When the Luna Walked Away novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Her Way

I looked at my sister for a long moment.

Then I smiled at her.

"Thank you," I said.

Raine's mouth stayed open.

"For what?"

"For telling me which one of you to bury first."

She backed up a step.

For the first time in her life, she looked at me like I was something with teeth.

Then she turned and hurried away to Tarran's truck, one hand under her belly.

I stood in the yard with Robin until my hands stopped shaking.

Thane found me in the nursery at midnight.

The court guests had gone.

The house was quiet.

Robin was asleep on his back in the cradle by the window, his arms flung up over his head.

I was sitting on the floor next to him.

Thane leaned in the doorway and didn't come in.

"Something happened in the yard," he said. "I felt it all through dinner. You were cold the whole time."

So I told him.

I watched his face go still.

Not angry.

Something worse than angry.

He straightened off the doorframe.

"Where are you going?" I said.

"Redfern."

"It's midnight."

"She'll be asleep. That's easier."

I got up off the floor.

"No."

"She paid five rogues to tear you open with your son still inside you. I'll have her throat in my teeth before the sun's up, and nobody in the North will say one word about it."

"And then what? She's a dead girl who was murdered in her bed by the King. Tarran cries at the funeral. Redfern hates you forever. My son grows up hearing his aunt was a martyr."

"I don't care what Redfern thinks."

"I do."

I crossed the room and stood in front of him.

He didn't move out of the doorway.

He was taller than the doorway, nearly.

"One of those rogues ran," I said. "Down the ridge with his tail between his legs. You let him go."

"I was busy."

"Find him. And when you do, I want him standing in Redfern's Moon Hall, in front of the whole pack, saying her name. I want every wolf who cheered for her at that Fair to hear what she paid for."

"That could take weeks."

"Then it takes weeks."

His jaw was tight.

"You want her to fall in public."

"I want her to fall where I can watch."

He looked down at me, and his eyes changed.

"You're a vicious little thing," he said, low.

"You marked me. You knew what you were getting."

"I didn't. I thought I was getting a border."

"How's that working out?"

His hand came up and closed around the back of my neck.

Not gently.

He pulled me in until my chest was flat against his.

"Badly," he said, and kissed me.

It wasn't like at the truck.

At the truck we'd been angry.

This was hungry, slow and deep, his mouth taking mine like he'd been thinking about it for six weeks and was done thinking.

I pushed my hands up under his sweater.

His skin was so hot it almost hurt.

He walked me backward out of the nursery, one step, two, into the hallway, without letting go of my mouth.

"Robin," I said against his lips.

"Is asleep." He pulled the nursery door almost shut behind us, leaving it open a crack. "My room is the next door. You'll hear him."

"You've thought about this."

"Every night since the Fair," he said. "I sleep in the chair outside your door so I don't walk through it."

I hadn't known.

I felt it in my knees.

I took his hand and pulled him the last steps myself.

His room was cold and dark, one lamp burning low.

I didn't stop to look at it.

I pulled him through the door and he kicked it shut behind us and then I was against it, his body hard against mine, his mouth on my throat.

"Six weeks," he said against my skin. "Six weeks of sleeping in a chair."

"Nobody made you."

"You did. Every night."

His hands found the wide collar of my dress and pulled.

It tore.

The sound of it went right through me.

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