Rise Of A Shattered Luna (Natalie) by Kave Derry novel Chapter 96

Chapter 96 The Forgotten Memory

Chapter 96 The Forgotten Memory

Natalie’s POV

I had expected a patchwork of scars and some artificial look.

But the woman staring back at me… she was a revelation.

My reflection still looked like myself, yet not quite.

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Most of my features remained; the slope of my nose, the curve of my jaw but the contours had been subtly, almost supernaturally refined.

At first glance, I was still Natalie.

Look longer, and I had become something else entirely.

My skin didn’t just look healed; it looked luminous.

“Is this really me?” I whispered, my voice still raspy.

I raised a trembling hand, my fingertips brushing the new skin of my cheek.

Baron stood behind me, his smile deepened, a look of profound, quiet triumph in his eyes. “It’s you, Natalie. At sixteen, you were already this dazzling, this untamed.”

Sixteen?

I blinked, the mirror wobbling in my grip.

I wanted to argue – to tell him he was mistaken.

He’d never seen me when I was sixteen.

When had I ever been so bold?

But then, a memory buried broke through the surface of my consciousness

That year, I had done something unthinkable.

I had run away from home, crossing borders alone to reach the Great Archives.

I was obsessed with the ancient scripts, the lost lineages of the packs that no one else cared to translate.

Away from the suffocating control of my parents, I had dared to let my hair down, to wear a look that was fierce and smoldering. matching the intensity of the secrets I was hunting.

The effect had been stunning.

Too stunning.

I remembered the way scholars and strangers alike stared at me in the dimly lit halls of the archives

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Chapter 96 The Forgotten Memory

What should have been a triumph of research ended in a cold, paralyzing fear.

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I learned then that for a woman in our world, beauty was often treated as a sin; an invitation for the wrong kind of hunger.

My parents had never known about it.

It was a secret I had carried alone, a private trauma that I thought I had buried deep enough to forget.

And yet, here was Baron, recalling it so easily.

He spoke of that version of me as if he had seen her with his own eyes.

My breath caught in my throat, a sudden realization dawned on me.

Hadn’t he once said we had met before?

Long before that night.

Could it have been then – during that very trip to the archives?

My mind raced, searching the fragments of that night. And suddenly… I saw it.

***

I had been fleeing down a back alley behind the museum, my heart pounding against my ribs after being harassed by a group of drunken men near the entrance door.

I had ducked behind a row of rusted trash bins, crouching in the shadows, praying to get back to my hotel unseen.

And then I stumbled.

My hand had landed on something cold and wet.

A body.

A man was sprawled on the ground, his chest soaked in blood under the dim streetlamp.

His face was bruised and battered, but when I tried to scream, a hand clamped around my ankle.

“Help me,” he had rasped. Speaking in a local tongue.

I nearly screamed, my lungs seizing. I had never seen so much blood in my life.

I had never been this close to the raw reality of death.

Every instinct in my body was to run, to kick free and disappear into the night, but his grip was iron. Even dying, he was stronger

than me.

Panicked and desperate, i had reached into my small dance bag and pulled out everything I had, my wallet, my cheap phone, my emergency cash. I dropped them beside his head like an offering to a dark god.

“I’m just a girl! I don’t want trouble!” I had hissed, my voice shaking. “Here never saw each other, all right? Just let me go!”

take this. All of it. Use the phone to call someone. We

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Chapter 96 The Forgotten Memory

I tugged at my leg, but the hand didn’t budge.

The man groaned, as he rolled back against the filthy bricks. Only then did I see the true horror of his condition.

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