Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 04

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 04 – The Man Who Dreams My Death

“Every night,” he said, and his voice broke on it. “Silver through the heart. A blood moon. A man holding your arms

and a girl in white laughing. I wake up with your blood on my hands, and I don’t know your face, and I don’t know your

name – except I do, I’ve screamed it at the ceiling of that cage eight hundred times – Wren, Wren, Wren -”

His hand was shaking against the wall.

Mine were too.

Because he’d just described my murder. In detail. Down to the white dress.

Something in the universe had cracked open, and both of us had come back through it.

“You dreamed it,” I whispered.

“I lived it.” His eyes searched mine, wild. “In the dream I’m always too late. I always get there when the smoke’s already over the wall. I kill and I kill and it never matters, because you’re already gone.”

The Beast of the Ninth Cage. Coming out of the fire at the northern gate, in the last hour, when everything was already

lost.

I’d assumed he was a stranger.

He hadn’t been coming out of the smoke to fight.

He’d been coming for me.

My knees went. He caught me before I hit the concrete – one arm around my back, careful, absurdly careful for something that size, and lowered us both to the floor of that filthy loading bay.

“You’re real,” he said, sounding stunned. “You’re actually real.”

“So are you.” I laughed, and it came out wet. “God. So are you.”

I gripped his ruined wrist. “What’s your name? Your real one.”

He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn’t answer.

“Rhys,” he said. “It’s been eight years since anyone asked.”

“Rhys.” I let it sit in my mouth. “Okay. Rhys. We’re going to change it.”

“Change what?”

“All of it.”

We drove out of the industrial district at three in the morning with the windows down, because he flinched at closed spaces and I wasn’t going to make him ask.

I bought him food at an all-night diner. He ate four plates. The waitress kept looking at his throat and then looking at me like she was deciding whether to call someone. I tipped her three hundred dollars and she decided not to.

And somewhere between the second and third plate, it happened.

A page opened behind my eyes.

Not a vision. Not a dream. Something older and colder and utterly matter-of-fact, unrolling across my mind like ink soaking into paper:

THE MOON’S LEDGER SOUL AUDITED.

—

Name: Wren Calloway.

Wolf: NONE.

Bloodline: HOLLOWBORN.

Classification: THIEF OF THE MOON.

Rank: FORBIDDEN.

Note: Hollowborn souls carry no wolf, because they were built to carry everything else.

I dropped my fork.

Gift One-HOLLOWHAND. Take any one thing into your hand. It ignores distance, armor, wards, and will. It cannot fail. Cost: one use per twelve hours.

Gift Two-BREAKER. No lock, chain, seal, ward, cage, or oath may hold against your touch.

That was the collar. That was the collar.

Warning: You have been dead once. The Moon does not forgive twice.

“Wren.” Rhys’s hand covered mine on the table. “Your eyes just went silver.”

I looked up at him with my whole world rearranging itself.

Twenty-three years of being the freak. The defect. The wolfless girl they let stay out of pity while she quietly paid

—

every bill in the pack.

I hadn’t been broken.

I’d been loaded.

“Rhys,” I said slowly. “What if I told you I could take anything? Anything at all. From anyone. And they could never stop

me.”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t blink.

He leaned back in the booth, looked at the silver still fading out of my eyes, and smiled for the first time – slow,

sharp, terrible.

“Then I’d say we’re not running,” he said. “We’re hunting. What do you want first?”

I thought about the northern wall. About Kaldrenn wolves who couldn’t be cut down fast enough. About what kills a

werewolf when nothing else will.

And I thought about the sealed thing under Blackthorn Tor, and the poison in its veins that no healer in the world can

cleanse.

“There’s a serpent chained under a mountain,” I said. “It’s been there nine thousand years.”

“And?”

“And I’m going to rob it.”