Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 19 of 40

Chapter 19: The Part She Will Not Play

Lirien pushed through the sanctuary door without knocking, and the door swung wide enough to hit the wall.

The healers by the window looked up. The young scribe in the doorway lifted his pen off the register. Three feet from the bed, an elder lay dying with her breath going shallow, and Lirien walked in like a woman come to collect a debt.

Sera stood at the foot of the bed with her hands folded. The founding seal sat in her coat pocket, a warm weight against her ribs. She had taken it from the archive that morning under the Alpha's signature, and she had not let it go since.

Dov stepped between Lirien and the bed. 'The sanctuary admits a witness when the patient names one. You were not named.'

'My sister is in here with a dying woman and a stolen seal,' Lirien said. 'Forgive me for being concerned.'

'Concerned,' Dov said. 'Most people bring flowers.'

Sera heard the thought before the mouth finished moving. She is not supposed to be here yet. Maren was never supposed to call for her.

The amber shimmer sat low around Lirien's head. Under her soft voice ran the second track, thin and fast: If the scribe writes her account first, the seal is hers by morning.

So that was the shape of it. Not grief. A race.

Lirien came past Dov anyway. Dov let her, which was its own message. The sanctuary did not stop people. It watched them.

'Look at her,' Lirien said, to the healers, to the scribe, to the room. 'The founding seal in her pocket, an elder dying three feet away, and she stands there like a guest at a funeral.'

'She is a guest,' Dov said. 'You are not.'

Lirien turned her back on Dov. She had chosen her audience and it was not the guard. 'Do you know what she did? She walked into the archive and took the one object that proves who the founding line is. The Alpha signed for it, and she carried it out, and now she wants us to trust her with it.'

Sera said nothing.

The room waited. That was the part Lirien had come for. She had written the scene on the walk over: the accused woman weeping, the accused woman explaining, and in the explaining, handing Lirien every word she needed for the council.

Sera did not hand her one.

'You are not going to answer me?' Lirien said. Her glasses had slipped down her nose. She pushed them up. 'You are going to stand there and let me say all of it?'

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