The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 585

Avery’s POV

Bjorn supervised the airplane repairs from his desk chair, calling out instructions while I held each wing in place and counted to sixty.

“It’s crooked,” he said, squinting at the third one.

“It’s got character.”

“Mom.”

“We’ll repaint it this weekend.” I set the plane on the shelf beside its unbroken brothers and ruffled his hair before he could duck. “And you’re still grounded.”

“I know,” he groaned, although he was smiling. Two weeks with no woods and an eight o’clock bedtime was a small price for being the hero who found his mother, and we both knew it. He’d taken the talk well, nodded in all the right places, promised he’d never sneak out again, and had the good sense to wait until he thought I wasn’t looking before he smirked.

The broken dresser was already gone, hauled out by Gideon and Tegan that morning. A new one was coming next week. Until then, Bjorn’s clothes lived in laundry baskets along the wall, which didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

That was how the days went. One piece at a time.

The greenhouse took a full afternoon to get her stench out of. The witch had used it as her plaything during my absence, making a total mess of everything while I was gone. Everything stunk like her, everything felt tainted. I threw out everything she had touched or pretended to touch, scrubbed the worktable until it sparkled, and propped both doors open to air it out.

My phone was another matter. Dozens of unread emails, a stack of voicemails, my assistant asking with increasing panic whether I was alive, whether the board meeting was still happening, whether I’d seen the quarterly projections.

The perfume deadline sat at the top of the pile and stared at me every time I opened the screen. I read the first few messages, then set the phone face-down in a kitchen drawer and left it there.

Sleep came back slowly. Some nights I still woke up, certain for one terrible moment that I was back in the hollow with spiderwebs in my hair. But then Gideon’s arm would tighten around me, the bond humming between us, and I would remember where I was and drift back to sleep.

Each night, the waking came a little later. Each morning, the hollow felt a little further away.

On the fifth morning, I walked to the back of the grounds.

The shrine sat where it had always sat, in the little stone alcove past the last of the gardens, right where the mowed grass ended and the wild took over. Ten years of neglect had nearly swallowed it whole. Dead leaves crawled halfway up the stone. Brambles had grown across the front of the alcove, and the statue at its center was nearly hidden now beneath a decade of dirt and moss, the last candle I ever lit having turned into a lump of wax and nothing else.

I stood in front of it for a long moment, looking at the statue’s serene face.

I belonged here. I think I’d always known it, somewhere underneath everything, the same way I’d known the vial needed my blood, the same way Bjorn had known to walk into the woods. The Goddess had put me here to tend what my people had always tended, and I had wandered a very long way from that. But she’d never closed the door behind me. She’d just kept the light on and waited.

Once the shrine was clean again, I lit a new candle and placed it on the altar. At the treeline, a few yards off, a patch of small purple wildflowers was growing. I dug out three clumps with my bare hands and replanted them at the base of the shrine, pressing the soil down firm around their roots.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. “For all of it. Even the test.”

The warmth pulsed once against my shoulders, and my hair seemed to pulse with it, and I sat down and leaned back against the stone.

The vial was in my jacket pocket, where it had been all week. I’d gone back to the clearing the morning after and found it lying in the grass, empty, the sprayer still attached, dew beaded on the glass.

I pulled it out now and turned it over in my fingers.

There was nothing left inside. Just the faint scent of the plants I’d used to make it, the ghost of the most valuable thing I had ever made. It had taken two days, a dream, and three drops of my own blood, and it would never sit on a shelf, never have a price, never be pitched across a conference table to a room full of suits.

In that moment, the decision was settled. It had been at the back of my mind since everything had happened, but now it was certain. I knew exactly what I was going to do with Lycan Root.