Underwater: The Silent Luna novel Chapter 106

Chapter 106

If he had known she would bring him this much peace, this much luck, this much unexpected light, he would have been at that altar.

The thought came so sharply it soured the sweetness in his chest for a moment.

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He would have been there. He would have shown up. He would have done it properly. He would have stood there and waited for her

instead of letting her be led into that humiliation alone. The memory of how it had all happened pressed on him harder now than it had

before, maybe because he loved her now in the way he had refused to name then. Back then he had been angry, bitter, wounded, full of

resentment at his mother, at his life, at the trap he thought was being laid around him. He had looked at Meadow as part of the cruelty,

not as another victim inside it. He had not stopped to think what it must have felt like for her.

Now he did.

He imagined it and hated himself a little for it.

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He imagined her walking down the aisle with no groom waiting. Imagined the stares. The whispers. The ugly curiosity. The shame of

being put on display only to be quietly rejected in front of everyone. In pack life, people could be kind when they wanted to be, but they

could also be merciless. He knew what gossip sounded like in Whitewood. He knew how words spread. He knew how women could be

looked at when they were pitied, mocked, or treated like something lesser. Meadow would have endured all of it in silence, and that made

the thought worse. She had no voice to defend herself with. No sharp answer to fling back. No easy way to push against humiliation once

it settled around her.

His jaw tightened.

Then he remembered the room. The first room they brought her to in the house. The things he had said. The way he had spoken to her

out of anger that should never have landed on her. The humiliation she had endured after that. The coldness. The distance. The small

cruelties of being tolerated rather than welcomed. Thinking of it now made his heart hurt in a way he could not brush aside. Meadow had

been brought into his life under horrible circumstances, treated as a solution, a convenience, a burden, and yet somehow she had still

found a way to make this work. To choose softness where bitterness would have been easier. To choose love where hurt had every right to

grow claws.

That shamed him.

It humbled him too.

The fact that she could look past all of that and still build something with him made him feel smaller in the face of her goodness. He did

not know what he had done to deserve her patience. He only knew he had not earned it, not then, and yet she had given it anyway.

He moved his chair closer to the bed and shifted onto it,

Meadow turned to him at once and smiled.

Her smile had become dangerous to him without her knowing. One look from her could soften things in him he had spent years

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11:59 Wed, Jun 17

Chapter 106

hardening.

“You should have dressed up before getting on your chair.”

She signed the words with mild reproach and amusement, and Ethan smiled back, shaking his head.

“We have to take our bath before

oping out there.”

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He wheeled himself toward her as he spoke. Meadow looked momentarily surprised, then shy in that sweet way she had when she

understood exactly what he meant. She had been holding the clothes she planned to wear. Ethan reached over, took them from her hands,

and tossed them onto the bed without much ceremony.

Meadow blinked.

Then he pulled her onto his lap.

“1

She let out a breathy little reaction, startled but not resisting, and he felt stupidly pleased by how easily she yielded to him. There was no

force in it. No demand. Only familiarity growing between them, the kind that let him gather her up without fear she would stiffen or pull

away. He wheeled them into the bathroom with her still on his lap, and by then Meadow was smiling again, her hands loosely around his

shoulders as if this, somehow, made perfect sense.

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MermicornQueen

Beautiful x

7 days ago

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Underwater: The Silent Luna