The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 488

Chapter 488

He wasn’t writing anymore, or tapping, just sitting cross-legged in front of the wall, staring at it like he could make the answers come out of it with sheer will alone. I felt my chest squeeze at the sight.

He was only doing this to protect his pack; the very pack that was once promised to him, and I stood as a threat without even meaning to. And he was still trying to ensure its survival. Even with the chance that he might lose his position as Alpha, all that mattered to him was seeing the pack thrive for the first time in his life.

I eased out of the sleeping bag, draped my coat over my shoulders, and shuffled over. He didn’t look up when I lowered myself down next to him.

We sat in silence for a while.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” I finally said. “The timing was awful.”

“You were half-crushed and babbling,” he said. “Forget it.”

My lips pursed. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t just ‘babbling’, that I knew what I’d heard, but I bit the words back for now. Like Dominic said-neither the time, nor the place. Even if Stephanie had plans like that, it wasn’t like she was going to traipse up a mountain and through an entire underground booby-trapped tunnel system to come for me. I could deal with it later, when we were back at the village.

“You know we weren’t always here,” Bastian suddenly said. “Goldenveil, the valley, all of it. That came later. Before that, we were on the road for years. My first memories involve running from rogues with a pack on my back.”

I turned to look at him. He kept his eyes on the wall.

“I was young, but I remember the hunger. I remember Mom’s ledger most of all. She kept it even then-every scrap of food, every penny, every mouth to feed. People used to call her heartless when she would cut people’s rations in half the moment they started getting a little too fat.”

I looked down at my lap and let him go on.

“Everything she does is arithmetic,” he said. “Cost and gain, for the family. It’s not warm, but it kept three boys alive who had no business surviving what we did. So when you tell me she poisoned a prisoner in her own village -“He shook his head. “It doesn’t add up. There’s no gain in it.”

Unless there was, I thought. Unless Vivian herself had become a cost to something greater.

But I looked at my brother, at the exhaustion carved under his eyes and the bandages around his shoulder, and I kept it to myself. Maybe I’d been too harsh. Maybe he was right, and the dream was just my rattled brain making things up. It wasn’t a knot I was going to untangle tonight, so I set it aside, next to everything else I couldn’t fix from the inside of a mountain.

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