All Chapters of The Luna He Threw Away : Chapter 21 - Chapter 27

“Eight more.” The words spread across the amphitheatre under the moonlight, quiet but heavy, and I saw exactly when they struck Seraphina Dane. I watched understanding settle into her face real understanding. Not the polite dismissal she’d worn before. Not the boredom she’d expected to feel. She had thought I would be easy. A human banker. Something to brush aside before the night ended. But I hadn’t walked into the Moon Court empty-handed. I had come with a plan. The same words had left my mouth once before. In the back of a Bentley, five years earlier, when I turned to Mikhal after securing the first Sterling Pack creditor. Thirteen more to go. That was how I had taken a pack apart. Piece by piece. Creditor by creditor. And this? This would be no different. Judge by judge. Seraphina recovered fast. Of course she did. She had survived centuries here a thousand years, if the whispers were true. Women like her didn’t crumble because a moment tilted against them. “A neat

I remained motionless on the worn stone bench beneath the plum tree. For a long while, I said nothing. Lysander didn’t try to break the quiet. He had already given me the truth, and now he did something far more difficult he let it remain as it was. He didn’t reach for me. Didn’t argue. Didn’t try to soften the edges. He just… waited. The way he always had. In that silence, my mind moved. I thought about too many things at once. The first Tuesday at the Liraeth tavern came back to me the glass of Liraeth red placed in front of me without a word. The bartender hadn’t asked what I wanted. He’d simply said, I have been watching you drink the Liraeth red every Tuesday for six weeks. At the time, I’d dismissed it as a line. It hadn’t been. It had been fact. Plain and exact. More truth than I’d realized. I thought about my grandmother, Eleanor Voss. About the way she held me when I was three and told my mother I would be the one to carry the line. About the trust fund she had quie

All twenty-three Northern pack families showed up at the Voss Capital office on Thursday. They arrived uneasy. It was written all over them the stiff shoulders, the low voices, the way their eyes moved too quickly as they filed into the long conference room on the top floor. Four stories up, right on the busiest financial street in the Second Free City. These were the same people who had trusted me with everything. The same ones who had backed me, funded me, believed in what I was building. And now, after a few whispered words from a silver-eyed woman, they were here wondering if it was all about to collapse. Four of them had already pulled out. The remaining nineteen had come to decide if they would do the same. I didn’t rush them. I let them sit. Let them talk in hushed tones. Let the tension thicken in the air until it pressed against the walls. Fear has a voice of its own. At a negotiation table, if you give it space, it speaks loud enough. Then I rose to my feet at the hea

The full moon climbed high, and I returned to the forest. Mikhal dropped me at the tree line. From there, I made the long walk by myself, nearly an hour through shadow and silver light. I wore a charcoal suit cut sharp enough to pass for armor, the Voss pearls cool against my throat. Lysander’s mark its silver crescent stayed hidden beneath my sleeve. My hands were empty. No briefcase. No documents. No ledgers stacked with three hundred and fifty years of Voss records. For the first time since I became an adult, I stepped toward the most important room of my life with absolutely nothing to present. A distant part of me the part that always observed, always cataloged found it oddly familiar. It felt like that morning five years ago, when I walked into the Sterling Pack courtyard in a white silk wedding dress. Empty-handed. Expecting nothing. On the edge of losing everything. But this time, the emptiness was mine. I had chosen it. That was the difference. That was the entire jo