Luna to No One

Chapter 25

The second letter arrives at dawn, carried by a runner who looks like he hasn't slept in days. Jericho brings it to me in the supply tent where I've been rebuilding patrol schedules since the sky was still dark, and his face tells me before the paper does.

Lira's handwriting is wrong. The first letter was careful—even margins, steady hand, penmanship performing calm across enemy lines. This one slants downward, ink smudged where her hand dragged through wet words.

"Read it aloud," Jericho says, his voice gone quiet in the way that means he's already bracing.

Vesper and Hilda have stopped pretending. Their arguments have spilled past closed doors into corridors, into council—Hilda's faction thickening, wolves peeling away from center.

Lira names three who turned this week. I trained two of them during the supply crisis, and their names scrape through my throat like swallowing glass.

Then Ronan. A single line in his own hand beneath Lira's script: I have been relieved of several duties. It is manageable. No complaint, no appeal—Ronan spending his one line on reassurance he doesn't owe me.

"He wouldn't write that if it were manageable." Jericho's shoulder presses mine as he reads over me.

"No." My fingers have gone white on the paper's edge. "If Ronan is downplaying, it's past the point where honesty is safe."

Lira continues—Nico is safe with Neve, eating well, sleeping through the night. Then the line that stops my lungs: I've started sleeping in the nursery wing myself. Just in case.

The words sit in my chest like a stone dropped into deep water, sinking past every wall I've built. Lira doesn't do things just in case—she does things because the ground is already shifting and she refuses to pretend otherwise.

"I can't go back early." I set the letter down and press both palms flat against the table. "Riding without cause violates my own treaty—the one keeping Stormhowl's legal claim to me intact."

His hand finds the back of my neck, warm and steady. He doesn't offer solutions I've already discarded—just stands there, solid as architecture, letting me breathe through it.

So I breathe through it. Then I do what I have always done when the walls press in—I work.

"Where are you going?" Jericho asks as I gather the patrol maps from the table's edge, his hand sliding from my neck reluctantly.

"To fix something I can actually reach." I don't look back, because if I do, the stone in my chest wins.

The patrol rotations have grown like weeds, wolves slotted where bodies were needed. I spend the morning rebuilding: stagger the eastern shifts to kill the two-hour gap at the ridge, overlap Petra's team with the river unit instead of replacing it.

The water problem takes me forty minutes. The upstream channel was rerouted fifteen years ago across a clay deposit nobody checked—silting has choked flow to the southern territories for two seasons.

"Dig a bypass trench here." I mark the map for Ulric, who wears the expression of a man watching his house get renovated without consent. "Silt settles before it hits the main channel. Three wolves, half a day."

He stares at the map, then at me, then at the map again—hoping the solution will reveal a flaw. It doesn't. "I'll get three wolves," he says, and walks away shaking his head.

By evening the camp has new patrol rotations, a water fix, and a perimeter weakness patched that nobody noticed because it required understanding how wind affects scent tracking at elevation. Jericho finds me at the cook fire with a plate in each hand.

"Ulric has started calling you Alpha behind your back." He sits close, knee pressing mine. "With the volume of a man who wants to be overheard."

"Tell him to stop." I take the plate. My stomach makes a sound that undermines whatever authority I was reaching for.

"I tried." His mouth twitches. "He said he takes orders from his Alpha, and then looked at you across the camp."

"That's insubordination." I stab something on the plate that might be potato. "And you're enjoying this entirely too much."

"Immensely." He bumps his knee against mine. "You could let them see you, Agatha. It wouldn't kill you."

"You don't actually know that." But the edge won't land, because something behind my ribs keeps unlocking every time these wolves look at me like I belong here.

I pull Lira's letter out again. There's a postscript I skipped, cramped into the bottom margin in Ronan's hand—personal, separate from his official line.

He goes to the boy's room at night. Sits for hours—doesn't speak, just holds him. I have watched my brother perform every duty like a man checking items off a ledger. This is the first time I have seen him act without an agenda.

I read it twice, and the firelight goes soft at the edges of my vision. "What is it?" Jericho asks, low enough that only I can hear.

"Vesper's been going to Nico's room at night." I fold the letter along its creases, careful, deliberate. "Alone. Ronan says it's different. No performance, no audience—just holding him."

His jaw works once, twice—the discipline of a man swallowing his first response for something more careful. "And what do you make of that?"

"Fatherhood may be cracking something in him I never could." The words come out tasting of a truth I haven't decided what to do with—not softening, because I refuse that word and the direction it implies.

Recognition, though. The acknowledgment that somewhere inside the man who locked me in a room for nine months, there is a father learning to hold his son in the dark without audience or agenda.

I fold it into the drawer where I keep every complicated thing about Vesper Varulf. The one with no label and no lock that never quite stays shut.

Later the dark full of cricket-song and distant river. Jericho's quarters, the furs heavy, his body curved around mine with the easy fit of something that became necessary without permission.

His fingers trace my shoulder—collarbone to the curve of my arm, back again. The idle rhythm of a man whose hands think while he's quiet. I count days in my head: twenty-nine here, thirty-one until the treaty sends me back.

"Stop counting," he murmurs against my hair, because apparently my mental arithmetic has a physical tell.

"I'm not counting—I'm calculating." My fingers close around his wrist and hold. "Counting is passive. Calculating implies I'll do something about the number."

"And what will you do about it?" His arm tightens, pulling me back against him until there's no space for arithmetic, for letters, for the stone sitting where just in case landed this morning.

I close my eyes. His heartbeat against my spine—steady, certain, the rhythm of a man who has decided where he belongs.

Thirty-one day. A son in a nursery guarded by a woman sleeping there just in case, and a father in the dark learning what no one could teach him.

And me, counting the distance between the life pressing warm against my back and the one waiting to unmake me.