Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 14

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 14 – The Debt

I put myself between them before I was fully awake – bare feet, no weapons, one hand out like that’s ever stopped

anything.

“Get away from him.”

“I am not here to take him.” Vaelith’s enormous eye rolled toward Rhys’s glowing body. “I am here because I felt the

Ledger open, and I have waited nine thousand years to see it open twice.”

“Explain. Fast.”

“The Moon does not give life away, Hollowborn. She lends it.” The serpent’s voice was almost gentle. “He asked her

to spend his year on you. She agreed – and she wrote his name in the ledger as the debtor. A year purchased must be

repaid in kind. That was always the price.”

The room tilted.

“Repaid how?”

“A year of yours,” Vaelith said. “Or all of his.”

Rhys’s chest rose. He was awake. He’d been awake for a while – I could tell by the way his hand had closed around

my wrist.

“Don’t,” he said hoarsely.

“Shut up.”

“Wren. Look at me.” He pulled me down until I had to. His eyes were wet and furious and absolutely certain. “I had eight years in a cage and eleven days as a monster and about six weeks of you, and I would sell my whole life again

for six weeks. Let her take it. You have a province. You have a war coming. You matter-”

“Vaelith,” I said.

“Yes, thief.”

“You’ve been sealed nine thousand years. You know that ledger better than the Moon does.” I stood up, I was shaking.

My voice wasn’t. “What happens if the debt is stolen?”

Absolute silence.

Then Vaelith began, very slowly, to laugh.

“No one,” it breathed, “has ever asked me that.”

“You said it yourself. Nine thousand years and no one ever offered you anything.” I looked up into that ancient eye.

“So here it is. I’m the Breaker and the Hollowhand and I can take anything – and a debt is a thing. It has a shape. It’s

written down.”

“It is written in the Moon’s own hand-”

“Then I’ll rob the Moon.”

The frost stopped climbing the walls.

“You would make an enemy,” Vaelith said softly, “of the thing that made you.”

“She made me a thief,” I said. “She doesn’t get to be surprised.”

And I reached out my hand toward the white light bleeding through Rhys’s scars, toward the fine silver thread of it

running out of his chest and up, and up, and out through the ceiling and the sky

HOLLOWHAND.

TARGET: THE DEBT OF RHYS OF ASHGRAVE.

THIS CANNOT FAIL.

TAKEN.

The thread snapped.

The light went out.

Rhys sagged back into the pillows, gasping, whole, ordinary, human, alive – and the black mark that came burning up

my own forearm in its place was cold as the bottom of a lake.

THE DEBT HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED.

DEBTOR: WREN CALLOWAY.

THE MOON HAS BEEN INFORMED.

Vaelith looked at my arm for a long, long time.

“She will come for you,” the serpent said.

“Good,” I said. “I’ve got questions.”

And then the god of Blackthorn Tor did something I’ll be turning over in my head for the rest of my life, however long

that is.

It lowered its vast silver head to the floor of my bedroom, all nine thousand years of it, and bowed,

“Then call me when she does, Alpha of the North,” Vaelith said. “I should like to see the face of a Moon who has been

robbed.”

And it was gone, and the frost melted, and I stood in the dark in an oversized shirt with a debt on my arm and a man

in my bed.

Rhys sat up slowly. He looked at the mark. He looked at me.

“You stole the Moon’s ledger,” he said.

“I stole one line of the Moon’s ledger.”

“For me.”

“Don’t get precious about it.”

He got out of the bed and crossed the room and picked me up like I weighed nothing, and I had to grab his shoulders,

and my heart was going like a hunted thing.

“Say it again,” he said against my mouth. “What you said on the wall.”

“You’re mine,” I whispered.

“And?”

“And nobody takes what’s mine. Not Damien. Not Kaldrenn. Not the sky.”

He kissed me like a man who’d waited two lifetimes, and outside the window the northern fog was gone and the

moon over my new province was very, very bright.

Watching.

Let her watch.

Eleven months ago I was wolfless, penniless, and bleeding out on a temple floor while my sister laughed.

Now I own the north, I have a god’s venom in my veins, a beast in my bed, and a debt written in the handwriting of a

goddess who has never, in nine thousand years, been robbed.

She’ll come.

They always come.

And when she does, I’ll be waiting with my hand out.

Because I don’t beg anymore.

I take.