The Luna He Erased Chapter 02

The Luna He Erased Chapter 02

Kane came home at 3 a.m., trailing moonwine and Celeste’s perfume — a cloying gardenia that made my wolf gag.

I was in the dark living room reviewing a patient file. Not waiting. But he assumed the world orbited him.

“Sage?” He squinted into the dark, swaying. “Why are you up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

He flicked on the light. He looked magnificent. The tailored suit I’d bought him. The face I had rebuilt. The Alpha confidence I had stitched back into him, transfusion by transfusion, through six months of agony.

He was my masterpiece. And he didn’t even see the artist.

“The party was incredible,” he said, dropping onto the couch beside me. Close, but not touching. Never touching anymore. “Celeste pulled in three Alpha families for the alliance fund. She’s brilliant at this.”

“She is,” I agreed. My calm scared me.

“You should have come.”

“You told me not to.”

“I said it was a PR thing. I didn’t say—”

“You said, and I quote, ‘Celeste handles the optics better. You’d be bored.'”

Something flickered across his face. Guilt, maybe. Then his ego swallowed it whole.

“You’re being sensitive, Sage.”

There it was. The magic word. Sensitive. The silver bullet he fired every time I dared to have a feeling.

“Maybe,” I said. “How’s the venom scarring? Any burning along the left side?”

He touched his jaw. “It’s perfect. Healer Doran says my recovery is the finest he’s ever witnessed.”

My blood went cold. “Healer Doran?”

“He did a follow-up for the press tour. He told the reporters the treatment was historic.”

“Kane.” I set the file down. “I did your treatment. I drew the venom through my own blood. Three times. Doran held the IV bag.”

He blinked. Then waved a dismissive hand. “Right, right. He meant the team. He was crediting the team.”

He hadn’t misspoken. He had handed my sacrifice to another healer — a male healer — because it was easier than telling the world his wife had bled herself half-dead for him.

I stood. “I’m going to bed.”

“Sage.” He caught my wrist. Gentle. Always gentle. That was the cruelty of it — never hard enough to bruise. Just hard enough to hold.

“I love you,” he said. “You know that, right?”

I looked at his hand. The hand whose tendons I had regrown after the venom dissolved them.

“I know,” I said.

In the guest room, I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both palms against my stomach. Two flutters answered me, faint as moth wings.

“I won’t let him make you invisible too,” I whispered.

Then I caught my reflection in the dark window, and my hand drifted to the side of my neck.

Smooth. Unmarked.

Five years of marriage, and Kane Blackwood had never given me his mating mark. “We’re modern wolves,” he’d said on our wedding night. “We don’t need the bite. It’s barbaric.”

I had told myself it was progressive. Romantic, even.

It wasn’t. It was a back door. And he had left it open for five years.

My phone buzzed. A celebrity alert I’d never been able to bring myself to delete.

Celeste Duvall, glowing on a red carpet, telling a reporter: “Kane and I have always been inevitable. Watch the Blood Moon Gala. There’s going to be an announcement that changes everything.”

The Blood Moon Gala. Eight days away.

Then a text from Kane, sent from down the hall, because walking to my door was apparently too far:

Gala next week. Wear gray. Stand near the back — Celeste’s wearing crimson and doesn’t want to clash.

I stared at the screen until the words blurred.

He was dressing me around another woman’s outfit. At the ceremony where she planned to take my place.

Fine, I typed.

Then I marked the date in my calendar with two words:

Blood Moon.