The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 552

Avery’s POV

I worked through the rest of the day and into the evening, hunched over the witch’s table with tools that definitely weren’t meant for what I was using them for, grinding and steeping and mixing until my back ached and my eyes burned from the fumes.

I started by drying a handful of the silver creeper over the woodstove until it crumbled, then steeped it slowly in a little oil until the scent coaxed out of it. It was finicky work, the kind of thing I’d normally spend weeks perfecting, but I didn’t have weeks, and it didn’t need to be perfect. It just needed to work.

By the time the sunlight faded to dusk, I had the base ready. It wasn’t finished, but it was a start. The truth-serum flower I set aside for later; that part of the plan was still forming, and I didn’t want to waste it before I knew exactly how I meant to use it.

Melissa had been sleeping for most of the day, only waking now and then to ask how it was coming, then drifting back under. I tried not to wake her; she needed every minute of rest she could get. Her foot looked a little better with the salve on it when I checked at one point, the redness no longer quite as angry, but the infection would spread until we got her antibiotics.

Only once darkness fell did I finally wake her.

“It’s late,” I said, crouching beside her chair with the scrying glass in my hands. “He’ll be alone in his room by now.”

Melissa rubbed her face and nodded. She didn’t look like she had it in her, but she held her hands out for the glass anyway.

“You know Bjorn’s bedroom better than I do,” she said. “Describe it to me.”

I closed my eyes and carefully pictured the room Gideon had prepared for Bjorn in Nightwolf, describing it as I went. The walls had been painted blue recently, a color change Bjorn personally requested one day over breakfast. The model airplanes lined up on his shelf, quite a few more now than the first one Gideon had given him—his favorite pastime these days was putting him together.

Then there was the window that looked out over the back lawn, the same lawn where I’d watched the witch lie in the sun with my family. I told Melissa about all of it, the color of the bedspread, the curtains, everything.

Finally, the surface of the glass clouded and swirled, and Bjorn’s face came into view.

He was asleep in his bed, the covers tangled around one leg while the other stuck out over the edge of the mattress. His mouth was open, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks. I smiled faintly as I watched him sleep.

He was okay. For now, at least. That meant something.

Melissa looked at me, tilting the glass toward me. “Try to say something,” she said.

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