The Runaway Luna

#11

Aria.

I couldn't sleep.

I lay there staring at the ceiling.The room was small. Stone walls, one tiny window, two beds pushed together because I refused to sleep away from them in a place like this. It smelled like dust and old linen.

Nothing like our little house in the rogue town. Nothing like home.

I turned my head and looked at Diana's face.

She had no idea.

She had absolutely no idea that a woman had died tonight in the basement of the very building she was sleeping in. That her mother had stood there and watched it happen. That the man whose blood I had come here to steal had looked at a trembling woman on the floor and felt nothing.

Nothing.

That was what scared me the most. Not the blood. Not the pill. Not even Emily's eyes turning that horrible steel white colour.

It was him.

It was the way he had stood there after. Completely still. Like he had just watched someone spill a cup of water. His face hadn't changed. His breathing hadn't changed. He had simply looked down at her body, bent over to take the paper from her hand and read it without so much as blinking.Then he had turned to Cade.

Dump the body.

Three words. That was all Emily was to him. Three words and a command.

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.

I had gone back to him for a reason. It had been a simple thing — I needed to find out which Head Maid would be directing the chamber staff the next morning so I knew where to report.

Freya had reminded me before I left. A small, practical thing.I had gone back up those stairs with absolutely no intention of staying more than two minutes.

But when I pushed that door open, I had walked into the wrong room. The dungeon entrance had looked like a storage corridor from the outside and I had followed the sound of voices without thinking.

I had seen Emily before I saw him.

I should have left immediately. I know that now.

But I had frozen.I saw the way she looked at me.

She had lifted her eyes from the floor and found my face across the room. Just for a second. And in that second, something passed through her expression that I still couldn't shake. It wasn't fear. It wasn't anger. It was resignation.

Like she was sorry. Like she wanted to say something to me specifically and had run out of time.Then she had looked down at her hand.

I hadn't understood what was happening until the coughing started.

My legs had stopped working. I had stood there completely useless while Cade rushed forward and a woman choked on whatever she had swallowed and Eryx — Eryx had just watched. He hadn't moved. He hadn't called for help. He hadn't done anything except stand with his hands at his sides and observe.

She had chosen death over giving him a name.

What kind of person makes someone that afraid?

What kind of person receives that kind of fear and just stands there?

I turned carefully so I wouldn't wake Diana and stared at the wall instead.I had been telling myself for weeks that coming here was manageable. That I could be smart about this. Get close enough, get what I needed and leave before anything went wrong.

Freya had made it sound almost logical when she laid it out. Maids come and go in a palace this size. Nobody pays attention. We would be invisible.

But I hadn't factored in who he actually was.

I had been so consumed by what he meant to me — the mark on my neck, the bond, the twins — that I had let myself forget what he was to everyone else.

The most feared Alpha alive.

I had stood in that dungeon and watched him tell his beta to dispose of a human being the same way you tell someone to take out the trash. No hesitation. No pause. She was a problem that had resolved itself and now needed to be cleared away.

That was all.

And he had sent Talia after me. After my children.

I thought about Diana's laugh earlier when Damon had muttered something under his breath that made no sense to anyone but her.

I thought about the way Damon had checked the door twice before settling down to sleep, the way he always did, my three year old already moving through the world like he knew it couldn't be trusted.

He had learned that from me.

I had raised them in hiding and they had absorbed every bit of it without me ever saying a word. And the man responsible for that — the man who had made it necessary — was sleeping somewhere above me in this same building right now. Probably unbothered. Probably fine.

Because people like him were always fine.

I sat up slowly, careful not to disturb the twins, and pulled my knees to my chest.He had looked at me differently when my tears fell on his arm. I had noticed it. That brief flash of something that looked almost like pain before he let me go.

I had thought about it the whole walk back.

Then I had reminded myself what I had seen twenty minutes before that moment and the thought had died instantly.

A man could look pained and still be exactly what he was. Those two things were not mutually exclusive. I had learned that lesson young.I rested my chin on my knees and looked at my sleeping children.

One month of herbs left. That was all the time I had. I needed to be smarter than my feelings. Smarter than the pull I felt every time he got too close. Smarter than the part of me that had noticed — stupidly, pointlessly noticed — that he had chased after me when I ran.

I needed to be a mother first. Everything else was noise.

I lay back down and pulled Diana closer, pressing my face into her hair.Get the blood. Protect the children. Leave.

Emily's resigned eyes flashed across my mind one more time.

I shut them out.

I had to.