Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 18 of 40

Chapter 18: The Witness Who Tests Him

Sera heard the elder's thought before Maren's mouth moved.

A thin amber thread shivered around the old woman's head, and the unspoken sentence unspooled in Sera's ears: If the Alpha holds the seal, the record will show he claimed it for the line. Sera held her face still. Outside the sickroom window the grove went silent, every bird and every creak of the old house swallowed, until only that thought hung in the air.

So that was the shape of it. The dying elder wanted the old record to read that Kael had taken Sera's seal into his keeping, which would make Sera his dependent and Kael the keeper of everything she carried. A neat little cage, built out of one sentence and a piece of black stone.

Maren's thin fingers caught the edge of Kael's sleeve and pulled him down to the floor beside Sera, ignoring the empty chair against the wall. Her grip was still strong for a woman the healer had already given up on. The room smelled of pine resin and old linen, and a single blue bowl on the windowsill held three wilting sprigs of rosemary, the kind Maren's mother used to press into the pack's healing salves. Sera remembered the first life, standing in this same room with the same bowl, begging Maren to let her save the pack's failing wards, and Maren's answer had been a closed door. Tonight the bowl was the only thing in the room that had not changed.

Maren looked at Sera. 'Place the seal in his hand.'

The words came out even, as if she were asking for a cup of water.

Sera closed her fingers around the black disc and left it where it was. She did not correct the elder. She did not say, You have the wrong person in the trap. She filed the thought away, the way she had learned to file everything since the night she woke up in her own past, and waited.

Kael did not reach for it either.

Maren's gaze stayed on him, hard and patient. The healer shifted against the wall but said nothing. The silence stretched.

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