Luna POV
Luna did not move.
She stayed on her knees with Calder's blood on her hands and looked up at Crest and waited for him to say something different. Something human. Something that meant she had misunderstood.
He said nothing else. He just waited, the way men like him always waited patient, blank, already finished caring about the answer.
"Tell him no," Luna said.
Crest blinked. Like the word was a language he did not speak.
"Tell my father no." She turned back to Calder, pressing her hands harder against the wound. "I am not leaving my brother. Tell him to send a healer. Tell him to send two guards. Tell him to do something useful for once in his"
"The Alpha was clear." Crest's voice had not changed pitch at all. "You come now or the arrangement proceeds without your cooperation. He said you would understand what that means."
She understood. She understood perfectly. The arrangement was already made. The buyer was already waiting. Whether she walked to the secondary gate or was carried there, she was going.
Calder's hand found her wrist.
"Don't," he said. His voice was stronger than it had any right to be. "Don't you dare go quietly."
"I'm not going at all."
"Luna"
"I said I'm not going." She looked at Crest. "Get out of my sight."
Something moved in Crest's face. Not guilt. Closer to irritation the look of someone whose simple job had become complicated. He took a step forward.
Calder moved.
He should not have been able to. He had lost too much blood and the wound was bad and Luna had felt how bad it was with her own hands. But Calder had always done things he should not have been able to do where she was concerned. He grabbed the wall behind him and pushed himself upright, one arm braced against the stone, and put his body between Luna and Crest.
He was shaking. He was bleeding through the cloth she had pressed against his ribs. He stood anyway.
"You're going to step back," Calder said to Crest. His voice was the voice Luna had heard him use exactly three times in her life low and without any performance in it. The voice that meant he was not making a threat. He was making a fact. "You are going to step back and go back to my father and tell him that his son says"
His legs gave out.
Not slowly. All at once, like a building when the last wall goes everything holding him up simply stopped, and he dropped. Luna caught him before he hit the ground but he was heavy and she went down with him, both of them on the cold dirt, his head against her shoulder, his breathing coming in short desperate pulls.
"Calder." She grabbed his face. "Calder, look at me. Look at me right now."
His eyes found hers. Still there. Still him.
"Stupid," she said, and her voice broke on it. "That was so stupid. Why do you always"
"Because it's you," he said simply. Like that explained everything. Like it always had.
Behind her, she heard Crest step back. Not leaving. Just giving her a moment the way you give an animal a moment before you put it in a cage. She hated him for it. She hated the patience of it.
She looked across the yard through the gap between the buildings.
The transport was still there. Black vehicle, engine running, north gate open. Her father was moving around the front of it, one hand on Mira's back, guiding her toward the door. Mira was crying pretty, frightened, the kind of crying that got noticed. She had always known how to cry like that.
"Father!" Luna's voice tore out of her before she decided to use it. Raw and loud and completely without dignity. She did not care. "Father, Calder is hurt! He needs a healer you have to send someone back, you have to"
Gregor stopped walking.
He turned around.
He looked at her across the smoky yard across the distance and the noise and the fire that was still eating through the east buildings. He looked at her. She looked at him. And for one second, one single terrible second, she thought he was going to do it. She thought some instinct in him was going to win.
He looked at Calder on the ground. He looked at Luna's hands red with his son's blood, reaching toward him across the dark.
Then he looked at Mira. Who was watching him. Waiting.
And he turned away.
He put his hand back on Mira's back. He guided her into the transport. He got in after her.
The north gate closed.
The sound the engine made when it pulled away was the quietest sound Luna had ever heard. Quieter than the screaming. Quieter than the fire. Quieter than Calder's breathing in her ear, which she focused on now because it was the only thing in the world that mattered.
Still breathing. Still here.
"He left," Calder said. He did not sound surprised. That was the worst part he did not sound surprised at all.
"Yes."
"Luna"
"Stop. Do not say anything about him right now. Don't give him the space." She pressed her hand back against his wound and held it there. "We are getting out of here. You and me. Same as always."
"Same as always," he repeated softly.
She looked around the grain store wall past Crest, who had gone still and watchful in the shadows. She mapped the route in her head. The south path ran parallel to the outer tree line and fed into the emergency tunnels the pack used for exactly this situation. If she could get Calder upright, if she could get him moving
"I'll help you carry him."
She looked at Crest sharply. His face was still blank. But he had said it.
"Why?" she demanded.
"Because the Alpha's transport is gone and I have no way out of this yard either." He glanced toward the east ward. "And those soldiers are coming this way."
Luna looked. He was right she could see lights moving, organized and deliberate, sweeping in their direction.
She stood up. She made herself think. She looked at Calder and looked at the route and looked at Crest
The wall behind them exploded inward.
Not from the fire. From impact something massive and deliberate, a battering force that turned a hundred-year-old stone wall into flying debris in less than a second. Luna threw herself over Calder, arms over her head, stone raining down around them.
When the dust broke open, three Ashen Claw soldiers were standing in the gap where the wall used to be.
And they were all looking directly at her.