TOO LATE, MY LUNA

The Rejection Bond Burns

I woke at three in the morning with a sound coming out of my throat that I did not recognise as my own voice.

It took me several seconds to understand what was happening, that I was awake and in my room in Nightfall and not back in the ceremonial circle, because the rejection bond had been so vivid in the dream that the boundary between sleeping and waking had dissolved completely.

I was sitting upright in the bed with both hands pressed against my chest and my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my fingertips, and the bond was tearing through me in waves the way it had on the night of the ceremony, hot and vicious and completely indifferent to the fact that I was supposed to be healing.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my sternum and breathed slowly and deliberately, counting each breath the way Sena had taught us in early morning training when she wanted us to bring our heart rates down after a hard set. In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for four. I did it over and over until the waves of bond pain started spacing themselves out enough that I could think between them, and I sat in the dark of my room and waited for my body to remember that the worst of it was already over.

That was when I heard the knock at my door.

It was sharp and immediate, two quick knocks followed by Zane's voice saying my name through the door in a tone that was controlled but had something underneath the control that I had not heard from him before. I told him to come in and the door opened and he stepped inside and he was holding a sword. He looked around the room quickly and completely, the way a person looks when they are checking for a threat, and when he found nothing his eyes came back to me sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands still pressed against my chest and my hair tangled from sleep.

He looked at me for a moment without saying anything, taking in my face and my posture and the way I was breathing, and I watched him understand what had happened and put the sword down against the wall beside the door. He was still fully dressed, which told me he had not been sleeping either, and that detail registered somewhere in the back of my mind and stayed there.

"The bond," I said, because it seemed easier than trying to explain the dream. "It comes back at night sometimes. I am fine."

He looked at me for another moment with that steady dark-eyed attention and I got the impression he was deciding something, though I could not have said what. Then he walked to the door and sat down on the floor outside it, his back against the wall of the corridor, his long legs stretched out in front of him, and he pulled the door almost closed between us so that I had privacy but not complete separation.

I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the gap in the door and tried to understand what he was doing. He was not leaving. He was not coming in. He was simply positioning himself between me and whatever the rest of the night might bring, without making a production of it or asking me how I felt about it or offering any explanation at all.

I lay back down slowly and pulled the blanket up and stared at the ceiling, and I listened to the quiet sounds of the corridor outside my door, and after a while the bond pain faded back to its usual low persistent ache and my heartbeat settled into something closer to normal. I did not sleep again right away but the particular sharp loneliness of waking from that dream was less acute than it had been, and I lay in the dark and breathed and did not think about why that was.

Somewhere around four in the morning I heard him shift his position slightly against the wall outside, and around five I heard the night watch change over in the courtyard below my window, and somewhere between five and six I finally fell back asleep with the pale grey of early morning beginning to show at the edges of the window.

When I woke properly the sun was fully up and the corridor outside my door was quiet. I got up and opened the door and looked out and he was gone, the way I had known he would be, no trace of him left in the hallway except a very faint impression in the dust against the wall where he had been sitting. I stood in the doorway and looked at that impression for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

I got dressed and washed my face and was pulling my hair back when I noticed the folded piece of paper on the floor just inside my door, pushed through the gap at the bottom sometimes during the night or early morning. I picked it up and unfolded it and looked at the handwriting inside, small and precise and immediately recognisable as Mira's.

It said three words.

Come to me.

I folded the note back up and held it in my hand for a moment, thinking about Zane's words from the evening before, that the answer to why Iron Claw Pack cared about her rejection had something to do with Aria specifically. I thought about those words and about the blood test Mira had run and about the two words I had heard through the closed herb room door three days ago, and then I put the note in my pocket and walked down the corridor toward the herb room.

The door was open when I reached it. Mira was standing on the far side of the worktable with the old leather book open in front of her, turned to a page I had not seen before, and Zane was standing beside her with his arms folded and his expression giving away nothing as usual.

They both looked up when I appeared in the doorway, and neither of them spoke immediately, and in that brief silence I noticed what was lying on the table between them.

It was a portrait. Small and slightly faded, painted on a piece of thick paper that had aged to a warm cream colour at the edges. It showed a young woman standing tall with her chin raised and her dark hair loose around her shoulders and her eyes looking directly out of the portrait with an expression that was calm and certain and slightly dangerous.

I stepped closer and looked at it properly and felt something cold move through me from the top of my head all the way down to the soles of my feet.

The woman in the portrait looked exactly like me.