The Luna He Broke To Keep

Chapter 22

The Woman in the Photograph

Nobody spoke for several long seconds after Rowan admitted the truth.

Rain filtered steadily through the trees surrounding the clearing, soft against leaves and broken wood, but the sound only seemed to make the silence heavier. Kaia stood near the damaged wall with her arms folded tightly across herself, trying to hold onto something solid while everything she thought she understood about the last few months continued shifting underneath her.

Rowan had not pushed her away because he stopped caring.

He pushed her away because he thought she was going to die.

The realization sat painfully beneath her ribs.

Part of her still wanted to stay angry. Anger would have been easier to carry than this hollow ache opening slowly in her chest every time she looked at him standing there soaked through by the rain, exhausted in a way she had never seen before. It would have been easier if he’d been cruel. Easier if he’d rejected her because he stopped loving her instead of because he was terrified.

But now she couldn’t stop seeing it.

Every cold word.

Every distance he forced between them.

Every excuse that never quite made sense.

All of it had been fear.

Kaia dragged in a slow breath, trying unsuccessfully to steady the chaos building in her head before her attention shifted back toward the broken opening in the wall. The abandoned structure behind her no longer felt like some hidden place she stumbled across by accident.

Now it felt like the center of everything.

“What was her name?” she asked quietly.

The question seemed to catch everyone off guard.

Kaia noticed the reactions immediately. One of the men near the structure looked away. Another rubbed a hand across the back of his neck uneasily while rainwater dripped from the edge of his sleeve. Even Rowan looked momentarily unprepared for the question, like nobody expected her to ask about the woman herself.

Only about the secret surrounding her death.

His gaze lowered briefly before returning to her. “Mira.”

The name settled heavily into the clearing.

Mira.

Not just a body buried inside an old investigation.

A real person.

Something about that made the metallic smell lingering around the structure suddenly feel worse.

Kaia swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “What happened to her?”

This time Rowan answered without hesitation, maybe because he already understood she wasn’t going to stop asking anymore.

“She worked in records,” he said carefully. “Mostly internal reports. Patrol schedules. territory disputes. Things people stopped paying attention to because they looked routine.”

The rain continued falling steadily around them while Kaia listened, every muscle in her body tense now without her realizing it.

“One night she noticed inconsistencies in old files,” Rowan continued. “Reports being altered after they’d already been submitted. Missing names. Incidents that should’ve triggered investigations disappearing completely.”

Kaia’s stomach tightened hard.

“She told someone,” she said quietly.

Rowan nodded once.

“The wrong person.”

The silence afterward felt suffocating.

Kaia could practically see it happening now. Mira finding something she wasn’t supposed to see and believing she could trust someone inside the pack to help her fix it, never realizing the corruption she uncovered went deeper than she understood.

“What exactly did she find?” Kaia asked.

Rowan’s jaw tightened slightly. “We still don’t know all of it.”

We.

The word caught her attention immediately.

Not I.

We.

Kaia looked between Rowan and the men surrounding the clearing again, this time seeing something different in them. Until now she’d assumed they were all here for the same reason—to protect the secret buried inside this place.

But suddenly the tension between them felt more complicated than that.

“You’ve been investigating this yourselves,” she realized slowly.

Nobody answered directly, but she saw enough in the exchanged looks to know she was right.

The realization hit her harder than she expected.

All this time she thought Rowan had pushed her away because he didn’t trust her enough to let her stand beside him.

But maybe the truth was worse.

Maybe he trusted her too much to risk her staying near any of this.

Kaia hated how much that possibility hurt.

Her gaze drifted back toward the opening in the wall, lingering there longer this time. Inside, she could just make out the shape of old shelves and filing cabinets through the darkness, shadows layered beneath years of dust and abandonment.

Then she noticed it.

Near the collapsed section of wall, an old metal cabinet had tipped onto its side during the fight. One drawer hung partially open, and something pale protruded from inside it.

Paper.

Before anyone realized what she intended to do, Kaia stepped toward the opening.

“Kaia—”

She ignored Rowan completely.

Wet gravel shifted under her boots as she crossed the clearing and ducked carefully through the broken section of wall. The smell inside hit her harder immediately, damp concrete and rust mixing with something older beneath it, something stale enough that it seemed buried directly into the structure itself.

The room inside looked smaller than she expected.

A dead light fixture hung crookedly from the ceiling while rusted shelving lined one wall beneath layers of dust. Filing boxes sat stacked near the far corner, some collapsed inward with age, others still sealed shut like nobody touched them in years.

This wasn’t some execution site hidden in the woods.

It was an office.

Or at least it used to be.

Kaia’s pulse began pounding harder as she crouched beside the overturned cabinet and reached toward the paper protruding from the drawer.

Behind her, she heard Rowan step inside the structure.

Slow footsteps.

Measured.

Not because he wasn’t worried, but because he already knew this moment couldn’t be stopped anymore.

“Kaia,” he said quietly.

She pulled the object free before he reached her.

Not paper.

A photograph.

Kaia froze instantly.

The image was old, its edges bent slightly with age, but the woman smiling back at her couldn’t have been much older than Kaia herself. Dark hair framed a bright face caught mid-laugh, like whoever took the picture captured the moment accidentally instead of posing it.

Mira.

For a second, Kaia just stared at her.

Not at the mystery.

Not at the investigation.

At the woman.

A real person with a real smile who clearly never expected to end up buried inside a hidden secret no one wanted uncovered.

Then Kaia’s eyes shifted toward the figure standing beside her in the photograph.

And her entire body went still.

Because the man next to Mira—

his arm slung loosely around her shoulders while both of them smiled at something outside the frame—

was Rowan.