I Was His Luna Until He Forgot Me

THE TRUTH BENEATH HIS DEATH

CHAPTER 5

THE TRUTH BENEATH HIS DEATH

ELARA VAYNE

I went to Kael's study before sunrise. No warning, no permission from anybody, I just decided to go there and see things for myself… I pushed the door open and walked in.

He was at the window, back to me, watching the dark grounds below. Vampires didn't sleep the way wolves did. The night was his now, in a different way.

"I expected you sooner," he said, without turning.

"I needed time to decide if I wanted the truth, or wanted to throw something at you first."

"Which did you decide?"

"Haven't fully committed." I crossed the room and stopped behind him. "Tell me what happened in the swamp. The real version. Not the noble Alpha story."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"How much did Lyra tell you?"

"That it was your choice. That it wasn't about me. That's all she gave me. The rest I need from you."

He turned from the window. In the candlelight he looked less like a king and more like a man who'd been carrying something heavy for a long time.

"I went to the swamp for an object," he said. "Old. Tied to the Vorath bloodline. Hidden centuries ago to keep it from a court that was hunting for it." He sat against the edge of the desk. "A binding stone. It holds the sealed memories and power of every Vorath heir who's ever lived. Whoever holds it has access to knowledge older than wolf or vampire civilization. The hunters had located it, hadn't retrieved it yet, but they knew where it was. If they'd reached it first, they'd have had enough to dismantle every treaty keeping the peace between species. Both our worlds were exposed and destroyed."

"So you went to get it first."

"Yes."

"And told me you were retrieving something stolen from me."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because if I'd told you the real reason, you'd have come with me. You always come with me." Something moved under his voice. "The swamp is a liminal space, between living and not. Crossing far enough to reach what was hidden there requires a living sacrifice. Not death. Something more specific. It takes whatever defines the living part of you, and replaces it with something that can survive in between."

"It took your wolf," I said.

"It took my wolf. My warmth. My bond memories. My connection to the pack, to everything in it." He met my eyes. "Everything that made me a wolf, an Alpha, your mate, that was the price. What it gave back was this." The last word landed somewhere close to bitter. "The court found me at the swamp's edge three days later. The transition was already complete. The stone was in my coat. Mission accomplished."

"Did it hurt?" I asked, because it was the only question I could manage.

"I don't remember pain. I remember absence. Like reaching for a door that used to be there and finding a wall instead." He looked at his own hands like he still didn't fully trust them. "I've had eight months to get used to having claws instead of nothing. I'm still not used to it."

"In the courtyard," I said, "before any of this. Watching you fight, for half a second I forgot everything that was wrong with this. You moved exactly the way you used to."

"Some things the swamp didn't touch, apparently." He almost smiled, and for a moment it was nearly the smile I remembered. Then it was gone. "Muscle memory isn't the same as memory."

"No. But it's something."

I sat down because I needed something solid under me.

"Why didn't you come back? Once you understood what happened, why let me believe you were dead for eight months while your pack blamed me for it?"

He was quiet.

"Because I didn't remember you," he said finally. "The transition erased my personal memories. Not all at once, not completely, I had images without feeling attached to them. I knew I'd been an Alpha King. I knew the pack's territory. But the people I'd loved were names without weight." His jaw tightened. "You were a name. Just a name. I didn't know what you were to me."

"But you're remembering now," I said. "I can see it every time you look at me."

"Yes." Something shifted across his face. "Your presence is accelerating it, and I can't fully explain why. The seal on your arm might be connected to the binding stone. The stone's been in this castle since I arrived. It's possible your proximity to it is restoring what the swamp took."

I leaned forward. "Kael."

"Don't," he said quietly.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You were going to ask me to come back. To stop being what I am and come back to what I was. I can't answer that yet. I don't know how much of what the swamp took is recoverable. I don't know who I'll be when it all returns. I don't know if what comes back will be exactly what is left."

I closed my mouth. He was right. That was exactly what I'd been about to say.

The candles burned low. Outside, the sky was shifting from black to the deep blue that comes just before dawn. I leaned forward slightly. He leaned forward at the same moment, and the distance between us dropped to almost nothing.

Every candle in the room went out at once, all simultaneously, nobody touched it, it just switched off on its own..

The door crashed open with a bang like a thunder storm..

A man in hunter grey filled the doorway, a command insignia on his chest, three overlapping circles in silver thread. He wasn't holding a weapon. He stood there with the composure of someone who'd walked into far worse rooms than this one.

Kael was on his feet instantly.

"Easy," the man said, one hand raised. "Not here to fight. If I wanted either of you dead, this conversation wouldn't be happening. I came to deliver a message."

"Say it and leave," Kael said.

The man looked at me.

"It's for her." He waited until he was sure I was listening. "My name is Darius Vex. I command the organization that's been hunting both supernatural factions for three years. We have records on both of you. Records you haven't been told about." He let that sit. "Your pack told you your mate died in the Blackveil Swamp. The man beside you told you he came back changed. Both of those are accurate, as far as they go."

I said nothing. My whole body had gone still.

"Here's what neither of them told you," Darius continued, eyes steady on mine. "Kael Draven is still alive. The original one. The wolf. The Alpha who made you his Luna and walked into that swamp." He tilted his head. "He's been in one of our facilities for eight months. Alive. Conscious. Aware of exactly where he is."

"Prove it," Kael said. His voice had dropped into something low and dangerous.

"I don't need to prove anything to you," Darius said. "I need her to know it's true. And she already does. Look at her face."

"Records can be fabricated."

"They can. These weren't." Darius reached into his coat slowly, in no rush to be misread, and set a folded photograph on the edge of the desk. "Eight months old. Taken the week we brought him in."

Kael didn't move toward it. I did.

The man in the photograph was thinner than I remembered, and his eyes were the warm amber I'd spent eight months grieving, not the still red of the man standing three feet away from me.

"That doesn't prove anything," Kael said, but something in his voice had already changed.

"It doesn't have to prove it to you," Darius said. "It already has."

The room tilted around me.

"Which means," Darius said, turning to the man standing at the desk with absolute and unhurried certainty, "the person you've been confiding in, the person you've been remembering and grieving and reaching toward in this room tonight is not your true mate."