The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 527

Avery’s POV

I didn’t tell Gideon about the pendant. By the time I returned to Nightwolf, the burn had subsided. The mark had calmed by evening, faded down to a pink crescent that my collar mostly covered. If Gideon noticed it at dinner, he didn’t say anything. We sat and ate with my mother and Bjorn, and laughed and sipped wine, and for a little while, things were good. Happy. Normal.

He noticed the mark later, though.

The bedroom door had barely fallen shut behind us before his mouth found my neck, tasting my skin, sucking gently. I gasped, not just from the pleasure that suddenly wracked my frame from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, but from the sting of pain against the hollow of my throat as his lips brushed the spot.

He stopped, pulling back to look at the mark. His fingertips hovered over it without touching.

“It got worse,” he said, looking up at me with concern written across his face.

I pulled him back down by the collar. “I’m fine. Don’t ruin the moment.”

I could tell he wanted to ask more, but then my arms were around him, my mouth slanting over his as my tongue swirled around his, and he was too distracted to bring it up again.

We found our way to the bed in stages, shedding clothes as we went, and then it was just the two of us and the dark room and the sheets tangling around our bodies. After three weeks of this, we knew each other again. He knew exactly where to linger. I knew exactly what would make him hiss through his teeth like the air had been pulled out of him. We moved together slowly at first, then less slowly, the heat building between us until the rest of the world dropped away entirely.

I felt myself climbing toward the edge, my fingers digging into his back, his lips at my jaw.

And I did what I had started doing again these past weeks, the thing I’d denied us both for ten years: I reached for the bond, wanting to feel him everywhere at once, wanting to intensify the desire we both felt the moment we reached our peak together.

But tonight, there was nothing there.

It wasn’t as if he was holding back, keeping a wall between us. It was as if the fog I’d felt before had intensified, turning thick and heavy and cold. And completely impenetrable.

I froze. Gideon must have felt something too, because he slowed, then stilled, his breath ragged against my cheek. Whatever had been building between us a moment ago was simply gone, snuffed out like a candle, for both of us at once.

He lifted his head and looked down at me. I looked up at him. Neither of us said anything for a few seconds, both of us too breathless and confused to speak.

A moment later, I felt his erection fade. He pulled out, propping himself up on his elbows to look down at me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I gently pushed at his chest, and he rolled off of me. I sat up, running my fingers through my hair. I tried the bond again, but it was the same. Dense and foggy, there but not there at the same time, almost as if it had gotten lost in the mist.

“The bond,” I said, looking down at him. “It’s… gone.”

Gideon blinked, thinking for a moment, then shook his head. “That’s impossible. We must just be tired.”

I stared at him, certain it was more than that. But the sincerity in his eyes made some of the tension slip from my shoulders, and I wanted to believe him.

“You’ve been running around all week,” he said. “Spending all your spare time working in the greenhouse, and now driving back and forth to Evergreen twice.” He shrugged. “Maybe you just exhausted yourself.”

The moonlight died a few feet under the surface. The darkness was absolute but I kept swimming anyway, kicking deeper, my hair streaming behind me.

They came out of the black one at a time. Gray, bloated faces, drifting just close enough to see, their eyes milky and wide. A man with his mouth stretched open in a scream that made no sound. A young woman whose lips were moving fast, urgent, bubbles spilling out with words in them—she was telling me something, warning me, I could feel the desperation coming off of her, but the words reached me as nothing but muffled noise.

Another face. Another. All of them were screaming or pleading or mouthing the same shapeless warning, and none of it made any sense, and I didn’t even care.

Below me, in the mud, something glinted.

I reached the bottom and scooped it up, mud and all. I opened my hand.

The pendant sat in my palm in a little nest of muck, glowing red from within. It pulsed against my skin, almost like a heartbeat, and from somewhere inside that glow, a woman’s voice whispered words that crossed the space even underwater.

“You are mine… Put the pendant on… Give me your body… It’s almost done… Peace… I promise…”

I reached up and clasped the pendant around my throat.

The cold suddenly poured into me from every direction, shocking and real, and my lungs seized with the burn of held breath, and I understood, with sudden and perfect clarity, that I was not dreaming anymore. There was black water pressing in all around me, and no air, and no way of knowing how far above me the surface was.

My eyes flew open wide. My mouth opened in a scream that made no sound at all, and a lungful of water rushed in.