THE LUNA THEY’LL NEVER LOVE

2: THE TORVAIN COUSINS

PHEEONA.

The throne room was not built for someone who could barely walk.

I knew this because my brother, Caelan, had pointed it out three times on the way down.

My legs had decided to make his point for him and I had needed his arm to stay upright.

"You don't have to be in there," he said, for what was probably the tenth time. “Dad can handle this.”

“Dad will give away too much."

“Our dad is the Alpha King of Lunaris."

“Yeah, and he cried at my sixth birthday when I fell off my horse." I straightened against his arm and tried to look like someone who had not spent the last thirty-two days vomiting into a bucket. "He's sentimental. He'll walk into that room wanting to protect me and they'll read it on him in the first thirty seconds."

Caelan's jaw tightened. He knew I was right. But he was still annoyed about it.

"You can barely stand," he said.

"Then I'll sit. That's what thrones are for."

He looked at me for a long moment. My brother was the ruling beta of our kingdom. The person who had spent more of his life watching my back than watching his own, and I loved him with all my heart for it.

“Are you ready?” He asked, and when I gave him a nod I hoped was steady, he pushed the throne room doors open and walked me through them.

The room was already arranged. My father stood at the far end near his throne, spine straight, hands clasped at his back in the posture he used when he was holding himself together through effort rather than ease.

Two of his senior advisors flanked him, older men who had served Lunaris for decades and were very good at looking unreadable. The room itself was high-ceilinged, the long windows letting in grey light that did the space no favors.

There was a seat prepared for me to my father's left. Lower than his throne, positioned slightly behind, which I suspected was deliberate––my father's little way of trying to keep me from being too visible.

I took the seat, and Caelan settled beside me, as we waited.

But it wasn’t for long.

The doors at the other end of the room opened, and the Torvain cousins walked in.

My breath caught instantly.

They came without an entourage. No guards, no advisors, no armed escort trailing behind them.

Just three men, walking into a foreign throne room completely alone. And somehow, that was more unsettling than an army would have been. An army meant they felt they needed one. Walking in like this meant they had looked at Lunaris and its walls and its king and decided that none of it required any particular preparation on their part.

I couldnt breathe properly any longer.

I had known, on paper, that the bond would react to proximity.

Nothing about knowing or prepping myself for this encounter had prepared me for what happened when they crossed the threshold and the distance between us collapsed from a realm's worth to the length of a single room.

It wasn't a pull exactly. It was more like pressure, like the air had changed all around me, as if something in my chest had been dormant so long it had almost convinced me it was gone and was now making very certain I understood it had simply been waiting. T

he heat that had been grinding me down for thirty-two days lurched, shifted, reached toward something with a desperation that made my hands tighten on the arms of my chair.

I kept my face neutral. It cost me considerably.

I hadn’t let myself think too carefully about what they would look like up close, because thinking about them in any concrete way had felt like a concession I wasn't willing to make.

So I was unprepared for the reality of them.

My gaze locked on Crowen first. He was massive in the way that made the architecture around him look like it had been built for someone smaller. He was tan skinned and broad-shouldered, with ink climbing his forearms and disappearing under his sleeves in patterns that looked ridiculously intricate. His hair was jet black, thick curls sinking around his ears and nape.

He carried himself with a kind of contained tension that made the air around him feel different… like he was holding something back at all times as a matter of habit rather than effort.

He moved like a literal problem that had decided to become a person.

Vizellan strolled into the room slightly to his left.

Where Crowen was massive and full of tension, Vizellan was something more fluid. He was tall and lean in such a way that still managed to be formidable, with hair so pale it was almost white in the current lighting. His eyes seemed careless, trailing over the entire room with calm, unrushed ease. His gaze swept over me patiently, making my body heat everywhere his bright blue eyes touched.

And my attention was drawn to the last cousin, Nashyn.

The first word that registered the moment I looked at his face was… unfair, which was an absurd thing to think about a man who had spent several years conquering the known realm.

But it came regardless.

He was just as pale as Vizellan, with thick dark brown hair and a face that sat somewhere between boyish and dangerous in a way that seemed deeply intentional.

He had the kind of looks that made you look twice and then feel slightly foolish after. His eyes found mine across the room and something in them shifted, quickly and almost imperceptibly.

As he dragged his gaze away from me, the corner of his mouth moved in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

They were… breathtaking. All three of them.

My hands curled into fists.

I found this deeply inconvenient.

They took the seats that had been arranged across from us, taking the room in with the ease of men who had walked into far more hostile spaces than a Lunaris throne room and found them wanting.

Crowen lounged in his chair with boredom. Vizellan crossed one leg over the other with an ease that bordered on insolence. Nashyn settled back with his arms loose at his sides and looked at the ceiling for a moment before bringing his gaze back down to my father with an expression of polite, almost theatrical attention.

My father looked at them.

They looked at my father.

The advisors looked at their hands.

Caelan's arm was pressed against mine and I was grateful for it because my body had decided that thirty-two days of deterioration was suddenly less pressing than the proximity of three men it recognized in a way my mind was still resisting.

Keeping myself upright required more concentration than it should have.

"Thank you for coming," my father said.

"You sent for us," Crowen said. His voice was low and even, the kind that didn't need volume to carry. "We came."

Not you're welcome. Not any acknowledgment of the courtesy in my father's greeting. Just a statement of fact, delivered with the mild interest of a man noting the weather.

My father's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "My daughter—"

"We're aware of why we're here," Vizellan said like he had assessed the conversation and trimmed everything he considered unnecessary from his end of it.

"Are you?” My father's voice had gone careful.

"We've been aware for some time," Nashyn added, and there was something in his tone that was different from his cousins’, lighter on the surface, but with an edge underneath it that you'd cut yourself on if you weren't paying attention. His eyes moved from my father to me as he said it, and they stayed there.

I held his gaze because looking away felt like losing for some reason.

"My daughter is ill," my father said, the word ill coming out like it cost him something.

I could hear it.

For a man like Aldric Winchester, asking anything of the Torvain cousins was an exercise in swallowing things that didn't go down easily. "She needs the bond completed. I'm asking—"

"We'll see to it," Crowen cut him off with ease.

The room went quiet.

My heart started racing in my chest.

My father blinked. His advisors exchanged a look as Caelan's arm pressed a little more firmly against mine.

It was Nashyn who let the quiet breathe for exactly the right amount of time before he added, almost conversationally. “Don’t worry. Your daughter will be well taken care of. She'll have everything she needs." His eyes found mine again across the room, and there was something in them––something that read so much, and there was no other word for it, like satisfaction. "She'll want for nothing."

"Our mate," Vizellan said, with the same tone one might use to note a land boundary or a trade agreement, “and her heat, will be well taken care of."

"We'll take her to Ashenbane,” Crowen added, holding my gaze for the very first time since he arrived. "And we'll put our mate out of her misery."

Electricity charged between our gazes, pulsing in the distance between us.

Silence permeated the room.

But it was broken by the most shocking thing that could ever have come out of the mouths of the men in front of me.

“We’ll help her.” Vizellan held my father’s gaze without flinching as he deadpanned, “But only as her husbands.”