Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 119

Chapter 119

Nicolai

The estate returns to silence the moment the council car clears the main gate. I stand in the doorway of the formal meeting room, looking at the table where everything happened the documents, the photographs, the careful, devastating dismantling of an accusation that never should have been made and then I go to find Skye.

I know she’s crying before I reach her wing. Not because I hear the sound. It’s her scent. Sharp and salt-edged in the specific way that means she’s been crying, but the texture underneath it isn’t grief. It’s rage. Cold and clean and righteous.

That knowledge alone strikes me hard. I’ve learned the difference. Learned her.

She’s on the floor of her sitting room. Seven months pregnant and on the floor, which surprises me for exactly a second before I understand it-at this stage, sofas and chairs require negotiation. Sometimes the floor is simply more honest.

Her back is against the sofa, knees drawn up as far as her belly allows. Her face in her hands. She’s not collapsed, not broken. Just containing emotions too big for an upright position.

I lower myself to the floor beside her. I don’t say anything. Don’t reach for her. Just settle my back against the sofa next to hers and wait, knowing my presence is enough and she’ll talk when she’s ready.

“I’m so tired.”

Her voice, when it comes, is not the voice of someone who has been crying with sadness. It’s the particular flatness of someone who has been fighting the same battle for years and is furious-not devastated, furious-that it’s still being fought.

“I didn’t drug him. I didn’t fake the mate bond. I didn’t sleep with you before the divorce, before any of this-” She stops. Takes a breath through her hands. “And it doesn’t matter. It will never matter. The moment someone points a finger at me, he flinches toward believing it. Every time. Without fail.”

I don’t interrupt, letting her get it all out. She presses her hands to her belly, and I watch the shift in her posture- the movement of a woman who remembers, mid-sentence, that she’s protecting someone.

“What does that teach Benji? When he’s old enough to understand his father’s behavior?” Her voice is steady but the words are cutting. Deliberate. “That accusations are enough? That his mother is someone whose every move needs to be investigated? That you can believe the worst about someone and it’s fine because you didn’t follow through?”

I let it sit. Let her say it into the room without rushing to answer or fix. She doesn’t need fixing, she never has. She just needs to be heard.

“I’m so tired of being blamed for things I didn’t do, Nico.” She growls, the rage finding its shape now. “Even after everything was dismissed today, it still happened. I still had to sit in that room and defend myself to elders who already ruled in my favor. I still had to submit to the process. I still had to-” She stops.

The silence lasts long enough that I know what’s coming next isn’t the same kind of statement. It’s a question, the real one underneath everything else.

She finally looks at me. “At what point do I just stop being the person these things happen to?”

I hold her gaze when I answer so she won’t doubt the truth in it. “You already have,” I say. “You left. You fought for your freedom in front of a council and won. You built something new here.” I pause, hoping she’ll agree what

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we have here is special. “But rage is appropriate. Don’t talk yourself out of it because it’s inconvenient or because you think you should be past it.” I hold her gaze. “You were wronged today. Again. And you handled it with more

dignity than anyone could have asked.” 1

face.

“It’s us,” I say. “That’s all it needs to be.”

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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