The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 589

Avery’s POV

“Why does the chicken have a paragraph under it?” Gideon asked me once the waiter had gone.

“You act like the only food in the packs is plain chicken and rice,” I laughed.

He sighed in a way that reminded me a little too much of Bjorn. “Our foods are simpler there. I don’t even know what half these words mean.”

I giggled. “Sounds like a you problem.”

Gideon rolled his eyes, but he was laughing right along with me. He’d gone for the steak, cooked rare, with a side of vegetables and roasted potatoes—simple, just like him. I went for something a little more experimental to celebrate my final night in the human lands.

Or at least, my final night for a while. I wasn’t sure when I would return. Probably someday. But right now, I saw myself leaving this skyline behind for a good long time, and I knew I wasn’t going to miss it nearly as much as I once thought I would.

The restaurant sat near the top of one of the towers downtown, candlelight and white tablecloths and windows running the whole length of the room. Gideon had made the reservation himself, somehow, days ago. I decided not to ask how. He looked out of place in the nicest possible way, too broad for the little chair, his sleeves still rolled from the afternoon, and every so often, one of the humans dining around us would glance at him like they weren’t sure if he might shift right there and wreak havoc.

Below us, the city was turning gold. The sun had dropped behind the hills across the river, and the light came in low and warm, catching on a thousand windows at once, and one by one, the streetlights were waking up beneath it all.

I had watched this city from a hundred windows over the past decade. Offices, the house on the hill, the kitchen table at two in the morning with my mother’s chamomile tea between my hands. It had never looked more beautiful than it did tonight. Or maybe it just looked that way because I was leaving.

We talked through all of it over dinner. The words came easy now, easier than they had in weeks, about Bjorn’s grounding and whether it stood any chance of surviving his birthday, about Claire and the look on those three identical faces when the dollar slid down the table, about what I wanted to plant in the greenhouse come spring.

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