All Chapters of His Rejected Luna, His Hidden Son: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"You should be afraid of me," he said.We were in the dark of a room near the top of the tower, a city's worth of light burning below the windows, his hand not quite touching my face — hovering, the way you hold a palm near a flame to test it."I used up all my fear earlier tonight," I told him. "Somebody took the last of it in front of three hundred people."He didn't laugh. I was already learning he didn't, much. But something eased at the corner of his mouth, and from him that felt bigger than laughter from anyone else."You knelt to no one," he said. "Down there. The whole room went to the floor, and you sat there and told a king to enter a contest.""I didn't know you were a king.""Would it have changed anything?"I thought about it honestly. That was the mistake. Honesty is how the night turned dangerous."No," I said. "I'm fresh out of things to lose. That tends to make a girl rude."His thumb finally touched my cheekbone. Barely. And the gravity I'd felt at the bar pulled tig

The trick to walking into a place you don't belong is to walk like you're already late for being there.I'd spent five years as a hospital records clerk — a polite title for the person who knows exactly how every institution lies to itself on paper. I knew what a credentials lanyard looked like. I knew the bored cadence of a clinical liaison who's done this a hundred times. I built the badge in an afternoon, in a borrowed back office, on a laminator that wasn't mine, and I wore it clipped to a blazer that had cost me a month of groceries, and I walked through the white marble lobby of the Draven medical division like the building owed me a meeting.Crane Bio-Registry, external consult, pediatric hematology, Dr. E. Crane's office, they're expecting me.They weren't. Crane had named the place to me and then, in the same breath, begged me never to go near it; he wasn't expecting me, and he'd have stopped me if he could. But his name opened the right doors, and his old credentials were re

I didn't faint. I didn't beg. I'd been thrown away once already that month — I knew exactly how long the fall took.So I sat down. In his chair. The one a guest is never offered."Put the ultimatum away," I said. "It's beneath a man who can have a city searched. I crossed a country to bring him to your door. I'm the only reason he's breathing inside your walls."The gold in his eyes burned slower. "Then name your terms. Since you've decided you have them."I had three. Built in the elevator. Alone. Expecting no help."One. His treatment starts tonight. Before a vow, before a signature. I don't trade his heartbeat for a promise. I've been promised things by powerful men in ceremonial whites. I know what those weigh."His jaw moved. I'd landed something."Two. I'm not a brood mare you're acquiring to launder an heir. I keep my name. I keep my will. Every choice about Luca runs through me — first, last, always. You've been his father for the length of an elevator ride. You don't get four

She arrived the way weather arrives. You feel the front of it before you see it.The receiving room had been mine and empty one second; the next, it belonged to her. Silver-blonde hair drawn back to show the architecture of her face. A gown the exact gray of a blade. The staff bent toward her like grass."So." Lovely voice. Warm, which made it worse. "You're the little hospital clerk. I expected more. Or less. I can't decide which would've been kinder to you.""And you'd be Seraphina.""Seraphina Voss. Daughter of the Lord Regent." She let the name ring on the air, listening for the sound it made. "Betrothed — was betrothed, I suppose we're saying now — to the man whose bed you found five years ago and have apparently been farming for an heir ever since."I didn't stand. I'd learned exactly how much power lives in a chair you refuse to rise from."You're taking it well," I said. "Being set aside. I'd know. I have notes."The smile didn't move, but something behind it did. "Oh, you mis

I made it back to the suite before my hands started shaking. Then I made them stop.I'd heard a man confess to murdering my entire bloodline through a wall. I'd heard him plan to do it again, starting with me. The smart move was to say nothing — to file it, the way I file everything, until I could survive using it.Kael was waiting. One look at my face and he crossed the room."What happened.""Nothing. Your Regent has a warm handshake.""Aurora.""Don't." I stepped back. "You told me the walls report to him. So forgive me if I'm careful which walls I bleed in front of.""If he touched you—""He held my hand and smiled. That's all that happened." I made the lie clean and flat — because if I told him the truth tonight, he'd do something a king does. Something loud. Something that ended with my son exposed before he was ready. And I'd kept people alive by staying quiet for five years. I knew how to wait. "Did you know he raised Seraphina himself? After her mother died. He told me there'