Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 16 of 40

Chapter 16: Before the Sanctuary Door

Sera caught Kael's sleeve before his hand found the inner door.

He stopped with his knuckles an inch from the wood. Beyond it, the sanctuary corridor ran dark and cold toward Maren's chamber, and a healer's lamp moved somewhere down there, slow, the way people walk when they are keeping watch over someone who might not see morning.

She pulled. He came back a step, then another, and let her turn him until his back was to the door and hers was to the room.

'You don't get to open that yet,' she said.

Kael looked down at her hand on his sleeve. He did not ask what she wanted. He had learned that much at Dov's table, and the learning sat in him like a new muscle, still sore.

'Then what do I get,' he said.

She let go of his sleeve and put her palm flat on his chest instead.

'One hour,' she said. 'That's what I'm offering. Not forgiveness. Not the pack. Not a door in my life for you to walk through whenever the mood takes you.' Her hand stayed where it was. Under it, his heart was going faster than his face admitted. 'One hour, and when it's done you go back to being the man who waits until I send for him.'

'And if I say no.'

'Then you sit in that chair by the window and count the cracks in the ceiling, and I go in to Maren alone.'

He was quiet. She had heard him be quiet in council rooms, in the archive, at the threshold of Dov's refuge with a summons cord at his feet. This quiet was different. This one had a cost in it, and he was paying it.

'One hour,' he said.

She kissed him before he finished the word.

He made a sound low in his chest, surprise more than want, and then it turned into want, and his hands came up and stopped, hovering, asking without words. She took one of them and put it where she wanted it, at the small of her back, and he pulled her flush and the whole length of him pressed against her and there was no more asking in the room.

Her own hands were not steady. That was fine. She had spent five rejection nights being steady in rooms full of people who wanted her to break, and here, in a borrowed guest room with a dying woman down the hall, she was allowed to shake.

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