The Luna He Erased Chapter 09

The Luna He Erased Chapter 09

He arrived at 6:47 a.m.

I knew because the entire maternity floor felt it – that low pressure-drop of Alpha power rolling through the building like weather. Nurses paused mid-step. The wolf-born orderly dropped a tray.

I was in a wheelchair outside the NICU when my mother planted herself in the corridor like a fortress in á cashmere

cardigan.

“Stay here,” she told me. “I’ll handle it.”

She didn’t have to go far. The elevator opened, and there he was.

Kane Blackwood. Unshaven, wild-eyed, still in yesterday’s shirt, his power flailing off him in waves he wasn’t even trying to control. The most feared Alpha on the continent, and he looked like a man who had crawled here.

“Where are they?” His voice cracked on it. “Elizabeth – please. Where are my-”

“They’re not yours,” my mother said, quiet and lethal. “Not legally. Father: Unknown. She left the line blank.”

I watched the words hit him like silver.

“She can’t do that.”

“She can. She did. You have no claim, Kane. You rejected a bond’s worth of claims the day you put another woman on

television and thanked her for your life.”

“I made mistakes-”

“You didn’t make mistakes.” Her voice rose, sharp and merciless, carrying down the corridor to where I sat unseen. ‘You made choices. Every single day, you chose someone else. You chose your ego. You chose Celeste. You chose the version of yourself that looked good on camera. And Sage chose you. Every single time, she chose you. Until she couldn’t

anymore.”

His legs gave. The Alpha of Silvercrest sank onto a plastic hospital chair like an old man.

“I just want to see them,” he whispered. “Through the glass. I won’t- I just need to know they’re real.”

My mother looked at him for a long, long moment. Then she looked down the corridor. At me.

It was my call. It had always been my call. That was the whole point.

I thought about it. I’ll admit that. I thought about the man who once hummed jazz standards while shaving, as if the world

were a stage built just for him. I thought about index-card vows and forty-one nights on a cot.

Then I thought about gray dresses and guest rooms and stand near the back.

+ shook my head once.

My mother turned back to him. “No.”

He didn’t rage. That was the strangest part He just nodded, slowly, like a man accepting a sentence he’d already passed on himself and then he walked to the far end of the corridor, where a small square window looked into the NICU from thirty feet away. Too far to see faces. Close enough to see two monitors rising and falling.

He pressed his forehead against the glass.

He stood there for six hours. Security asked him to leave twice. He showed them something – a check, a card, I never found out and they let the most powerful Alpha alive stand at a window like a beggar at a church door.

When I was wheeled past at dusk, sedated and aching, I saw the glass had fogged with his breath. He had written something in the fog with one finger, and it was already fading:

I’m sorry.

I felt nothing, I told myself. The door inside me was iron, and iron doesn’t ache.

That night, Maeve called.

“He’s gone home,” she said. “But Sage – his lawyers filed this morning. A blood-claim petition with the Moon Council. Paternity recognition and joint custody of Alpha-born heirs.”

My arms tightened around nothing. My babies were forty feet away in glass boxes and I suddenly wanted them against

my skin.

“Can he win?”

Maeve was silent a beat too long.

“Under the old laws, Alpha-born heirs belong to the bloodline,” she said. “Sage. He could take them.”