His Forgotten Silver Luna

Chapter 7

The breakfast place was a small café three blocks from the hotel.

Not supernatural just an ordinary Manhattan morning spot with wooden tables and the smell of dark roast coffee and the particular noise of a city that had been awake since before dawn and had no intention of slowing down. Selene had chosen it deliberately. Neutral ground. No pack ears.

Damien was already there when she arrived, which meant he'd been awake long enough to get dressed and walk three blocks and order coffee, which meant he probably hadn't slept at all. He looked it not undone, Damien Cross didn't do undone in public, but there was a quality of compression about him, like something being held under considerable pressure.

She sat down across from him.

He looked at her. "Talk."

"Good morning to you too."

"Selene."

She wrapped both hands around the coffee cup the server had just placed in front of her and looked at her brother at the jaw and the dark eyes and the three years of something unresolved that lived in the lines of him and made a decision she had been making and unmating for a very long time.

"I know who Silver is," she said.

The café continued around them. Someone laughed at the next table. A machine hissed steam behind the counter.

Damien did not move. "Say that again."

"I recognised her fourteen months ago." Selene kept her voice level. "At an SGC real estate filing event in Chicago. I was there representing the pack on the northern territory boundary documentation. She was there closing the Marcello Building acquisition you'd have seen it in the council briefs, the supernatural commercial property on Michigan Avenue."

"I remember the filing." His voice had gone very careful. "You recognised her."

"I wasn't certain at first. She looks different. The way she holds herself, the way she speaks, everything about her presentation is constructed. But there was a moment when she turned and caught the light a specific way and I" Selene stopped. Steadied herself. "I knew."

"Selene." His voice had dropped. "Who is she."

She looked at him directly.

"Nova," she said. "It's Nova Sinclair."

The word landed and the silence that followed it was the loudest thing in the room.

Damien's coffee cup was halfway to his mouth. He set it down with a precision that suggested he was using the action to keep himself very still. His face had done something she'd never seen it do in twenty-three years of knowing him it had gone completely, absolutely blank. Not controlled. Blank. The expression of a system that had just received information it had no existing category for.

"That's not" he started.

"It is."

"She was left at the boundary in October. Three years ago. Without resources, with a severed bond, in the early stages of deterioration"

"And she survived," Selene said. "Clearly."

"How."

"I don't know all of it. What I know is that she built Sinclair Corp from nothing in under four years, which tells you everything you need to know about what she was carrying when she walked into that forest." She paused. "She had Remy. Chase her beta, R. Chase, the one who's been her right hand since the company started. He followed her out that night. I confirmed it."

Damien was staring at the table. The muscle in his jaw was working rhythmically, steadily, the way it did when he was processing something at depth.

"You've known for fourteen months," he said.

"Yes."

"And you didn't tell me."

Selene held his gaze. "No. I didn't."

"Why."

"Because I needed to understand what you'd do with it." She set her cup down. "And because she asked me not to."

His eyes came up sharply.

"She knew I'd recognised her," Selene said. "She came to me, privately, at the end of the filing event. She was I want to be clear about this, Damien, because I think you need to understand the version of her that exists now she was completely calm. Not frightened. Not angry. She walked up to me and she said, I think we both know who I am, and I'm asking you to keep that to yourself. And then she walked away."

Silence.

"She didn't threaten you," Damien said.

"She didn't need to."

He pushed back slightly from the table. Not standing just creating space, the physical instinct of someone whose body needed room to process what his mind was working through. He looked at the window. At the street. At the ordinary Manhattan morning going about its business outside the glass.

"The scent," he said, half to himself.

"What?"

"Last night. I couldn't something about her scent was I thought I was pattern matching. Grief response." He pressed his thumb briefly against his sternum. Selene noticed the gesture she'd been noticing it for three years without mentioning it. "The bond ghost. It's been doing something since the meeting."

Selene absorbed this carefully. "What kind of something."

"Pulsing." He said it like a man admitting something that undermined his entire position. "Which isn't possible. It's severed."

"Silver blood," Selene said quietly.

He looked at her.

"I've been researching it since Chicago," she said. "One in ten million wolves, roughly. Born with blood that carries a specific supernatural charge healing, power, the ability to affect bonds that should be permanent." She paused. "Including, theoretically, broken ones."

The table was very quiet.

"She doesn't know," Selene added. "About the blood. As far as I can tell she has no idea what she is."

Damien looked at his sister for a long time. When he spoke his voice was stripped of everything except the essential question.

"Is she all right," he said. "In general. Is she"

"She's extraordinary," Selene said. And then, because she loved her brother and believed in honesty more than comfort "She's also built every wall that exists. Don't expect her to make this easy."

He nodded once. Slowly.

Outside, Manhattan moved at full speed, indifferent to the fact that everything had just changed.