The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 369

That thought settled heavy in my chest as I came around the last bend and the cottage came into view.

It looked the same from the outside. The same stone path leading to the front door, the same flower beds along the front, although the flowers were dead now, dried up and frost-bitten from the cold. The garden had always been her pride. She would spent entire weekend mornings out here with dirt on her knees, right fucking here, and I hadn’t visited her.

I unlocked the front door and stepped inside.

The smell hit me first. It was faint and fading by the moment, but the perfume she wore and the coffee she liked and the smell of her was still permeating the walls.

My throat tightened as I took another step into the house.

The furniture was still in place, but most of the surfaces had been cleared. The small knickknacks that used to sit on the windowsills and the mantle were gone, packed away. The bookshelf was half empty. A stack of boxes sat against the far wall of the sitting room, neatly labeled in someone’s handwriting that wasn’t my mother’s. Kitchen. Bedroom. Books.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked around at all of it.

I hadn’t visited enough. The thought kept coming back, patient and insistent, the way guilt usually was. I had been so caught up in my own survival, in Dominic and Vivian and the impossible task of trying to change a timeline that seemed determined to run its own course, that I had let months go by between visits.

And the worst part about all of it was that she had never said a word about it. She never asked me to come by. She never put pressure on me. Even when I acted like a jackass, she was always there when I was ready, always willing to provide a warm hug or a cup of tea, and I hadn’t done the same for her. No one had. 1

I moved through the sitting room and down the short hallway to her bedroom. It was emptier in here, the closet standing open with bare hangers, the dressing table cleared. Someone had stripped the bed and folded the quilt at the foot of it. I took the quilt and tucked it under my arm.

Two trunks sat at the base of the bed. I recognized one of them; it had lived at the top of her closet for as long as I could remember. I crouched down and opened it.

Inside were layers of fabric, papers, and a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon. Old photographs in a cardboard sleeve. A small wooden jewelry box that I set aside to take. And underneath all of that, wrapped loosely in a piece of old linen, was something hard and angular.

Curious, I pulled it out and unwrapped it.

It was a small stone tablet covered in markings around a central relief of a wolf howling at the moon

“What the…”

I stood, walking over to the window, and held it up.

The carved relief was beautiful in the light. The wolf, I now realized, had something that looked like a crown Hoating abuses

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify