The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 587

Out back, the pool sat under its cover, leaves collecting on the tarp. Every year, this yard had filled up with folding tables and balloons and shrieking kids for Bjorn’s birthday. He’d learned to cannonball off the diving board at six and never entered a pool any other way again.

I went upstairs last.

Bjorn’s room was the corner one, the one with the morning sun. The glow-in-the-dark stars were still on the ceiling. We’d put them up together when he was five, arranging them into constellations, and when the movers came, I’d tried to peel one off and taken a strip of paint with it. So they stayed. A little piece of him, left behind to watch over the room that the new owners said they wanted to use as their future child’s nursery. So it all worked out in the end, I supposed.

The doorbell rang at eleven, right on time.

They were waiting in the foyer when I came down, holding hands, looking up at the staircase with wide eyes. Young. Nervous. The wife had her hair pulled back and a cardigan buttoned up to the neck, and the husband was gripping the banister, giving the railing a little shake like he was testing for faults.

“We can come back,” he said quickly when I came dow nthe stairs. “If you need more time.”

“I’m all done,” I said. “It’s yours.”

“We still can’t thank you enough.” He shook his head. “The price. Our realtor kept checking the listing for typos.”

Nearly ten years of my life had happened inside those walls. My son’s first steps. My mother’s first rest. Late-night tea and pool party birthdays and a company built from the ground up. The human lands had given me all of it, and I wasn’t leaving any of it behind. It was coming with me, the way everything always did. Always there, even as I stepped into a new chapter that felt like an old one.

Besides, I wasn’t finished with this world quite yet. I was just changing how I spent my time in it.

I got in the car, started the engine, and pulled out of the driveway. In the rearview mirror, the couple stood together in the open doorway, already home, waving at me. I waved back and turned down the street toward the city.

Downtown, the shareholders were waiting.