The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 561

“I didn’t mean—” I choked out the three words, only for them to be cut off abruptly.

“The shrine,” she said. I furrowed my brow, and an image came immediately: the little stone alcove at the back of Nightwolf’s grounds, the one I had cleared and kept carefully when I first moved there. Moonstone and wildflowers. A candle always burning. The years going by until I forgot to light the candle, then forgot the flowers, then stopped going entirely.

I pressed my lips together and looked down at the ground.

“You stopped tending it,” she said. “You stopped praying. You stopped giving thanks and started thinking of what was given to you as something that simply belonged to you. Something to put in a bottle. Something to sell.” She shook her ethereal head, white hair flowing behind her, defying all laws of gravity. “You are a child of mine, Avery. You’ve always been a child of mine. I put you here to keep the old ways alive, to tend what your people have always tended. And you walked away from it.”

A tear ran down my face. I didn’t try to stop it.

“This,” she said, “is your test. You have the gift. Use it now for what it actually is.” The light had already begun to pull back, her silhouette softening at the edges. “Not a commodity. What it has always been. A divine thing.”

“Wait,” I said. “Please, I’m not finished—”

I jolted upright with my cheek wet and my pulse hammering.

Gray morning light filled the hut. Melissa was still asleep. My neck ached from the angle I’d slumped at, and there was a crease in my arm from the table’s edge, and I barely registered either of those things.

A divine thing.

The guilt struck me square in the chest.

Ten years. I hadn’t thought about the shrine in years. I’d walked past the corner of the grounds where it sat and not even glanced at it. I’d taken everything she gave me—the Lycan blood, the healing instinct, the particular sensitivity to plants that no one had ever been able to explain—and I’d packaged it up and presented it to men in suits and called it a product.

She was right. I had a gift, and I hadn’t been using it for a long time. Not the way it was intended to be used, at least.

I looked at the vial on the table, and suddenly, it hit me.

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