From His Luna to His Rival's Mate

Chapter 24

SELENE

HOURS LATER

The dorm room was quiet in a way that felt heavy rather than peaceful, everyone else had gone to sleep or gone out, and I was alone with the kind of silence that doesn't let you rest.

I sat on the edge of my bed with my knees pulled up to my chest and my back against the wall, my shoulder still ached under the bandage. The medicine might have taken the sharpest edge off the pain, but it hadn't done anything about the thoughts, those were running completely unsupervised.

I stared at the opposite wall and let them. Could I actually handle all of this?

The question sat in the middle of my chest like a stone dropped in still water, sending small rings outward in every direction.

Because honestly, if I was being real with myself at... I checked the small clock on my desk... eleven forty-three at night, the answer felt less certain than I wanted it to be.

I had been shot with a silver arrow, someone had gone through my room, my shoulder wasn't healing the way it should. I was absorbing strangers' emotions through accidental contact like some kind of unwilling sponge.

Calder was unraveling in public while trying to be kind at the same time. Kael was hiding a power strong enough to ease physical pain and still thought keeping distance was a reasonable life strategy.

And I had done all of this while attending classes and pretending to be a completely normal werewolf student.

I pressed my lips together. "Impressive, Selene. Genuinely."

But underneath the dry thought was something more honest and less comfortable. Doubt.

What if the Vale bloodline waking up was too much for me to manage? What if I couldn't figure it out fast enough? What if the next arrow found somewhere worse than my shoulder?

I dropped my chin onto my knees and exhaled slowly, the thing about doubt was that it always showed up when you were tired and alone and the lights were low. It never came at noon in the middle of a good training session. It always waited for the quiet.

"Rude," I thought. "Genuinely rude of it."

I sat there for a while longer, turning everything over without reaching any conclusions, then I got tired of my own spiraling, which was at least something. I couldn't fix anything tonight.

I couldn't find the person who had shot me or figure out who broke into my room or make Kael stop being so frustratingly careful or make Calder stop being so frustratingly complicated. I couldn't do any of it at eleven forty-three in the dark.

But maybe I could do one small thing. I looked at the box in the corner of my room. It had been sitting there since I moved in, half unpacked, the bottom layer still untouched. I had been putting off the last of it without a real reason.

I got up from the bed, crossed the room, and crouched down next to it. I moved a folded sweater, a spare notebook, and a charger I had forgotten I owned, and there it was. My laptop.

I pulled it out and looked at it for a second. It felt strange in my hands, like something from a life that had been going normally before everything decided to become complicated all at once. I carried it back to the bed, sat cross-legged against the headboard, and opened it.

The screen light filled the dark room. I squinted at the brightness, turned it down, and pulled the blanket over my lap.

Okay. Let's see what we're actually dealing with.

I opened a browser and sat there for a moment with my fingers over the keyboard, thinking about how to even phrase it. Then I typed: 'feeling other people's emotions through touch.'

The results came back immediately. Empathy, emotional sensitivity. Psychic connection. I scrolled through slowly, reading bits and pieces, dismissing the ones that were clearly not what I was looking for and stopping on the ones that felt closer.

One article talked about people who reported absorbing the emotional states of those around them, feeling drained afterward, needing physical space to recover. I read the whole thing.

"Well," I thought. "That is uncomfortably accurate."

I typed again: 'werewolf bloodline abilities emotion sensing moon goddess.'

The results were thinner this time, more scattered, most of it was general folklore about werewolf gifts, things I had heard variations of in Professor Harlan's class.

But one entry near the bottom caught my eye, a small academic-style paper about dormant bloodline gifts and the conditions under which they resurfaced. I clicked on it and read slowly, moving through the careful language with my finger tracing the screen.

Dormant gifts, according to the paper, didn't disappear. They compressed. Generational trauma, suppression, or simply the absence of the right conditions could push a gift so far down that it stopped showing in the bloodline entirely, sometimes for decades.

But compression wasn't the same as extinction. Given the right trigger, significant emotional trauma, a strong bond, a powerful external event, the gift could resurface. Usually stronger than its last recorded form.

I stared at that last sentence. 'Stronger than its last recorded form.'

I thought about Professor Harlan saying the Vale line hadn't shown its ability clearly for many generations. I thought about the wave that had hit me when that girl's fingers brushed mine over a borrowed pencil. I thought about Elara's jealousy pouring through my skin completely uninvited.

A borrowed pencil, that was all it had taken. I closed the tab and opened a new one. 'How to manage emotional absorption. How to block other people's feelings.'

This time the results were more practical. Grounding techniques, breathing patterns, visualization methods... imagining a wall, a glass barrier, something solid between yourself and incoming sensation.

One page talked about physical awareness as an anchor, focusing on your own body to stay rooted in your own emotional state instead of sliding into someone else's.

I read that one twice. It wasn't a solution. It wasn't even close to a full answer, but it was something. It was a direction, which was more than I'd had an hour ago when I was sitting on the edge of my bed cataloguing everything that could go wrong.

I set the laptop on the pillow beside me and looked at the ceiling. I was making progress. No matter how small.

I hadn't figured out who broke into my room. I hadn't figured out who put an arrow in my shoulder. I still didn't fully understand what was happening inside my body or how far it was going to go.

But I knew a little more than I had before I opened the box in the corner, and I had a few things to try the next time someone's hand brushed mine without warning, that counted for something.

I picked the laptop back up and typed one more thing almost on impulse: 'Vale bloodline moon goddess gifts historical records.'

Very little came back, a few scattered mentions in folklore databases, nothing detailed. One line in an old digitized text said the Vale line was described in ancient records as 'listeners of the heart,' women who could not be lied to by anyone they touched.

I read that three times. 'Listeners of the heart.' As gifts went, it was poetic. It was also, based on my recent experience, exhausting and inconvenient and had absolutely zero respect for personal boundaries. I almost laughed, almost.

I closed the laptop and set it on the nightstand, the room felt a little less heavy than it had an hour ago. I lay down carefully on my good side and pulled the blanket up.

The doubt was still there. I wasn't going to pretend one late-night research session had chased it off entirely. It was still sitting in the corner where I had left it, patient and unhelpful as ever, but it was smaller now, and I had given it less to work with.

I stared at the dark ceiling and thought about the phrase again. 'Listeners of the heart.' In another life, in another set of circumstances, it might have sounded almost beautiful.

In this one, it meant I needed to start wearing gloves.