the correct and logical thing for him to have done. We were not… this was not —I pressed my palms flat against the sheets and told myself to focus.

The wounds. That was what mattered. The black lines spreading at the edges. The way his arm had shaken when he gripped the bath.

I got dressed and went to find him.

I smelled the blood before I reached his study.

Faint. Old by a few hours. But there.

I pushed the door open without knocking.

He was behind his desk. Jacket on. Papers in front of him. Looking, from a distance, like a man who had a perfectly normal night.

Up close, the jacket was wrong. Too still on his left side.

“You’re bleeding through the bandaging,” I said.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Damon.”

“Sit down, Sera.”

“You’re—”

“I know,” he said. His voice was flat. “Sit down.”

I sat. Barely.

He looked at me across the desk and whatever he was about to say he didn’t say because the door opened behind me and Percy walked in fast, the kind that meant something had already gone wrong this morning and he was only now catching up to it.

He looked at Damon. Then at me. Then back at Damon.

“Voss,” he said. “She’s called a formal grievance.”

The room went very quiet.

“Against who,” Damon said.

Percy’s eyes came to me.

Oh.

“Against me,” I said.

“Against the Luna,” Percy said slowly. “She’s filed it with Elder Croft. Formally. In writing.” He set a folded paper on the desk. “She’s claiming you are not who you say you are. She’s requesting a blood verification before the full pack presentation.”

Blood verification.

I knew what that was. Everyone in any pack knew what that was. A drop of blood on an elder’s stone. It reads your lineage. Your real name. Your family line going back three generations.

There was no surviving a blood verification.

I sat in the chair and felt the floor drop out from underneath me and kept my face completely still.

Sienna went silent inside me. The particular silence of someone who has just looked at something and is not ready to say what they see yet.

Damon picked up the paper. Read it. Set it back down.

He looked at me.

I looked back.

“When,” he said to Percy.

“Croft wants it done today,” Percy said. “Before sundown. He’s citing pack law that states that any challenge to a Luna’s identity must be resolved within twenty four hours of formal filing.” A beat. “She filed at midnight.”

Midnight. She’d filed it while I was in the bath. While I was kneeling at the edge of the tub with my sleeves rolled up. She’d already been moving.

I had called it. I had sat across from Damon and said she was going to escalate and I had been right and it had not done a single thing to stop it.

“Percy,” Damon said. “Leave us.”

Percy left.

The door closed.

Damon looked at me across the desk with those dark eyes and I looked back at him and neither of us said anything for a moment that stretched out until I could feel my own heartbeat.

“Blood verification,” I said finally.

“Yes,” he said.

“You know what that means.”

“Yes.”

“Then you know there’s no—”

“I know,” he said quietly.

I pressed my hands flat against my thighs. “So that’s it.” I heard my own voice come out steady and hated it. Hated that even now, even here, I was still performing. “She wins.”

“No,” he said.

I stared at him.

He stood. Came around the desk. Stopped directly in front of me and looked down at me with an expression I had not seen on him before. Not cold. Something tighter than that. Something that looked almost like anger but was aimed somewhere I couldn’t identify.

“She does not win,” he said.

“Damon. A blood stone will show my real name. My lineage. Sera of the Ashwood pack, no family, no rank. There is no story that covers that.”

“There doesn’t need to be a story,” he said. “There needs to be a reason the verification doesn’t happen.”

I looked at him. “You can’t stop a formal elder grievance. Pack law—”

“Pack law,” he said, “says a blood verification can be waived in one circumstance.” He held my gaze. “If the bond is already sealed.”

The room went absolutely still.

My brain caught up approximately three seconds later.

“The bond,” I said slowly.

“A sealed mating bond supersedes identity verification,” he said. “If you are already my mate —fully, formally, in the eyes of pack law, Croft has no grounds. The Luna’s identity is confirmed by the bond itself. Not by blood, not by lineage, not by anything Voss filed.”

“That’s—” I stopped. Started again. “That requires—”

“Yes,” he said.

“Damon. That requires a bite.”

“Yes,” he said. “It does.”

I stood up.

I didn’t mean to. My body just decided standing was necessary. We were very close suddenly, because he was already right there, and I had stood up directly into that, and now there were approximately eight inches between us and he was looking down at me and I was looking up at him and neither of us moved.

“You’re talking about bonding yourself to me,” I said. “Permanently. A Lycan bond doesn’t, you can’t undo that.”

“I know what a bond is,” he said quietly.

“The curse,” I said. “Damon. The curse kills the woman who bonds with you. You told me that yourself. First full moon after the bond seals—”

“I know,” he said.

“Then how is this—”

“Because the full moon is three weeks away,” he said. “And in three weeks I will have found another way. Or I will have broken the curse entirely.” Something moved in his jaw. “But right now, today, before sundown, Voss is going to walk you in front of Elder Croft and end this. And I will not let that happen.”

I stared at him.

“Why,” I said. The word came out smaller than I meant it to. “You could let it happen. You could hand me back to Cain, find a real alliance, start over. This is not your problem. I am not your—” I stopped.

He looked at me for a long moment.

“You are my Luna,” he said. “Whatever the circumstances that brought you here. Whatever name is on that stone when they press your blood to it.” His voice was very quiet. “You handled this pack. You handled Voss. You sat in that hall and looked every elder in the eye and you were better at this than women who trained their whole lives to stand in this position.” Something flickered. “I do not throw away things that are worth keeping.”

My chest did something I was not prepared for.

I looked at the window. At the mountains. At anything that was not his face.

“This is a tactical decision,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re not… this isn’t—”

“It’s tactical,” he said. “Completely.”

“Right,” I said.

“Entirely tactical,” he said.

“You can stop saying it,” I said.

“Sera.” His voice.

I looked back at him. Mistake. Complete mistake.

“I need your answer,” he said. “Now. We have hours.”

I thought about Voss at midnight, filing papers in the dark, patient and precise and absolutely certain she had won. I thought about Elder Croft’s face. The blood stone. My real name rising up out of it in front of every person in this pack.

I thought about Demi. ‘Stay alive.’

I thought about the three women in the ground.

I thought about the soup.

“If you die,” I said, “before you break this curse. If the full moon comes and you haven’t found a way—”

“Then I will have three weeks of a real Luna,” he said simply. “And this pack will be in a better position than it was.”

“That’s a terrible answer,” I said.

“It’s an honest one,” he said.

The fire crackled.

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and felt my own heartbeat and made myself look at him. At the jacket he’d put on this morning over bleeding bandages. At the dark eyes and the walls and whatever was behind them that I was only starting to see the edges of.

“Okay,” I said.

Something moved across his face. There and gone.

“Tonight,” he said. “Before Croft’s deadline.”

“Tonight,” I said.

He nodded. Turned back to his desk.

I walked to the door on legs that felt only somewhat reliable.

“Sera.”

I stopped.

“The bond,” he said. Still not looking at me. “It will hurt. The mark… it’s not—” He stopped. Started again. “I need you to know what you’re agreeing to.”

I stood in the doorway.

“Three women,” I said quietly. “In the ground. A curse. Voss. Cain. A name that isn’t mine.” I looked back at him over my shoulder. “I’ve been knowing what I agreed to.”

I walked out.

And in the corridor, alone, I pressed my back against the wall and slid down it until I was sitting on the cold stone floor and stared at the ceiling and said, very quietly, to no one in particular.

“Demi. If you have any pull up there whatsoever. Now would be the time.”