The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 586

Avery’s POV

So this was it.

The house was sold. After weeks of sitting on the market, waiting for the right buyer, it had finally happened. A young couple ready to begin their new life, a little one on the way, a whole future ahead of them. People who planned to stay in the human lands, unlike me, who planned to close this part of my life—perhaps for good, or perhaps not. I still wasn’t entirely sure yet. The pieces were still falling into place, and I’d learned a long time ago not to try forcing anything until the pages turned to reveal the next steps.

The movers had finished clearing everything out on Tuesday—the new owners purchased some of the furniture, but most of it was too minimalist for their tastes, so I would up giving a lot of it away to Claire and my other employees and donating everything else to the local women’s shelter.

The papers were signed Thursday morning in a flourish of pen that felt final and terrifying and exciting all at once.

All that was left now was this: one last walk through the house I’d built, and a set of keys that no longer belonged to me.

I started in the living room.

My mother and I had shared a thousand cups of tea at the table that used to sit under that window. I used to come downstairs at two in the morning and find the kettle already on. Two mugs of chamomile, her favorite, simple and cheap, even though I’d tried to buy her expensive imported teas on more than one occasion. We would spend so many sleepless nights sitting by the window, sometimes talking, mostly not, watching the city glitter below until one of us finally started yawning.

In this house, I got to watch my mother come into her own for the first time. She had spent her whole life being needed by somebody, forced to work, to clean, to constantly move. Here, for the first time, she got to rest. It was one of my favorite things in this house, watching her sip her tea in the kitchen or lounge by the pool with an enormous sunhat or simply sit with a smile on her face and watch as Bjorn played.

She still insisted on working, of course. It was all she knew most of the time. I hired a cleaner to come once a week and told her she didn’t need to lift a finger anymore, but she said she liked keeping busy. Although, I could see her face smooth out whenever we came home from our Friday night dinners out at a local restaurant to a clean house that she hadn’t had to tend to herself.