I Refused to Be His Luna Again novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Plum and Smoke

I went cold from my scalp to my heels, and I did not move.

His thumb stayed where it was, over the burn.

"No," I said.

"Marit."

"No. Linnea pulled you out of that river. The whole pack knows it."

"The whole pack was told it."

I slid off his lap and pulled the blanket up around me.

My hands were shaking, and I hated that he could see it.

In my first life I had spent twenty years second to a girl who had earned it.

I had swallowed that, every day, as the price of having been the lesser woman.

If I had earned the thing instead, then every one of those days had been stolen.

I could not stand in that all at once.

"I don't remember Ashfall," I said. "I woke up in Gran's infirmary with a burn and a blank."

"I know."

"So you can't tell me it was me."

"I'm not telling you." Anders sat up slowly, naked to the waist, with the gray light on his scars. "I'm telling you what I remember, and I'm telling you what I smelled."

"Which was what?"

"Plum," he said. "And woodsmoke, like a cold hearth."

I stared at him.

"Linnea smells of honey and lavender," he said. "She always has. I told myself for four years that the river was a fever dream, and that the plum was the pack's orchard."

He reached out and lifted the end of my braid.

He put it to his face.

"It's this," he said. "It's been this since the day you came back from the gate with snow on your coat."

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