Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 14 of 40

Chapter 14: The Cord That Turns on Her

Sera closed her fingers around the signet before Lirien got one step farther into the room. The metal had gone cold in her palm, and the cold was useful. It kept her hand from doing anything her face had not agreed to.

'He's not yours to order,' she said, and she said it to Kael, not to the woman in the doorway.

Lirien stopped just past the threshold. The bell above the door swung once more and went quiet. She had the red cord wound twice around her left wrist, the council's summons cord, waxed and braided, and she held that wrist up against her cardigan like a bracelet she was proud of.

Kael had not moved from the latch. His hand was still on it, and his shoulders had gone still the way they did when he was reading a room before he decided anything.

'Alpha,' Lirien said again. 'I'm sorry to come so early. I tried the pack house first.'

'You didn't try anything,' Dov said from the back room door. She had her apron on over yesterday's shirt, and she did not come all the way in. 'You walked straight here. I heard you on the square from the window.'

Lirien smiled at her. It was a soft, reasonable smile, the kind she used on healers and scribes and anyone who might write something down. 'I'm glad you're here too. Witnesses are good for everyone.'

Sera said nothing. She kept her hand closed around the signet and watched Lirien's mouth and Lirien's hands, and she let the silence sit in the room the way she had learned to let it sit, because silence made people fill it.

Lirien filled it.

'The council issued a summons cord last night,' she said. She turned her wrist so the red braid caught the morning light. 'It names the respondent in the bloodline challenge. It requires her to be produced before the panel within the day, or the panel proceeds in her absence.'

'Produced,' Kael said. 'By whom.'

'By the party who holds the territory she's standing on.' Lirien pushed her glasses up her nose. 'That's you, Alpha. This refuge is inside the border. She's inside the border. You're the only authority who can execute a council summons on pack ground.'

Sera heard the whole of it, and under it, faint and amber at the edges of Lirien's head, she heard the other thing. He won't do it. He'll say the cord doesn't cover a refusal to appear. She needed him to say it out loud, in front of her, so she heard it from him and not from Sera.

So that was the game. Lirien had not come to take her. Lirien had come to make Kael choose in front of a witness, and to make Sera hear him choose.

Sera stayed where she was, and did not help her.

Kael let go of the latch and walked into the room, past Lirien, to the table where the old Alpha insignia and his own signet had been sitting all night. He picked up the insignia and turned it over once in his fingers, and Sera understood he was buying himself the seconds it took to read the cord's actual terms.

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