Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 13 of 40

Chapter 13: The Morning He Does Not Claim

Kael set the cup down beside her hand, close enough that she could reach it without turning, and then he moved his coat off the pallet and onto the chair by the wall, where the door was, so that when she looked up she would see the doorway and not him.

Sera looked at the cup. Then at the coat. Then at him.

He had slept on the floor by the stove with his boots off and his back to the room, and he had not asked her for anything, not once, not even when the seal rolled into the light between them and lay there with the founding sigil cut into the glass.

That had been the whole of the night. Neither of them had said a word about it.

'Sit,' she said.

He sat. He took the chair, not the pallet, and he left the coat where it was.

Dov was in the back room with the door half open, pretending to sort dried root by the window, and Sera heard her thought pass through the wall the way she heard everyone's now, flat and dry: He moves like a man who has been trained out of reaching.

He does, Sera thought. Someone taught him that a long time ago. It was not me.

'You can leave whenever you want,' she said. 'You don't need my permission.'

'I know.'

'Then why are you still sitting there.'

Kael looked at the cup he had set down for her, and then at the table, where the birth-cord seal lay on a folded square of grey cloth, and then back at her, and he did not answer the question she had asked. He answered the one underneath it.

'Because if I leave first, it looks like I decided. And you're the one who decides this.'

Sera picked up the cup and drank, because her throat was dry and because it gave her a half-second to weigh him.

He had come to the refuge with the old insignia in his pocket and set it on Dov's table and said it belonged to the refuge and not to him, and she had let him in on terms, and he had kept every one of them. He had stopped when she said stop. He had slept on the floor. He had not asked her to forgive him or come home or give him the twins.

That was the part she could not make sit still. In the first life he had done none of it. In the first life he had let her burn.

← Chapter 12 · All chapters · Chapter 14 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend