Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 05

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 05 – What the Ledger Says About Thieves

Blackthorn Tor is a two-day drive and a six-hour climb, and Rhys did the climb barefoot because nothing in a store fit

him.

We talked the whole way up. It was the strangest thing I’d known him for thirty hours and I’d never in my life talked

to anyone like that.

I told him everything. The rejection. Cassie’s knife. Damien’s hands on my arms. Julian at the northern gate. Margo

dying in a village that shouldn’t have burned.

He listened without interrupting, and every so often his hands would flex like he was strangling someone in his head.

“Say his name again,” he said finally.

“Which one?”

“The one who held your arms.”

“Damien Thorne. Alpha of Silverpine.”

Rhys nodded once, filed it somewhere, and said nothing else about it. Somehow that was scarier than a threat.

Halfway up the ridge, I finally asked the question that had been eating me.

“Why were you in the Pits? You had a pack once. I can hear it in how you talk.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“I was fifteen,” he said. “My father was Alpha of a border pack called Ashgrave. Kaldrenn came over the line one

winter and offered him a deal – open the pass, keep his title. He refused.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “They killed him and everyone in that valley in a night. Four hundred people. I lived because my mother put me under her body.”

I stopped walking.

“They collared me and sold me south,” he said. “I was a curiosity for a while. Then I was a champion. Then I was just a thing they couldn’t kill.”

Kaldrenn. The same wolves who would come through my fog in three hundred and thirty-nine days.

“Rhys.” My throat hurt. “The war I told you about. The one coming. It’s them.”

He looked out at the valley, and the storm in his eyes went completely, perfectly still.

“Then I’m not leaving in seven days,” he said.

The Tor’s summit was ringed in old standing stones and a light that hurt to look at directly.

I saw it before I heard it.

—

Nine thousand years chained, and it was still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen a serpent of pale silver coils, big enough to wrap the hill twice, scales throwing back moonlight like a shattered mirror. When it lifted its head, the sky over Blackthorn cracked open with lightning.

“HUMAN THINGS.” The voice came from inside my skull. “NINE THOUSAND YEARS AND THEY STILL SEND ME

CHILDREN.”

It struck.

–

Rhys threw me behind him and the ward flared gold and slammed the serpent’s skull sideways with a boom that

knocked us both flat.

The seal held. I’d counted on it holding.

I got up, wiped blood off my lip, and stepped as close to that golden wall as I dared.

“Hi,” I said.

“YOU SMELL WRONG,” it hissed. “YOU SMELL OF DEATH AND DEBT. WHAT ARE YOU?”

“I’m the person who’s about to take something from you.”

The serpent laughed. It was a horrible sound, like a mountain grinding.

“NOTHING TAKES FROM VAELITH.”

I reached out my hand toward it, through the ward, and pulled.

HOLLOWHAND – TAKEN.

ACQUIRED: SOULROT VENOM (FORBIDDEN).

Every strike delivers rot. It bypasses hide, silver, armor, and blessing. The rotted cannot be healed, cannot be

cleansed, cannot shift. Stacks three times. Feeds on every poison you consume.

Heat rushed up my arm and settled behind my teeth like a second heartbeat.

The mountain screamed.

“THIEF!” Vaelith’s coils smashed against the seal, again, again, cracking stone. “GIVE IT BACK, LITTLE HOLLOW

THING, GIVE IT BACK OR I WILL UNMAKE-”

“Twelve hours,” I called up cheerfully, backing away. “I’ll be back. You’ve got a lot of things I want.”

The serpent went abruptly, horribly quiet.

Then it lowered its enormous head until one eye the size of a car door was level with me, and I swear it smiled.

“I know what you are, Hollowborn,” it whispered. “And so does he.”

My blood turned to ice water.

“He who?”

“The one who dreams your death,” Vaelith purred. “Did you truly think he dreams it by accident? Ask your beast, little

thief. Ask him what he was, the last time the world ended.”