The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 538

“You’re a—” I couldn’t finish it.

“A spider. Say it. It won’t bother me.” She tilted her head, a gesture so utterly mine that my stomach churned at the sight. “I wasn’t always a spider, though. Once, I was the most beautiful woman in the packs, and I knew it, and I made sure everyone else knew it too.” She turned back toward me. Ran her hand over her hair. “The Goddess doesn’t care for such vanity, as it turns out. So she gave me a shape to match what was underneath. The vain woman became the thing that hides in the dark and eats flies.”

My throat bobbed. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. The back of my head was stuck to the web, forcing it forward.

“It took me a long time to find a way around her little punishment,” she went on, “but one day, while skittering through the caves and the muck, I found something. A pendant, discarded in the mud.”

The pendant Sebastian had given me.

“The pendant, when worn by a beautiful woman who is loved by those around her, soaks up all that love and warmth that surrounds her. It weakens her over time, dulls the bonds she forms with others. Even mate bonds.”

She paused, eyes flicking over me again. Her tongue darted out to wet her lips.

“Once the pendant has taken everything,” she said, “it gives me the opportunity to step in. For a while, I can take the wearer’s body. Use it as my own.”

“How long?” I managed.

She shrugged and looked at her hands again.. “It’s hard to say, but all mortal bodies wear out eventually. Yours will too, in forty years, fifty if you’re lucky, and when it does, my spider form will begin to return.” Her smile thinned out, turning nasty. “And then I’ll have to go find another one. I always do.”

I thought about the faces in the pond. The gray, bloated faces, mouths working wordlessly, trying to warn me.

I clenched my jaw. “Gideon will know it’s not me. He’ll come looking for me.”

She laughed. It was low and menacing, nothing at all like mine. She didn’t look back over her shoulder at me as she said, “Even if he does somehow figure it out, he won’t find these boulders again. No one ever does unless I want them to.”

And then, just like that, she was gone.

In the silence that followed, I screamed Gideon’s name, and Bjorn’s, and Melissa’s, even Sebastian’s and my mother’s, and then names that didn’t mean anything at all, just sound, just noise flung up into the darkness.

I thrashed until the spider’s silk cut grooves into my wrists and my voice gave out for the second time that night, and the only thing that answered me was the slow creak of the web swaying under my own weight.