The Luna Price

Chapter 10: What I Trade For Him

I didn’t choose to give it. The power took it the way grief takes things—quietly, between one breath and the next, and you only notice it’s gone when you reach for it.

My mother’s voice—the lullaby—was still there. But the specific texture of it went thin. I could hear the melody. The voice behind it was becoming just a voice. Just sound. Not her mother’s sound anymore.

My palms were on the underground floor. The anchor pulled. Hungry. Incomplete structures were the greediest things. They didn’t ask. They just took what was closest.

Her perfume was still present. I noticed it with sudden desperation because I knew the power was working through my memories in order of detail. Smell came after sight.

Kael watched me. He saw the exact moment the first memory went. I knew because his face changed—the way a face changes when it watches someone lose something small that means everything.

I reached for my mother’s face. The shape was there. The feeling was there. The eyes—what color were her eyes—

Brown.

I knew that. I knew that the way I knew my own name. I could feel the knowing—the fact of it—sitting in my chest. But when I reached for the image. The actual specific warm-brown of them in morning light. In the doorway. Looking at me.

Nothing.

The anchor took it. Between one breath and the next. My mother’s eyes—gone.

I stopped building. The anchor held its incomplete shape. Shaking slightly.

“What did it take,” Kael said.

I looked at him. His eyes—silver-black. Mine. The eyes I could no longer remember in my mother’s face.

“Her eyes,” I said. “The color. Just the color. I still have everything else.”

His face did something that had no name for it.

Just one detail, I told myself. I still had her voice. Her hands. The lullaby. I still had almost everything. I could do this.

The anchor shook underneath my palms. Hungry. It needed more than one detail. I already knew that. I was just not ready to say it out loud yet.

“Stop the build,” he said. “Right now.”

“It’s holding.”

“It’s holding and eating your memories. Luna that is not—”

“You staying here forever is not a solution either.” I looked at him straight. “You walked in voluntarily. You were going to anchor the Shadow Queen’s power and just—disappear. Into a dream-house. Underground. Forever.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not love. That’s vanishing.”

“Sometimes—”

“They are not the same.” My voice came out hard. “My mother vanished. She ran and hid and came back to a tree until it killed her slowly. My grandfather vanished into a plan he told no one. Everyone in this bloodline loves people by disappearing and calling it sacrifice.” I held his eyes. “I am not doing that. I am not watching you do it either.”

“The memories it will take—”

“Are mine to spend.”

“Your mother’s face—”

“Is mine to spend.” My voice cracked. I pushed it flat. “My choice. My cost. Everyone made choices around me for eighteen years without asking. This one is mine. Nobody gets to take it from me. Not even you.”

Long silence.

“What if it goes past details,” he said quietly. “Past the color of her eyes. Past her voice. Past the lullaby. What if it takes—”

“Then I’ll stop.”

“How will you know when to stop.”

I didn’t answer.

He heard the silence. “Luna.” Just that. Just my name. Heavy with everything underneath it. “How will you know when to stop.”

When I can’t remember why I came down here, I didn’t say. That’s when I’ll know. That’s probably too late. I knew that too.

Mira had been watching from the corner. Flowers drifting around her shoulders. She stood. Walked to the incomplete anchor. Studied it.

She spoke—fully Mira. No Shadow Queen underneath.

“He built the original seal with grief,” she said. Not to anyone. Like remembering out loud. “My grandfather. I could feel it in the architecture my whole life. He grieved while he built. Grieved me. Grieved what I was becoming.” She touched the edge of the anchor structure. Pulled her hand back. “Grief makes permanent things. It’s the heaviest material there is.”

“I’m not grieving,” I said.

“No. You’re angry.” Something almost like warmth. “Anger builds fast. Not permanent.” She looked at the anchor. “You need heavy. You need something that already knows how to stay underground.”

I went still. “What are you saying.”

Mira turned. The girl with the flowers. A hundred years old and fourteen. Eyes just dark now—human dark—for the first time in a century.

“I have a hundred years of Shadow Queen memories,” she said. “Dark. Heavy. Permanent by nature. Already underground. Already built to last.” She held my gaze. Steady. “I don’t want them. I never wanted them. They aren’t mine. They are the heaviest things I carry and I would very much like to put them down.”

She was offering me the Shadow Queen’s darkness. A century of monster—as building material. So I didn’t have to use my mother’s face.

She survived a hundred years underground. She drew flowers in every margin the power couldn’t reach. She said please into an empty room for a century. And now she was offering me the worst of what she survived. So I could keep the best of what I had.

This was what the flowers were for. This exact moment. This was why the power couldn’t take them. It knew she’d need them.

—Mira’s hand in mine and what moved between us was nothing like silver power it was heavy and dark and permanent and I understood immediately why it made such strong seals it was built to last it was built from a hundred years of someone refusing to disappear completely—

The Shadow Queen’s memories moved through—not silent. A century of screaming funneled into structure. I held it like a river—through not in—channeled it into the anchor.

The anchor solidified. Clicked. Found its permanence. My grandfather’s architecture accepted it like a piece that was always missing.

Mira got lighter with each transfer. Not physically. Something more essential. Like watching someone remember they were allowed to take up space.

The flowers—lavender, childhood, hers—filled the room as the darkness left. Her real self expanding into every corner she reclaimed.

The taste of the seal finding its teeth. The lock closing correctly.

The anchor clicked. Complete. Permanent. No new white strands. The Shadow Queen’s memories—not mine—cost me nothing.

Mira’s eyes: just dark. Human dark. No silver. No black. Just a girl.

Free.

I stood up. Ready to tell Kael it was done. Then I looked at him. And understood that I had solved the wrong problem.

He hadn’t moved. His face was the answer to a question I hadn’t thought to ask yet.

The anchor held the Shadow Queen’s power, I realized, cold moving through me. But the outer seal—the original structure—still had to close. From the inside.

“The anchor is complete,” I said. My voice was steady. I made it steady. “Mira is free. You don’t have to stay as anchor. You can—”

“Luna.”

“You can come up. The outer seal will hold on its own now that—”

“Luna.”

I stopped talking.

He was still standing in the same place. Arms at his sides. Face—I’d spend years learning every version of his face. This one I would never forget. This one I would reach for in the dark on bad nights for the rest of my life.

This one was goodbye.

“The anchor holds the Shadow Queen’s power,” he said. Careful. Like he’d been holding these words underground for a hundred years and was finally setting them down. “But the outer seal—your grandfather’s original structure—it’s dynamic. It moves. It breathes. The anchor can’t hold a breathing seal. It needs something alive inside to keep the walls stable while everything closes.”

I heard myself breathing.

“Someone has to be inside when the outer seal closes,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Someone with enough power to hold the structure stable.”

“Yes.”

“And that person can’t leave after.”

“No.”

I looked at him. My father. My eyes in his face. Silver-black. Careful. Enormous. Certain the way only something very old or very loved can be certain.

“You knew,” I said. “Before I came down. You knew the anchor wouldn’t change this part.”

“Yes.”

“You let me build it anyway.”

“You needed to build it. Mira needed you to build it.” His voice stayed steady. “And you needed your mother’s face.”

The room went silent.

I found my father today. I found him in a dream-house underground where he waited a hundred years. I heard him almost-laugh. I saw my own eyes in his face. I built something impossible to bring him home. I saved my mother’s face to remember him by.

And he was still not coming home.

He was never coming home. He knew that before I arrived. He let me find him anyway.

The flowers on the walls fell. Every single one. All at once. Still.

“Tell me something true,” I said. Fast. “Something only yours. Not the plan. Not what grandfather built. Something that belongs to just you.”

He looked at me. Something in him settled like it had been waiting to be asked.

“Your mother laughed like she was apologizing for it,” he said. “Every single time. Like joy was something she’d borrowed and wasn’t sure she deserved to keep.”

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

“You have her laugh,” he said. “I heard it through the seal the night you fought the rogues. One sound. Just one. Before the pain started.” He held my eyes. “That’s how I knew you were mine. Before I saw your face. Before anything. Just that one sound.”

The walls of the dream-house began moving inward. Slow. The seal finding its moment.

“I’m coming back,” I said. Fierce. “I’m going to build a person-free anchor for the outer seal too. I’m going to figure it out and I’m coming—”

“Luna.” He stepped forward. Put both hands on my face—careful, enormous, careful. Looked at me the way I’d looked at Mira. Full. Seen. I see you. “Go home.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Build one.” His thumbs on my cheekbones. “You built an anchor in one hour underground. A home will take less.”

The seal pressed closer. Mira’s hand on my arm. Now. It had to be now.

“I’ll remember you,” I said. Useless. True. Completely true.

“I know.” He stepped back. Into the closing dark. Steady. Certain. “I’ll be here.”

I know, I said without sound.

The seal closed. The dream-house folded into dark. I rose—up through stone and root and hundred-year-old dark—Mira’s hand in mine—and broke the surface gasping.

The pack stared. Mira beside me. Breathing. Real. Human eyes blinking at moonlight for the first time in a century.

And Darius—hour eleven. On his knees in the dirt. Not submission. Not defeat. Relief.

I looked at the ground beneath my feet. At the sealed dark. At my father, still and permanent and certain, holding a door closed from the inside so the world above it could breathe.

I’ll come back, I told the earth. I don’t know how yet. But I’ll come back.

The ground was quiet. It didn’t need to answer.

Far below, in the dark, in the closed dream-house—a man who moved like rain on stone was already waiting. As long as it takes, his silence said. I know how to wait.