Chapter 5
Chapter 5:
My shoulders trembled. Not from cold. From the effort of holding something enormous and jagged inside my chest without letting it out.
Ten years. Ten years of serving every woman he brought home—cooking their meals, washing their sheets, running their baths. Massaging feet that had wrapped themselves around my husband hours earlier. Kneeling outside bedroom doors at night, listening, while the bond channeled every moan and gasp and whispered endearment directly into my nervous system like electricity through water. And afterward—always afterward—I cleaned. The room. The woman. The evidence of my own irrelevance.
I was the Luna of the Nightblood Clan, and I lived like a servant who had forgotten to negotiate a salary.
Out of guilt. That was the worst part—the part I couldn’t confess to anyone, because it sounded insane. I endured it because somewhere deep in the rotting foundations of my conscience, I believed I deserved it. A girl was dead because of my father’s ambition. A girl Thane had loved. And so I knelt, and I served, and I waited for the punishment to feel like enough.
It never did. Nothing ever appeased him. Suffering, it turns out, is not a currency you can spend down to zero.
“Hurry up.” His voice was bored now. The cruelty had passed its peak and settled into routine.
I ran my palm across Ravenna’s shoe. The leather was smooth and cold under my fingers. She shifted her foot closer—just slightly, just enough to make me reach—and the corner of her mouth twitched upward.
Thane watched for a moment, then lost interest the way a cat loses interest in a mouse that has stopped running. He turned to Ravenna, and his hands found the zipper at the back of her dress with the efficiency of long practice.
The fabric whispered as it fell. Her body emerged—pale, curved, deliberate as a weapon designed for exactly this purpose.
He pulled her close. His mouth found her collarbone, then her throat, and his hands mapped a geography I had memorized from the wrong side of the room a hundred times before.
What started slow became urgent. Ravenna arched into him, her fingers raking through his hair, and the sounds they made—wet, breathless, animal—traveled through the bond and into me like voltage.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper. My wolf howled somewhere behind my ribs—a thin, keening sound that only I could hear. The empathic link was doing what it was designed to do: transmitting every sensation between bonded mates. Except the bond didn’t know we were broken. The bond thought this was betrayal, and it screamed accordingly.
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I stayed on my knees. I kept my eyes open. Because the last time I looked away, Thane withheld food for three days, and hunger, I had learned, is a surprisingly effective teacher of obedience.