The Luna He Erased Chapter 06

The Luna He Erased Chapter 06

I didn’t get blood. I got something stranger.

Two weeks after the Lunar Times piece, my mother called at midnight, her voice tight with fury and something else I

couldn’t name.

“He came to the house,” she said. “Kane. He stood on my porch and begged. He got on his knees, Sage On my doorstep. Like a dog.”

My hand found my belly. The twins stirred. “What did you say?”

“I told him my daughter was dead. That the woman he married no longer existed. And that if he ever came back, I’d release the visitor logs and the healing records to every outlet on the continent.”

“Good.”

“He said- she hesitated. “He said he already had. Released them himself. This morning.”

I sat down slowly. “What?”

“Turn on the news.”

I did. And there he was.

Kane Blackwood, standing alone at a podium, no PR team, no Celeste, no polish. He looked terrible. Thinner. The face I’d ebuilt gone sharp and hollow, like grief had whittled away everything soft. His hands – the hands I’d given back to him –

were visibly shaking.

“Six months ago, I nearly died of vampire venom,” he said into a forest of microphones. “Every healer on the continent efused my case. One did not. She drew the venom through her own blood. Three times. She slept on a cot beside my bed or forty-one nights. She fed me when my throat was burned black.”

He looked straight into the cameras.

“Her name is Sage Whitlock. My wife. My Luna. The woman I erased.”

The reporters erupted. He raised his hand, and the Alpha command in it silenced them.

“Every prior account crediting anyone else was false, and the falsehood was mine. I let the world believe a lie because the lie was prettier. The Lunar Times will print a full retraction or face my lawyers. Celeste Duvall visited my sickbed twice once with photographers, once with a gift basket. The visitor logs are now public.”

He paused. His jaw – my jaw, the jaw I rebuilt – worked once.

“My wife purged death from my blood; funded my company with her inheritance, and held my pack together while I recovered In return, I gave her a guest room and a footnote. The failure was mine. It has always been mine.”

He walked off without taking questions.

The internet detonated. Within hours my name was trending across three continents. Healing forums dissected my transfusion technique. The Lunar Times printed the retraction in thirty-six-point font. Celeste’s sponsors began dropping her one by one, like petals off a dying rose.

And nobody could find me. The Blood Moon Luna had vanished, and the mystery only fed the fire.

My academy inbox flooded. Interview requests. Conference invitations A fellowship offer from the Silver Cross Institute, the most prestigious healing center in the world

I read none of the articles about him. Almost none.

One quote got through my defenses anyway – an interview with Mira, the old nurse who’d assisted the second

ransfusion:

“Healer Whitlock pumped that venom through her own heart for six hours. At one point her hands started seizing, and she stopped, took three breaths, and kept going. I’ve worked with hundreds of healers. She was the best I’ve ever seen. And her husband never once came to thank her.”

I closed the laptop and sat in the dark.

The twins rolled and kicked, restless, as if they could taste my heartbeat changing.

“That changes nothing,” I told them quietly. “Words after the wound are just noise.”

But somewhere in the back of my mind, in the place where the old Sage still lived, a small voice asked the question I

efused to speak aloud.

His trackers were still out there. The birth was twelve weeks away. And the old healer’s warning still rang in my ears like a

>ell.

The day they’re born, every wolf for a hundred miles will feel it.

What happens when he finds out?