Selah’s POV
Sleep wouldn’t come to me that same night, no matter how many times I turned on the wide bed.
I lay there in the dark, staring up at the shadows on the ceiling, running through the hand signs Mira had taught me earlier that afternoon.
My fingers kept twitching against the heavy blanket without me even meaning to, moving through the shapes for WATER, DANGER, NEED, and STOP.
Over and over, my hands repeated the motions until my knuckles felt stiff.
Eventually, I gave up on lying still altogether.
Pushing the blanket aside, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and stood up.
The Beast was still playing sentry right beside my door.
It was asleep, its body rumbling with snores.
I carefully tiptoed around it and walked through the door.
The corridor outside my room was pitch-black and completely quiet.
Garrick’s door was close enough beside mine that the moment I stepped outside, I became aware of how shockingly loud my own footsteps sounded in the silence.
My bare feet made dull thuds against the runner rug, and I had heard enough about an Alpha’s wolf hearing by now to know exactly whose ears might catch me moving down the hall.
Without making a conscious decision, I found myself walking on the balls of my feet, holding my breath as I passed his door like that would help anything.
I held my arms close to my sides, praying that the floorboards wouldn’t creak under my weight.
WOULD YOU RATHER JUST GO INTO HIS ROOM?
My wolf whispered inside me.
I KNOW YOU WANT TO.
BE QUIET!
I snapped at my wolf in my head.
SURE, I WILL.
My wolf murmured.
It was right, I was fighting the urge to go into Lord Garrick’s room, see what it was like in there, perhaps watch the great man in his most vulnerable state.
But there was no time for that nonsense right now, and I wasn’t even sure I would make it close enough to his bed before he caught me.
My wolf subsided, but not before leaving behind the distinct feeling of laughing at me anyway, amused by my panic.
I shook my head to clear the voice and kept moving.
I made my way toward the main hall out of habit more than intention. The source of this chapter is g.com.
As I rounded the corner leading to the lower corridor, I caught sight of Vera coming from the opposite direction.
Her arms were completely loaded with what was clearly stolen food from the kitchens.
She had a thick wedge of crusty bread balanced awkwardly against a small jar of preserved fruit, and half a roasted chicken leg wrapped in a grease-stained cloth tucked under her chin.
I stifled the urge to smile as I watched her.
She didn’t see me standing in the shadow of the archway.
She was far too focused on not dropping any of her haul, ducking quickly into her own room with the haste of someone who had done this a hundred times before and gotten away with it every single time.
I pressed a hand firmly over my mouth to keep from grinning.
The image of the usually chatty girl sneaking around like a master thief in the middle of the night was the first funny thing I had seen since I arrived here.
Once I was alone again, I wandered further than I had ever gone before.
Instead of turning back toward my room, I walked past the main hall and stepped into a long gallery lined with massive oil portraits that I hadn’t had any reason to study until now.
The moonlight filtering through the tall glass windows illuminated the paintings for me.
Past Alphas stared down at me from their wooden frames in formal and rigid poses.
They were stern, broad-shouldered men wearing regal clothes, their dark eyes seeming to follow me as I moved down the hall.
Beside most of them painted on the same canvas were the women who must have been their Lunas, standing or sitting with the same pride.
I learned more about this household in the space of ten silent minutes than I had in a whole week of actually living in it.
I saw names written on brass plates at the base of the frames, names I half-recognized from some stories that Lord Asher used to tell me in a last life.
It was a long, grand lineage stretching back much further than I had ever thought to ask about.
Generation after generation of powerful wolves who had built this territory out of blood and war.
I reached the very end of the gallery, where it opened up into the upper balcony of the foyer itself.
Right there, hanging in the center wall, was one portrait that dwarfed every single other painting in the entire house.
I stopped in front of it, my breath catching softly in my throat.
Oh, my.
It was beautiful!
It was a woman, unmistakably.
She was painted young and radiant, with long, dark hair falling over her shoulders in soft waves. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
She had a sharp, strong jaw and a set of striking green eyes that I recognized instantly.
I didn’t need to ask who she was.
I had spent enough hours now studying those exact same features on Lord Garrick’s face at the dinner table.
It was his mother.
The portrait was hung in the most prominent place in the entire foyer, framed in polished gold.
It was clearly the one piece of art in the mansion that had never been allowed to collect dust or fade into the background the way everything else eventually did.
The paint looked as fresh as if it had been laid down yesterday.
Someone had loved this woman enough to make sure she was never forgotten, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me who that was.
I stood there for a very long time, staring up at the woman’s face.
She looked strong, but gentleness shone through her eyes.
She looked like she belonged in a place like this, as if she knew exactly who she was and what she was born to do.
Without meaning to, a lonely thought slipped into my mind.
This is what a Luna is supposed to look like.
A Luna wasn’t a girl who was dragged out of a slave market, stuck in a stranger’s body with a dead voice.
She wasn’t an unwanted curse that made people lose their minds about her.
She was a true leader.
I slowly lifted my hands in the dim moonlight, looking down at my pale, trembling fingers.
I flexed them, remembering the awkward hand signs I had struggled with all day.
I thought about Garrick standing up for me in front of everyone on his council and even beyond.
Then I looked back up at the radiant woman in the golden frame, a question weighing on my mind.
How was I supposed to be a Luna?
How was a mute, broken girl like me supposed to stand beside an Alpha Lord and lead these fierce, dangerous people?
Why me?
Without any answer to that question, I turned around and hurried back into my room.
The visions… the locket… Drop your theories: whose body do you think Selah woke up in?
I won’t confirm anything