Six Years As His Luna. He Only Wanted My Sister Chapter 10

Seven days after my death.

The elders refused to let Cyrus bury me on his estate.

Because I was no longer Luna.

Cyrus took out his copy of the dissolution scroll.

In front of everyone, he set it on fire.

“I proposed the dissolution.”

“I pushed her to Kane.”

“She never betrayed the Thornes.”

“The Thornes failed her first.”

“If she can’t stay in the family plot, then I’ll keep her in my own rooms.”

Lady Thorne tried to reason with him, eyes red.

“Cyrus, she’s gone.”

“You fighting for this now-she won’t know.”

Cyrus looked at my portrait.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to come back.”

“But what we owe her doesn’t disappear just because she’s dead.”

In the end.

I was buried in the backyard of the estate.

The gravestone read only-

Maeve Sinclair.

Nothing else.

Sia still held the copy of the dissolution scroll with my handprint.

What Cyrus burned was only his.

He couldn’t burn away the fact that I had truly wanted to leave him.

The day of the burial.

He stood by the grave. Wouldn’t let go for a long time.

“Maeve.”

“This time, no seven days.”

“Get up.”

“You said you didn’t want Kane.”

“I’ll cancel it right now.”

But the coffin lowered slowly.

He would never get an answer again.

A month later.

Everyone in the Sinclair family was locked in the dungeon.

My father was sentenced by the elders and arbiters to a hundred lashes.

The day of the flogging, he was bound to the stone pillar.

Every lash tore skin.

The first lash, he still cried innocence.

The tenth, he begged.

The fiftieth, he couldn’t even scream.

By the hundredth, he was a torn rag.

Dragged off and thrown into the deepest cell.

Ronan received eighty lashes and permanent banishment from the core council.

My mother received fifty lashes and exile to the northern border.

When the whip fell, she screamed until her voice broke.

But no lash could bring back the breath I never took.

Lila’s sentence was the heaviest.

A hundred and twenty lashes.

Paraded through the streets.

Life imprisonment in the deepest level of the dungeon.

The night before her punishment, she asked if Cyrus had come.

He never showed.

The day of the flogging, Lila was dragged to the center of the Grayhaven execution ground.

With every charge read, the whip fell.

The first lash, she screamed.

The twentieth, she sobbed Cyrus’s name.

The fiftieth, she begged incoherently.

The eightieth, no sound came out.

The hundredth, she hung limp on the pillar, no part of her unmarked.

By the hundred-and-twentieth lash, she was barely conscious.

Only one phrase kept repeating.

“I just… didn’t want… to lose him…”

No one listened anymore.

The deepest dungeon had no daylight.

Lila spent the rest of her life there.

Every two hours, the guard threw in a piece of black bread hard as stone.

She rotted there.

Cyrus stepped down from his position as Alpha.

He still lived on the estate.

He visited me every day. Watered the flowers on my grave.

Once, he sat from dusk to dawn.

The moonstone never left his hand.

As the sky brightened, he finally said, low,

“Kane was right.”

“I took your funeral, not for you.”

“Because I couldn’t accept that you and I were truly over.”

He raised his hand. Wanted to touch the gravestone.

Stopped.

“You once asked. Did I want you to let go? Or just not too cleanly?”

“Now I know the answer.”

“I didn’t allow it.”

“I wouldn’t truly choose you. And I wouldn’t truly lose you.”

“Six years of care. I let you believe we could go on.”

“One line. This wasn’t our choice. And I told myself I never loved you.”

He lowered his head. Voice hoarse.

“When they locked you in that dark room, were you still waiting for me?”

“When they tied you up, did you still think my men would come?”

“When you slammed into that door, did you hate me?”

No one answered.

“What I fear most isn’t that you hated me.”

“What I fear most is that before you died, you didn’t think of me at all.”

“Because you already knew. I wouldn’t choose you.”

But I could never tell him now.

What I wanted was simple.

I only wanted.

When everyone was pushing me back.

One time. Him on my side.

Not “wait seven more days.”

Not “she means well.”

Not “don’t embarrass your sister.”

Just once.

Him saying,

“Maeve doesn’t want this.”

“Then it ends here.”

But that one sentence.

I never heard it while I was alive.

Cyrus pressed his forehead to the cold gravestone.

“Maeve.”

“This time, whatever you want, I’ll give it.”

But he had said seven days.

And I hadn’t lived past seven days.

For years after.

He visited the grave every month.

Waited day after day.

But no one would give him an answer on the seventh day anymore.