Rise Of A Shattered Luna (Natalie) by Kave Derry novel Chapter 381

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Chapter 381 The Ruined Penthouse

Chapter 381 The Ruined Penthouse

Loretta’s POV

The structural geometry of absolute ruin is remarkably quiet.

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I sat perfectly motionless in the center of the dark, ruined penthouse suite, forty stories above the northern quadrant’s corporate grid.

The city below was a sprawling, jagged canyon of blacked-out concrete and glass, its streets empty, its towers dark, its pulse reduced to the faint, distant wail of a winter wind threading through abandoned alleys.

I stared directly at the primary desktop interface monitor resting on the walnut desk surface before me.

The display was a solid, unyielding sheet of crimson text code.

*LINEAGE FREQUENCY: SYSTEMATICALLY FORECLOSED.”

*ASSET SHIELD: ZERO VALUE CURRENT.”

*CORE VAULT: TERMINATED.*

Three lines. Three sterile, clinical declarations of absolute financial death.

Moon pack, the empire I had killed and schemed and betrayed to protect-reduced to three lines of red text on a dying monitor

“Renee’s tokens…” I whispered into the freezing, stagnant air cells of the room, my voice dropping into a dry, gravelly rasp that sounded like a dead wire dragging across pavement.

The name tasted like poison on my tongue.

Renee.

Baron’s little data witch.

The unassuming technician who had spent years buried in the Blackridge networks, invisible and underestimated, while focused all my attention on the Alpha himself.

The bitch had woven a flawless liquidation net.

Within a single metric hour, Baron’s bastard data terminal had unstitched every off ledger bank account t had hidden acIONS SAVIN jurisdictions.

Every property deed stamped with the Moon pack’s name, from the coastal warehouses to the mountain estates to the very penthouse.

Our pack was no longer an active variable on the council.

That pathetic, simpering fool

metic trash,” Chissed, a cold, venomous sneer curting my lips, as I thought of him sing thend then

uns containment facility.

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The old Alpha, my legitimate mate, had flatlined before producing an heir, leaving me vulnerable to the succession wars that inevitably followed the death of an Alpha.

I needed a successor… a partner, someone strong enough to command the pack’s loyalty, ruthless enough to eliminate rivals, and ambitious enough to help me execute the financial coup I had been planning for years.

Jensen had been the perfect candidate.

An Alpha from a secondary lineage, hungry for legitimacy and drowning in ambition.

Our alliance was born out of shared, calculated greed. I gave him the Moon pack name to legitimize his registry and grant him access to the northern corporate networks.

He gave me the martial weight to strip Baron of his birthright and cast him out into the mud where he belonged.

But Jensen didn’t act smart… he was after Natalie that he acted stupidly and missed his chances.

His obsession had been useful at first. It kept him focused on destroying Baron, on eliminating the competition, on pursuing the very goals I had set for him. But obsession has a way of curdling into weakness.

A partner is only valuable until he shatters.

Jensen let his obsession with Natalie blind his tactical defenses. He underestimated her.

He underestimated the Nomadic Pack.

Now he was dead weight, counting his days in a cage while my pack burned to ash. He had served his purpose, and when his purpose expired, so did his value.

“Since he proved too weak to hold the asset lines and claim his prize, I will close the ledger myself,” I muttered, a slow, sickening smile baring my fangs into the gloom of the penthouse.

Years ago, I used fraudulent High Council waivers to cast Baron out into the freezing mud of the lawless lanes as a broken exile

I had stood on the balcony of this very penthouse and watched him stumble into the wilderness, stripped of his title, his wealth, his pack, his future.

I thought I had deleted him from the map.

I thought the winter cold and the lawless predators would finish what I had started. I thought would never hear his name again, Instead, the bastard had built the dark, protective veil of the Witch Doctor from scratch.

He had clawed his way back from nothing, assembling a network of rogues and outcasts, amassing power in the shadower while grew complacent in my victory.

He had taken a sovereign Scribe as his matriarch-Natalie, the very woman Jensen had been so desperate totalin

And together they had crawled back from the wasteland to systematically destry everything had built

He had zeroed my bank accounts. He had seized my properties. He had dismantled my empire pilece

I stood up, my joints popping with still, brime fruition as I drag my skin willax Photog

boards

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But Twas still breathing.

I walked across the room my bare palms sliding over the cold mahogany paneling until my fingers found the manual release tab hidden beneath the brass molding

The mechanism was ancient-mechanical, not digital, completely invisible to the surveillance networks and data scanners that Renee had used to gut my accounts.

My father had installed it during the old pack wars, when he understood that some weapons needed to exist outside the reach of any registry.

Click, Whir. Slide.

The vault was small-no larger than a briefcase-but it contained the only thing that mattered now.

Inside the velvet-lined tray, resting under a thick layer of preservative grease that had kept it pristine for three decades, lay my father’s antique, silver-tipped chemical kinetic rifle.

I reached down, my long fingernails digging into the heavy steel stock as I hauled the weapon out into the green twilight of the

room

The rifle was a relic from another era-an illegal weapon from the old pack wars, forged before the High Council standardized armaments and required digital tracking chips in every firearm on the continent.

It was a heavy, multi-ton iron.

One shot to the chest, and even the strongest Alpha would drop. Two shots, and he would be permanently fried, leaving nothing but a hollow shell where the beast had once burned.

The cold weight of the iron against my collarbone felt real-realer than the digital bank screens that had displayed my ruin.

The rifle was solid. It was tangible. It was the one thing that couldn’t be erased by a clever data terminal or a Scribe’s processing

fire.

I didn’t care about surviving the winter freeze.

I didn’t care about the Nomadic Pack’s crescent formation or their allied patrols or their Scribe’s terrifying power.

My life frequency was already reduced to a zero column on the sheet. My accounts were empty. My properties were seized, My name was already being erased from the continental registries, my legacy reduced to ash and memory i had nothing left to lose

But I wasn’t just going to sit here and watch my name blink out of existence.

Since Jensen proved too weak to hold the asset lines and claim his prize, I would close the ledger myself. I would take the Blackridge pack standard back by raw, physical force

I needed Baron’s territorial registries. I needed his real estate deeds. I needed his private gold reserves to re

rebuild what had been taken from me.

And I know exactly how to get them

I would drive a five-ounce silver spike stright through Baron’s chest fliser.

I would seize his clearing the pack house he had bolik for big Schou, the bargħalvar Máy Slacks slagel

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Chapter 381 The Ruined Penthouse

the sanctuary he thought was safe from the monsters of the old world.

And I would execute those children before Natalie could snap the wire of their mate bond back into alignment.

Sean and Susie.

The heir and the spare.

The children who represented everything Baron had built and everything I had lost.

They would die first, and Natalie would watch.

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She would know, in the final moments before I put a silver slug through her skull, that her Scribe power hadn’t been enough to save them.

That her mate bond hadn’t been enough to protect them.

That all her strength and all her cunning and all her ancient bloodline magic had been useless against a single, well-placed shot from a dead woman’s rifle.

I turned my head toward the shadows near the balcony door, where a low-tier scavenger from the marshes beneath the Moon Pack boundary stones stood waiting silently.

He was a wretched creature-thin, dirty, his clothes hanging off his frame like rags draped over a scarecrow-but he was loyal enough when paid in advance.

The Moon Pack’s territory had always been a breeding ground for desperation, and desperate men made useful messengers.

“Go,” I commanded, my voice dropping into an aggressive baseline that left no room for hesitation. “Slip through the rear of the Nomadic Pack’s fuel lines. Their patrols rotate every four hours you’ll have a twelve-minute window between the third and fourth watch. Deliver a final warning to Natalie.”

I paused, running my thumb along the rifle’s cold steel barrel, savering the weight of it.

“Tell her I have four unbranded grey transit rigs packed with mercenaries parked in the willow grove drainage ditches. Tell how she has one final chance to surrender the Blackridge territorial deeds and transfer the entire pack wealth to my registry blocks before the sun clears the ridge peaks. If she doesn’t write the assets over to me…” I smiled, and this time the expression case easily, naturally, the way it had in the old days when I crushed rivals beneath my heel. tell her I am coming to the clearing myself to execute her yearlings and burn the estate to the bedrock.”

The spy gave a low bow, his filthy cloak sweeping across the dusty floorboards. “It will be done, Matriarch”

“See that it is.”

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