The Imprisoned Luna: Blood of the Lost

Chapter 5: The Visitor

It isn't a guard.

The cloak drops from her shoulders, and torchlight catches on a face I recognize even in the dark, though it takes my mind a second to accept what my eyes are already telling me. Old scar along the jaw. Grey streaking through hair that used to be black. Broad shoulders held with the same rigid discipline I remembered from the wedding, back when she stood two steps behind Kaelen's throne with one hand resting on the hilt of a blade nobody dared test.

Kaelen's second. The woman who commanded his personal guard before all of this happened.

Reya.

For a moment, neither of us says anything. She just looks at me, the way soldiers look at wreckage they weren't there to prevent.

"You're supposed to be dead," I say, because it's the only thing that comes out. If the council moved against me this fast, I couldn't imagine they'd have left anyone loyal to him standing for long. I'd assumed her name would already be on that list.

"I'm supposed to be a lot of things." She crosses the cell in three quiet steps and crouches in front of me, close enough that I can see the exhaustion carved into her face, the kind that doesn't come from one bad night but from weeks of moving through shadows and sleeping somewhere different every time. "Keep your voice down. I bought us maybe ten minutes before the shift changes, and I'm not wasting them explaining how I'm still breathing."

"Then explain something that matters."

A ghost of a smile crosses her mouth, gone fast. "He's not dead."

The words don't land right away. I've spent every hour down here telling myself the same thing, that a paralyzed alpha isn't a dead one, repeating it in the dark until it started to sound like something I'd made up just to survive the nights. Hearing someone else say it out loud, someone who isn't just trying to comfort a prisoner, almost breaks something open in my chest that I've been holding shut on purpose.

"Where," I say. It's not really a question. It's a demand.

"Under guard, in the north tower. Three men at the door, rotating every four hours." Reya's voice stays flat, the voice of someone used to delivering hard information without softening it. "The council can't kill him outright, not without proof strong enough to survive a formal challenge from the other packhouses. Right now, all they have is a poisoning they can't fully explain, so they're keeping him alive and silent while they work on making the rest of the evidence point wherever they need it to point."

Her jaw tightens, and for a second the discipline slips just enough to show me how angry she actually is underneath it.

"Which means they need you convicted fast, before anyone starts asking why the vial that framed you had a royal armory seal on it instead of something a street poisoner could actually get their hands on."

I became still. "You know that detail."

"I know a lot of details nobody's supposed to know." She glances at the door, then back at me. "That's not something a random assassin plants, Lyra. That's something someone with access to the royal vaults plants. Someone who wanted it found."

My mind is already running ahead of her, turning that piece over. "The elderly don't have vault access without council approval. Vespera does."

"Vespera has a lot of things," Reya says carefully. "Motive isn't proof. But it's more than the council's given you, and it's more than they think you have."

I lean forward despite the chains biting into my wrists. "Why are you here? Really. You could have stayed hidden and let this play out."

For the first time since she stepped into my cell, something like doubt crossed her face. "Because Kaelen made a vow in a basement to a girl nobody thought mattered, and he kept it in front of the entire council even when it cost him everything. I don't serve the throne. I serve the man who was willing to burn it down rather than break his word. If you go down for something you didn't do, that vow dies with you, and everything he risked for it was for nothing."

Silence settles between us, heavier than the surrounding stone.

"There's a trial set for three days," she finally says. "Public. The council wants it fast, before sympathy for you has a chance to spread through the lower packs. If you're going to survive it, you need more than an accusation to throw back at them. You need the actual poisoner's name, and you need it before that vial disappears from the evidence room the way inconvenient things tend to disappear around here."

"And you think I can get that from inside a locked cell."

Reya's eyes flicked toward the small barred window near the ceiling, then back to me, and something in her expression shifted into calculation. "You survived the slums on nothing. You kept an alpha alive with a candle and a jar of salve. I think underestimating you is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place."

She stands, pulling the cloak back over her shoulders, and for a moment she almost looks like she regrets what she's about to say next.

"I can get you one visit. One person, once, before the trial. Choose carefully, because I won't be able to do it twice."

Footsteps echo somewhere down the corridor, faint but getting closer, and Reya's whole body goes tense.

"Three days," she says again, already moving toward the door. "Don't waste them mourning him. Mourn later. Right now, figure out who wants you dead badly enough to frame you with their own family's poison, because that person is still walking free while you sit in chains for it."

She slips back out into the dark before I can ask anything else, the cell door easing shut behind her with barely a sound, and then I'm alone again with nothing but the drip of water down the corridor and the weight of everything she just handed me.

A name I don't have yet. A visit I haven't chosen. A clock that just started running whether I'm ready for it or not.

I press my back against the cold stone and let myself feel it, just for a moment, the relief of knowing he's still breathing somewhere above me. Then I push the feeling down, because relief doesn't win trials, and I don't have three days to spend being grateful.

Kaelen is alive.

And somewhere above this cell, warm and comfortable at the council table, the person who poisoned him is already rehearsing whatever story they plan to tell at my trial, confident that a slum girl in chains poses no real threat to anyone.

They buried the wrong version of me. The one that grew up begging for scraps and hiding from tax collectors is gone. What's left is the one who dragged a dying alpha out of the mud with her bare hands and kept him alive with nothing but stubbornness and a jar of salve.

They're about to find out that the girl doesn't bury easily.