The Luna He Erased Chapter 07

The Luna He Erased Chapter 07

Teaching was a revelation.

I stood in front of a lecture hall of sixty first-year healing students and felt, for the first time in years, like a whole person.

Not a wife. Not a footnote. Not a ghost in gray standing at the back of someone else’s party.

A healer. A teacher. A mind.

“Vampire venom,” I said, pointing to the projected bloodwork, “doesn’t kill the wolf. It convinces the wolf’s own blood to kill him. To purge it, you’re not fighting poison. You’re fighting a lie the body has decided to believe.”

A student in the front row raised her hand. “Healer Whitlock – is it true you did the Blackwood purge? The one they’re

teaching at Silver Cross?”

The room went silent. Sixty pairs of eyes. My belly, thirty-two weeks round, hidden behind the lectern.

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

“What was it like? Pumping that venom through your own heart?”

I considered the question honestly.

“Like loving the wrong person,” I said. “You survive it. But your blood is never quite the same.”

Nervous laughter. We moved on to the zygomatic arch.

After class, Madam Thorne found me in the faculty lounge. “There’s a chronicler outside. Rhea Castellan, from the Continental Times. She’s writing an investigative piece on the Blackwood case. She has your healing logs. All of them.”

My blood chilled. “How did she find me?”

“She didn’t say.” Thorne sat down across from me. “Sage. I’ve been in medicine for forty years. I’ve watched men take credit for women’s work since before you were born. You have a chance to put your name on your own miracle. Not for

For every woman healer who’s been erased.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.

That night I sat in my apartment, ankles swollen, back screaming, the chronicler’s card on the counter. I picked it up. Put it

down. Picked it up again.

My phone buzzed. Unknown number.

I answered, expecting a telemarketer.

“Sage.

His voice. Low and wrecked and unmistakable. Every nerve in my body fired at once- and where the bond used to be, the

scar tissue ached.

“Don’t hang up,” Kane said quickly. “Please. I know I don’t deserve-”

“How did you get this number?”

“I’ve spent four months and a fortune. It doesn’t matter. Sage, I need to see you. I need to-”

“There’s nothing to see. You watched me for five years and never saw anything.”

“I read the logs. All of them. I made them public. I forced the retraction. I told the world-”

“Kane.” My voice cut through his rambling like a scalpel. “I don’t care about the credit. I never cared about the credit. cared about you. I cared about being seen by the one person who was supposed to see me. And you looked straight hrough me while another woman wore my miracle on a magazine cover.”

Silence. Long enough that I heard him breathing – uneven, ruined.

“I see you now,” he whispered.

“Too late. The Blood Moon doesn’t give refunds.”

I hung up. Blocked.the number. Then I sat down on the kitchen floor and cried for the first time in months.

Not for him. For the girl who had handwritten her wedding vows on an index card – I will fix what is broken, I will hold what is fragile, I will stay when it’s easier to leave – and believed with every cell of her body that love was enough.

It wasn’t.

The twins kicked furiously, both at once, reacting to my hammering heart. I pressed my hands over them and breathed until we all went quiet.

“It’s just us, I whispered. “It’s enough. I promise.”

Two days later, at thirty-four weeks, under a rising blood-tinged moon, my water broke.

Six weeks early.

And I was completely alone.