When The Luna Broke Her Chains novel Chapter 96

Chapter 96 Touch Her, And She Dies

[KNOX]

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I wake with the distinct sense that something is missing. It takes me a moment to place it, because nothing around me has changed. My chamber is the same, the light filtering in through the same wide window, illuminating the tapestries and reaching corners–even the one where I’ve tucked Xena’s ceremonial cloak. And yet something feels… incomplete.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t rested enough. Sleep evaded me last night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her standing in front of me, heard her voice asking the same question over and over again.

Why can’t you let me go?

My jaw tightens as I sit up, dragging a hand down my face. My wrist aches faintly, the ugly, meaningless scar sitting there. Except it wasn’t meaningless last night. It burned and… reacted?

I stare at it, turning it slightly, as if the answer might reveal itself if I look at it from a different angle. Why did it happen? Why then? Why with her? And what was I even doing?

I lean back, exhaling slowly as I try to reconstruct the moment with the same clarity I apply to everything else, but it doesn’t fall into place the way it should. There is no clean sequence, no clear cause and effect. There is only… disruption.

I spent days staying away from her, deliberately. And then I saw her, and something gave way. Without warning or reason.

For a moment, it almost felt like I had–no. I cut the thought off immediately, before it can take shape. Because if that’s what it is–if that’s even remotely true then Seraphel was right. And I refuse to entertain

that.

I push the thought aside, forcing my focus elsewhere, but it doesn’t leave entirely. It lingers, as everything else tied to her does.

My father won’t hesitate. He has never been incapable of cruelty. I have seen enough, heard enough, to know what the name Oberon demands, what it protects, and what it sacrifices. If Xena were removed from this place–if she were sent away, or worse–it wouldn’t even register as a loss to him. It would be efficient. Clean. He’d call it necessary.

And what that means for me, if I truly feel for Xena, can only be described as disastrous. Something doomed before it can even begin. Because I can’t feel any semblance of love for another person, as I can never act on it, or it will kill them. Literally.

Touch her, and she dies. Bind yourself, and she breaks. Mate, and you will bury another body. That is my curse. That is how you will pay for what you’ve taken from me. A lover for a lover.

The changeling’s curse has been etched deep into memory. I remember it word by word–perhaps that’s a part of the curse too. The first time I’d heard it, I’d been shaken. Then, as days passed, I asked myself how real could it be? Changelings didn’t have inherent magie–they could simply transform from one form to another. They can’t mark a soul–at least not in a way that remains active after they die. So, recklessly, in a drunken haze—and to prove to myself the curse was merely a string of words the changeling hurled at me as his mate died in his arms–I took a woman to bed.

I had been returning from a campaign fought in my father’s name when it happened. The camp celebrated with drink, noise, and women were brought in before the fires died. When a beautiful one named Kara walked up to me, settled in my lap, and began kissing my neck, I didn’t refuse her.

13:59 Tue, Apr 28 @

Chapter 96 Touch Her And She Dies

48%

Finished

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