THE CHRISTMAS LUNA SATISFYING THE ENIGMAS

Chapter 9

ALESSIA

Christmas arrived on the heels of all of it, quieter than any Christmas I could remember, and entirely without performance.

Jasper produced a tree from nowhere on Christmas Eve, pine needles caught in his hair, and Carter untangled a box of lights with the same unhurried patience he brought to interrogation drills. Logan came in the morning, sat with us around a tree decorated in whatever Jasper had found, including several lengths of ribbon I recognized from my own sewing kit, and handed me a flat, wrapped package.

Inside was a sketchbook. Large format, heavy paper — the kind I'd used before Ethan decided Lunas didn't need to sketch.

Underneath it was a smaller envelope: a provisional acceptance letter to the fashion design program, addressed to Alex George, and a student identification card with my photograph — shorter hair, the set of a jaw the binding gave me, a name I'd chosen nine days ago and already thought of as mine.

"January fourteenth," Aiden said, from the doorway, watching me hold it. "Orientation on the twelfth. You'll need to be moved in by the eleventh."

I turned the ID card over in my hands, and thought about Mia's unanswered letter in my drawer, and Ethan's silence since his last text, and the version of myself who had sewn a wedding gown for three thousand dollars and called it romance.

That version of me would not have recognized the one holding this card.

Logan left in the early afternoon with a hug that lasted a beat too long. The apartment settled into the unhurried quiet that belonged to the day, and I took my new sketchbook out to the balcony and opened it to the first blank page.

I had not drawn in three years. The ability, it turned out, had simply been waiting — patient and intact, the way most things worth keeping are capable of waiting in the dark of a drawer.

I drew for two hours. By the time the light changed, I had six pages of designs that were rough, urgent, and entirely mine.

Aiden found me there as the evening came down blue over the courtyard. He looked at the sketchbook without asking to see it, which I'd come to understand was its own kind of respect, and then he asked to see it anyway, and I let him.

He turned each page slowly. When he reached the last one, he said, "These are extraordinary," with the same flat precision he brought to correcting my walk, which was how I'd learned to recognize when he meant something completely.

"Everything's ready," he said, when he handed the sketchbook back. "The documents, the training, the name. All that's left is walking through the gate."

"I'm ready," I said, and for the first time since the chapel, I believed it completely.