Chapter 340

Chapter 340

Chapter 340

ARIA

Kael’s gaze

moved around the corridor with the comprehensive assessment of an Alpha taking stock of a situation that had just resolved itself in an unexpected direction. It landed, briefly, on the upper walkway where Amber had been standing.

Amber was gone. She’d withdrawn with the efficiency of someone who’d completed a task and was returning to other responsibilities.

Kael’s eyes returned to corridor level without any particular comment about this.

Then he looked at me.

“You alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. And then, because honesty seemed like the operating mode for today: “I was approximately two seconds from an international incident when the bucket arrived p>

His expression did something that wasn’t quite a smile but was adjacent to one. maintenance schedule,” he said, “is a very thorough document p>

“Apparently,” I said.

“The

He nodded once, in the way that meant he had things to do and was returning to doing them, and left the corrido

with the steady purposeful movement of an Alpha who had about fourteen additional problems waiting for his attention and was going back to address them.

I stood in the cleared corridor and breathed.

Then I looked up at the empty walkway where Amber had been standing p>

I found her twenty minutes later, back in the textile workshop, sitting at her desk with the posture of someone who was absolutely focused on the inventory records in front of her and had been focused on them all morning and had not recently been standing on a maintenance walkway with a bucket.

She didn’t look up when I came

e in.

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I stood for a moment, not sure what the protocol was for this. For thanking someone who’d just defended you with weaponized cleaning water while technically maintaining complete deniability about the entire incident.

“Amber,” I said.

She looked up. Her expression was the professional neutral she’d given me in our previous interactions not warm, not hostile. But her eyes, when they found mine, had a different quality than they’d had before. The closed-door quality was still there. But there was

something behind it that acknowledged what had happened without speaking about it directly.

She looked at me steadily for a moment.

Then she winked.

One quick, deliberate, completely unmistakable wink. The gesture of someone communicating *I’ve got you* in a language that didn’t require words and couldn’t be documented in any record of the morning’s events.

Then she looked back at her inventory records and resumed working as though I wasn’t there.

I stood in the doorway of the textile workshop with the weight of everything the morning had accumulated the training and Ivory’s help and the white-flag quality of people responding differently and then Sera and the bucket and Amber’s wink going to call what it actually was.

and felt something that I was

Belonging. The early, fragile, don’t-press-on-it-too-hard kind. The kind that existed before you were sure it would last, before you’d given it enough time to prove it was real rather than situational.

But real enough that I could feel it. Real enough that standing in the doorway of Amber’s workshop felt different than it had every other time I’d stood in it.

Amber, who had every reason to hate me and had still done what she’d done.

Because I was their Luna. Because I was inside Shadowmere’s boundary. Because Sera Quinn had come into their territory and aimed something at their person, and Shadowmere stubborn, fiercely loyal, completely impossible Shadowmere did not let that stand.

Not for Ivory, not for Kael, and apparently, even now, not for me.

petty,

“Thank you,” I said quietly, even though she’d already looked away. Even though it would never be acknowledged.

Amber made a small sound that was probably about the inventory records,

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Chapter 340

+5 Free Coins

Amber had gotten her back. Not out of affection for me. Probably not out of any significant revision of her feelings about me, which remained clearly complicated. But because Sera was here making herself unwelcome in Shadowmere and taking shots at Shadowmere’s Luna and that was, apparently, a category that Amber had strong feelings about regardless of who the

Luna was.

They only had the right to hate me. I’d thought that at the celebration when they’d chanted my name for the visiting Alphas. The understanding that had felt like being charmed against my better judgment.

Amber had just demonstrated the same principle from a ledge with a bucket.

I thought about Ivory’s face when the w I thought about Ivory’s face when the water hit. Ivory, who had definitely seen it happen from water hit. Ivory, who had definitely seen it happen from wherever she’d been standing, and whose expression I’d caught a glimpse before the crowd

had shifted and she left to a

was thinking something

being caught by sera had been doing the thing where she no intention of saying very briefly, looking like

while also,

humor found deer, a

exactly the kind of poetic justice that a person with her sense of

someone who’d just

satisfying.

Where the hell is Martha when I need her.

Ivory had said that last night about Dan. Apparently Martha wasn’t the only one Shadowmere had in reserve for situations that required creative solutions.

I reached into my pocket and touched the pearl. It was warm – warmer than usual, the warmth of something responding to what was around it. I thought about what I’d nearly done when Sera had been talking. The surge of the lunar power, the heat of it, the second I’d been away from something that would have been an international incident and also, possibly, exactly what she’d come hoping to provoke.

Amber had saved me from that. Hadn’t known she was saving me from it, probably – had just seen a moment and taken it with the creative efficiency of a pack member who loved her healer and extended that love to the protection of the territory her healer belonged to.

But the result was the same.

1

I stood in the corridor and breathed and let the morning reorganize itself around this new information. The white flag feeling from earlier was still there- complicated now, less clean, with Sera somewhere in the clinic and Damon somewhere beyond Shadowmere’s borders and the awareness that today’s relative calm was not the end of anything but more likely the beginning of something new.

But it was still there.

Amber had winked at me. That was also still there,

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The pack was strange and petty and operated on a logic that took significant time to decode. They’d been openly unkind to me for months and would probably continue being at least privately unkind for a while yet. They didn’t like me and weren’t pretending otherwise and I’d stopped expecting them to pretend.

But they’d backed me.

I was going to need to send Amber something. I didn’t know what yet something appropriate, something that acknowledged what she’d done without making it into more than it was, without assuming it meant more than it meant. Something that said *I know what you did and I’m not pretending I don’t* while also saying *I understand what you did it for and I’m not confusing it for something else p>

Shadowmere had a language. I was learning it slowly, imperfectly, with the same stubbornness I’d been applying to the lunar power in the training grounds this morning.

But I was learning

The guard was beside

“Back to the change,

And then, becaus

I

utral and patient, waiting for direction.

aid. “I have reading to finish p>

“And thenine was in the clinic and Dam W25 JOTEN PREJ Azie neste

the border and

the day had just gotten significantly more complicated than it had been this morning, I added:

gebote butterly with Nina p>

We walked back through the pack grounds, through the morning that had started with something like a white flag and had become something more complicated and more interesting than that.

Above me, somewhere, I was fairly sure I could still smell the faint lingering aftermath of Amber’s bucket.

I kept my expression neutral all the way to the chambers.

Then, alone, with the door closed and the pearl warm in my hand and the guard stationed outside, I allowed myself exactly thirty seconds of the laugh I’d been holding since I’d looked up and seen Amber on that ledge with an empty bucket and the face of a completely innocent person.

Thirty seconds. Then I put it away and opened the library texts.

There was always work to be done.

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