Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 10 of 40

Chapter 10: The Heirs He Rejected

The amber shimmer was already active when Sera stepped out of the council chamber, a low warm haze clinging to every head in the corridor, and she hated that she could not turn it off, not since the rebirth, not since she woke on the stones of the rejection circle with two lives stacked in her skull and a second heartbeat under her own. She kept her face still. The gift was not a kindness. It was a ledger, and tonight she intended to balance it.

Kael was waiting at the far end of the antechamber, by the high window, Lirien's custody statement folded in his fist. He had not slept. She could read that much without the amber, in the set of his shoulders, in the way he stood too still, the way he did when he was holding something down.

'You knew,' he said, before she reached him. 'Before the scribe read it. You knew what she filed.'

'Everyone in that room knew what she filed,' Sera said. 'It was read aloud.'

She did not stop walking until the stone ledge was between them, cold through the sleeve of her coat. Through the wall, the council's voices carried low and unhurried, deciding the shape of her children's lives without her in the room.

Kael's jaw worked. 'I didn't know she would name them.'

'You wrote a grant that named them first.'

'That was different.'

'It was the same.' She let it sit. 'You wrote them into pack protection without my name on the page. She read your document and wrote the next one. You handed her the pen.'

His hand came off the ledge. For a moment she thought he would argue, and she was ready for it, the whole clean shape of it. He didn't. He set the statement down on the stone between them and flattened his palm over the signature, as if he could press the ink back into the page.

'Are they mine,' he said.

Not a question with a question mark. He asked it flat, the way a man asks a thing he already knows and wants the room to say back to him.

Sera looked at him. The amber light was already gathering at the edges of her sight, thin and warm, the way it always came when a mind near her started working hard. She held it back. She wanted to hear him first.

'What do you remember,' she said, 'of the bond night.'

He went quiet. The window light laid a bar across the floor between them and neither of them crossed it.

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