Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 2 of 40

Chapter 2: The Price of Leaving

Kael catches Sera on the border road, offers her money and a signed travel order in exchange for leaving before the pack can call her withdrawal deliberate, and she accepts the order and the money while refusing his apology, then folds the order into her coat and tells him his own seal has just made her departure official.

Kael's hand closed around her wrist two steps short of the boundary stone, and the amber shimmer lit up behind her eyes before she had even turned.

He had run to catch her. His overcoat was open, his breath uneven, and there was pine sap on the heel of his boot from cutting through the grove instead of the road. He had not wanted anyone to see him follow her.

'Sera.'

She looked at his hand on her wrist. He did not let go.

'You have somewhere to be,' she said. 'They are still pouring the wine.'

'I signed this before the ceremony ended.' He let go of her and put a folded document into her free hand. The paper was still warm from his coat. 'A travel order. Neutral passage, both directions, no escort required.'

She did not open it. She could hear him thinking, and the thought was not the one he was saying out loud.

Get her past the marker tonight, before Aldren logs the withdrawal as voluntary. If she is gone by dawn, the record closes clean and nobody has to ask her anything.

So that was the shape of it. Not a gift. A formality with a ribbon.

'And money,' he said. He took an envelope from his inner pocket and held it out. 'Enough to reach Ashfen Crossing. Enough to stay a while.'

Sera looked at the envelope. Then at him.

'You are paying me to leave quietly.'

'I am paying you to leave safely.' His jaw worked once. 'There is a difference, and you know it.'

She did know it. She also knew what the difference cost him to say, and she filed that away too, next to everything else she had collected tonight.

'Say the rest,' she said.

'What rest?'

'The rest of what you came out here to tell me.'

Kael was quiet for a moment. The torches were small behind them now, and the road was dark, and somewhere in the trees an owl had stopped mid-call to listen.

'I am sorry,' he said.

There it was.

She did not move. She did not let her face do anything at all, and she was good at that, better than she had ever wanted to be. Two words, and he thought they could be handed over like the envelope.

'No,' she said.

'No?'

'You do not get to apologize and also get the quiet.' She said it the way she would have said the weather. 'You chose this. In front of the whole pack, with the torches lit and the elders watching. That was your choice, Kael. Not the Moon's. Not mine.'

His thumb moved along his jaw. He was thinking about the bond-reading, about the two witnesses, about the paper he had signed in good faith, and none of those thoughts were an answer to what she had just said.

'You think I wanted this,' he said.

'I think you did it.'

He had no reply to that. Good.

She opened the travel order and read it properly, holding it up toward the last of the torchlight. Emergency bloodline matters, sealed with the old Alpha stamp, the one that predated his father and his father's father. He had used that seal to move her across a border without naming her, which meant the order would pass any gate in the territory without a single question.

He had not thought about that. She had.

'This is generous,' she said.

'It is practical.'

'It is both.' She folded it along its own crease, twice, and slid it into her coat, and the paper settled against the wax impression and the camera and the tin box and everything else he did not know she was carrying. 'I will keep it.'

Something eased in his shoulders. He thought he had won.

He thought she was a woman taking severance pay because she had nothing left to fight with, and the thought came off him in a warm amber wash, relieved and a little guilty and entirely wrong.

Let her go. It is the kindest thing left to do.

Sera almost laughed. She swallowed it instead, because a laugh would have told him more than she was willing to give.

'Take the money,' he said.

'I intend to.'

She took the envelope and did not open it. She did not need to count it. Whatever was in there, it was not the point. The point was already folded against her ribs.

'You will not come back,' he said. It was not a question, but his voice went up at the end of it anyway.

'You are the one who told me to go.'

'I did not.'

'You did. Not out loud.' She met his eyes, and for one second she let him see exactly how much she had heard tonight, and how little of it she intended to repeat. 'You have been telling me to go since the moment you stepped onto that platform.'

Kael went still. It was the stillness she had watched him use on men twice his size, the one that ended arguments, the one that made rooms go silent and elders sit down. It did not work on her. Not anymore.

'Who told you the record had already been opened?' he asked.

There it was. He had said it without meaning to, and now he knew he had said it, and the two of them stood on the dark road with it hanging between them.

'No one told me anything,' she said.

'Then how do you know what Aldren is doing in the archive right now?'

So Aldren was in the archive right now. That was useful.

'You just told me,' she said.

His jaw tightened. 'Sera.'

'Goodnight, Kael.'

She turned and kept walking, and she did not hurry, because hurrying would have meant she was afraid, and she was not afraid of him. She was afraid of the six weeks. She was afraid of a dying woman in a sanctuary who would not hold on past the new moon. She was afraid of every day she did not yet have the seal in her hands.

He followed her.

She heard him on the road behind her, one step and then another, and she did not slow down and she did not speed up, and the distance between them stayed exactly the same, which meant he was matching her pace on purpose.

'You should go back,' she said, without turning. 'They will notice you are missing.'

'Let them.'

'That is not like you.'

'No,' he said. 'It is not.'

They walked like that for a while, past the last fence post and the first of the old oaks, and the night smelled like new leaves and cold soil and the faint burned-sugar smell of the torches still guttering behind them.

Then he said, 'Was it my choice?'

She stopped.

'What?'

'The rejection.' His voice was low and careful, the way a man sounds when he is asking a question he has been carrying for hours. 'You said it was my choice. I want to know if you believe that.'

Sera turned around.

He was standing in the middle of the road with his hands at his sides and no one watching, no elders, no witnesses, no ceremony. Just him, and the question, and the amber shimmer rising off him like heat off a stone, and underneath it the thing he would never say out loud.

I do not know why I did it. I have not known since the words left my mouth.

She could have told him. She could have told him about the forged reading and the two witnesses and the sister who had planned it down to the minute, and she could have watched his face change, and it would have felt like winning.

She did not.

'Yes,' she said. 'You chose it. Whatever was done to you to make it easy, you are the one who said the words.'

He flinched. It was small, and he hid it fast, but she saw it.

'Then I suppose that is that,' he said.

'It is.'

He reached out, slowly, and this time it was not for her wrist. He reached for the folded corner of the travel order where it showed at the edge of her coat, as if he meant to take it back, as if the whole thing had been a mistake he was only now noticing.

Sera stepped back and pressed her palm flat over the paper through the wool.

'No,' she said. 'You signed it. You sealed it. And now you have just made my departure official, with your own hand and your own stamp.'

His hand stayed in the air between them.

'The record closes clean,' she said. 'That is what you wanted, isn't it?'

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