Rebirth of the Broken Luna A Second Chance at Luna's Heart novel Chapter 512

Chapter 512

LUMINA

‘Why?’ Rivers asked suspiciously. “What did this Janice want in return?”

“A promise,” I said. “When I died, when she offered to send me back, I promised that if I got another chance, I would leave Xenois. Would take Ollie and remove us from his life so we wouldn’t have to suffer through his neglect again.”

“But you didn’t leave, Silvia observed.

‘No, I agreed. Because when I came back-when I woke up in my past self one year before everything fell apart-I started investigating. Started paying attention to things I’d dismissed before. And I realized, well it took leaving here with Ollie to seek refuge in Zade’s pack that Xenois wasn’t choosing to neglect us. He was being magically controlled by Sophia.

I looked at Xenois, seeing the same guilt and pain I’d been carrying reflected in his eyes.

“Once I understood that, I continued, “I couldn’t leave him alone,. Couldn’t abandon him to that manipulation or let Sophia win,. So I stayed and fought for it.. Exposed her magic. Brought our family back together properly.”

“That’s how you knew,” Thorne said slowly. “How you figured out Sophia’s control so quickly when the rest of us had been blind to it for months. You’d

already lived through the consequences.”

“Yes, I confirmed. “And that’s how I knew to insist on comprehensive medical testing for Ollie that caught his heart condition early enough to treat. How I knew to look more carefully at Riley’s situation and question whether he was following Sophia blindly, or was being used against his will as bait,

being Xenois’s son.”

“The facility, Lyn said, comprehension dawning on him. “Finding Riley and Lake at that experimental facility, where Andy had taken me to be tortured- that happened differently in your timeline?”

“That didn’t happen at all in my timeline,” I said. “In the original version of events, I never discovered Riley was our biological son. Andy’s kidnapping, the facility experiments-none of that came to light because Xenois was too controlled by Sophia to investigate inconsistencies. Riley would have stayed with Sophia indefinitely. Lake would have remained imprisoned. None of the rescue operation would have happened.”

“So you changed everything,” Lynn said softly. ‘Every major event of the past six months-it all happened differently because you had knowledge from a

timeline that no longer exists.”

‘Yes, I said. “And that brings us to the problem. When Janice sent me back, I made her a promise. A promise I broke by staying with Xenois instead of leaving. By changing not just my fate but the fate of everyone around me. And now- I took a shaky breath, -now she’s coming to collect her debt.”

“What debt? Samuel demanded. ‘What does this necromancer want?”

“She wouldn’t tell me, I admitted. “When she appeared to me during the heart attack-when I was unconscious, she pulled me into some kind of liminal space-she said she was coming to collect payment proportional to what I’d received. Time, knowledge, the power to change fates. But she wouldn’t specify what form that payment would take.”

‘That’s deliberately vague, Rivers observed. “Which means she’s either undecided or doesn’t want you preparing countermeasures/

“Both, probably, I agreed. She did say she was being generous by letting me finish the conflict with Jerome first. After that-after we defeat his

coalition-she’s collecting whatever she’s decided I owe.”

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Chapter 512

‘Can we fight her?’ Zade asked immediately, his alpha instincts demanding action. “Find a way to break the debt or-

‘She can reset everything,” I interrupted. ‘Janice made that very clear. She has the power to unmake all the changes I’ve made, to return us to that original timeline where Ollie dies and I die and Xenois is left holding my corpse. If I try to avoid payment or find loopholes-she’ll take away everything we’ve built and put us back in that nightmare.”

The threat hung in the air, making everyone realize the stakes.

‘So we’re trapped, Thorne said flatly. “Either you pay whatever debt this necromancer demands, or she resets time and we lose everything

“Essentially, I confirmed.

“That’s unacceptable,” Silvia said, her voice carrying the steel that had made her a legendary alpha. “We don’t negotiate with threats. We find the entity

making them and we eliminate it.”

She exists outside normal reality,” I said. “She manipulates time itself. How exactly do we eliminate something like that?”

“We find a way, Silvia insisted. “We’ve faced impossible odds before. This is just another challenge.

it’s not, I said firmly. “This isn’t like fighting Jerome or rescuing prisoners or defending against attacks. This is cosmic debt. This is the price of cheating death and changing fate. We can’t fight it with weapons or tactics or superior numbers.

“Then what can we do?” Lyn asked.

“We prepare, Xenois said, speaking up for the first time since I’d started my explanation. “We document everything Lumina knows about that other timeline. Record every warning, every piece of information about what could go wrong. So if Janice takes her memories-if that’s the payment-we still have

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