The Luna He Erased Chapter 10

The Luna He Erased Chapter 10

The twins came home after nineteen days in the NICU.

Nineteen days of pressing my hands against incubator glass, of pumping milk a sterile room while machines beeped the rhythm of my children’s survival. Nineteen days of preparing for war.

My apartment was small, but it was ready. Two bassinets. A thrift-store rocking chair. Stacks of onesies that smelled like lavender. My mother stayed a week, holding babies at Sa.m. while I slept in ninety-minute fragments. Then she left, and it

was just the three of us.

And the Council hearing, circling closer every day.

One night, feeding Iris at 2 a.m., I made the mistake of opening my academy email.

From: K. Blackwood

Subject: I know you won’t read this

Sage.

I stood at that window for six hours. I couldn’t see their faces. Only the monitors.

I don’t deserve to know their names. I know that.

But I need you to know I told the truth. Every outlet. Every chronicle. You saved my life. Not Celeste. Not Doran. You.

I am drowning, Sage. I am drowning in a fortune you funded, breathing through a body you rebuilt, and I can’t look in the

mirror because everything I see belongs to you.

I’m not asking you to come back. I’m not asking for forgiveness.

I’m asking you to let me be sorry. Even if it changes nothing.

Kane

I read it once. I closed the laptop. I held Iris against my chest until her heartbeat slowed mine down.

I didn’t reply. Not because I was angry – anger had burned through me months ago, leaving only ash. I didn’t reply because I had nothing left to say.

But his lawyers had plenty to say. So I called Maeve.

“Fight it,” I said. “Fight all of it.”

“Sage, a Council tribunal is public. Everything comes out. The finances. The transfusions. The rejection. Your children’s Saames will be in every chronicle on the continent.”

I looked at Leo, asleep with bis tiny fist curled against his cheek. At Iris, warm against my heart.

“Let it come out,” I said. “All of it. Every word.”

Three days before the tribunal, my phone rang. Rhea Castellan. The chronicler.

“Healer Whitlock. Before you hang up – I’m not calling for a quote.” Her voice was strange. Careful. “I’ve spent four months investigating the Blackwood case. The healing logs, the finances, the gala. But I kept pulling one thread that didn’t fit, and last night it came loose.”

“What thread?”

“The vampire ambush. Six months of digging, and I finally traced the payment. The vampires who attacked your husband were hired, Sage. It was a contract.”

The apartment went very still. Even the twins seemed to stop breathing.

“Hired by whom?”

“The payment ran through a shell foundation in the Crimson Fang territory. Through a publicist’s escrow account.” Rhea paused. “Sage. The contract was commissioned by Celeste Duvall.”

The bottle slipped in my hand. I caught it on pure surgeon’s reflex.

“She paid them to attack him,” Rhea went on, relentless. “Non-lethal contract-venom, not a kill. She wanted him broken, not buried. Broken men need saving. And she had already booked the photographers for the hospital before the ambush

even happened,”

I stared at the wall, my whole chest ringing like a struck bell.

The venom I had pumped through my own heart. The forty-one nights. The destruction of my marriage, my wolf, my

name.

All of it had been a publicity stunt.

The woman he thanked on live television – the woman he nearly crowned under the Blood Moon –

was the one who had ordered his death.