Rise Of A Shattered Luna (Natalie) by Kave Derry novel Chapter 37

Chapter 37 The New Face

Baron’s POV

I looked through the glass at the figure on the table, and my chest felt like it had been hollowed out and filled with ice.

Natalie didn’t look like a woman anymore; she looked like a wreckage. The skin that had been so pale and elegant was now a map of blackened tissue and raw, red weeping.

I couldn’t breathe properly with that image stuck in my throat.

Whoever did this hadn’t just tried to kill her, they had tried to erase her. They wanted her to feel every second of her own destruction, and I would make sure they go through everything she’s facing right now.

“We have to avenge her even if she doesn’t want to,” Raze snarled in the back of my mind. He was pacing, his claws clicking against the floor of my consciousness. “We’ll make them both pay.”

“I know,” I muttered under my breath.

I turned back to Yvonne, my voice dropping into a lethal, low register. “Investigate the fire; I want the exact cause. Phantom’s reports were scattered and incomplete… I want to know why a top–tier agent couldn’t get a wolfless girl out of a warehouse before it collapsed. I want every detail. Everything.”

Yvonne paused, her jaw tightening. “I’ll go myself, Alpha. I need to know what really happened to my sister at the Nightfang pack. Phantom wasn’t a rookie, she shouldn’t have died there.”

“Go,” I said. I looked her dead in the eye, the weight of my Alpha authority pressing down on her. “But listen to me… If you ever take your sister’s death out on Natalie–if I see one hint of resentment in the way you treat her–you’ll leave her side permanently. Understood?”

“I won’t hold it against her,” Yvonne said. Her voice was steady, but I could see the grief vibrating in her hands.

She left, and Finn followed her out, leaving me alone with her in the room.

I sat by her bed… I didn’t–no–I couldn’t touch her.

Her skin was too fragile, too ruined. I just watched her, her brow was furrowed, her muscles twitching involuntarily as her body fought the fire that was still burning in her nerves.

My knuckles turned white as I gripped her medical chart.

“Still as foolish as you were five years ago,” I whispered.

I remembered her then, crazy for her Alpha, for whom she sacrificed her rib. Her stubbornness defied her lack of a wolf, and now, five years later, she was the same.

She had walked into a trap for a man who didn’t even have the spine to protect her.

Natalie’s eyes suddenly opened.

They were clouded with pain and unfocused, but when they finally landed on me, something shifted

For a second, I thought she was going to scream, but instead, she whispered my name.

“Baron?”

“Well, would you look at that,” I said, my tone sharpening with a sarcasm I didn’t really feel. “You actually remember me; that’s progress.”

“You’re awake?” She tried to sit up, her movement jerky and desperate.

“Don’t move!” I snapped.

The motion tugged at the fused skin on her neck; her face twisted, and a sharp intake of breath wheezed through her teeth. The corners of her lips cracked instantly, a bead of dark blood welling up and rolling down her chin.

I hovered over her, my hands shaking. I wanted to push her back down, to hold her still, but I was terrified that if I touched her, I’d peel the skin right off her bones.

“Do you even know what condition you’re in?” I growled. “Stop acting like you have a wolf’s healing. You’re human, Natalie… act

like it.”

She didn’t flinch at my tone, she didn’t even get angry. She just looked at me and smiled.

It was a hideous but beautiful thing. A radiant smile on a face that was covered in charred scars.

“Why are you smiling?” I asked, my heart aching so violently I felt it in my teeth. “Did the smoke fry your brain?”

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” she whispered. Her voice was a ruined scrap of sound. “Please… don’t do anything reckless like that again. We’ve barely met, and you didn’t have to almost die saving me.”

The temperature in the room suddenly became hot.

I remembered the surgery, I remembered her drifting in and out of consciousness, her lips moving, whispering his name. Jensen. Even while I was burning my own life force to stitch her back together, she was mourning the man who had let her burn.

“Natalie, are you telling me I should have minded my own business?” I asked. My voice, a mix of calm and jealous.

She rushed to explain, her words tripping over each other. “That’s not what I meant. I-

“Enough,” I interrupted. I stood up, the chair scraping harshly against the stone floor. “Whatever you think you’re feeling, let it go. If you want to recover, it’s going to take time. Surgery and skin grafts–I’ve already contacted the Witch Doctor.”

I didn’t tell her that / was the Witch Doctor. I didn’t tell her that the only hands I trusted to touch her were my own.

“Your face won’t look the same afterward,” I said, watching her carefully. “But if you want it to, he can try to restore it.”

Natalie went still as she reached up, her hand hovering near her cheek, and then she caught herself.

She looked down at her bandaged fingers, her expression hardening into something cold and jagged.

“What am I now, Baron?” she asked. “A monster? A child would scream if they saw me.

“You’re alive,” I said.

“I’m a ghost,” she corrected. She looked at me, her eyes burning with a dark, focused intensity I hadn’t seen before. “The old Natalie is gone; she died in that warehouse. And she’s not coming

back.”

Chapter of the New race

She looked at her reflection in the darkened glass of the monitor.

“Sharon thinks she won… she thinks she erased the Keeper so she can keep her lie. She’s wearing my life right now, isn’t she? Standing next to Jensen, playing the tragic sister.”

“She is,” I said.

Natalie’s jaw tightened. “Then let her keep my old face. Let her keep the memory of the woman she killed.”

She turned to me, her voice as sharp as a scalpel.

“Baron, I want a new face.”

Raze let out a low, satisfied rumble. “She sounds different.”

I leaned over her, my hands bracing against the bed rails. “A new face means a new identity. It means you can never go back to being the girl Jensen knew. You’ll be a stranger to everyone who ever has ever touched you.”

“Good,” she said. “I want to be the one who haunts them. I want to see the look on Jensen’s face when he realizes he lost everything for a lie, and the woman he’s looking at is the one he let burn.”

I looked at her–really looked at her–and I didn’t see the wreckage anymore. I saw a weapon.

“Fine,” I said. I reached out and finally touched the tips of her fingers.