Underwater: The Silent Luna novel Chapter 138

Chapter 138

Ethan was still in shock long after Doctor Camila left their cabin. The room had gone quiet again, but it was not the kind of quiet that brought peace. It was the kind that pressed on the chest. The kind that made every thought louder. He sat there with too much inside him, too many things trying to settle at once and failing. He had been meant to go through with his own session after Meadow’s, but he could not. Not then. Not when what Camila had uncovered about Meadow had turned everything in his head upside down. He had thought many things about his wife’s silence over the years. He had thought it cruel fate. He had thought it tragedy. He had thought perhaps some damage had simply been done and there was no changing it. But this? This was different. This was deliberate. This was not the work of nature or misfortune. This was a person. A person with patience. A person with malice. A person who had chosen to do that to a child and had then returned later to finish what they started when she got her

wolf.

The thought made something vicious move in Ethan’s chest.

To think there had been nothing naturally wrong with Meadow all this time. To think some wicked bastard, somewhere in the pack had decided to ruin her for reasons only a monster could understand. It sickened him. It baffled him too. He kept trying to make sense of it, and the more he thought about it, the uglier it became. Meadow had been a little girl. Whatever she stumbled on when she was young, whatever she saw or heard or wandered into, it had been enough for someone to decide she should be silenced. Not just once, either. The person had been patient enough to wait. Patient enough to come back after she had gotten her wolf and bury her deeper, make sure she stayed trapped, make sure she stayed harmless.

Whoever had done that had lived among them.

That was the part Ethan could not shake. This was not some stranger passing through. Not some enemy from far away. Not some random evil that vanished into the dark. The person who did this had known her. Had watched her. Had stayed alive in the same world as her while she suffered through the consequences of what they had done. They had eaten, slept, laughed, moved through the pack, all while Meadow lived with a life that had been twisted at its root.

His jaw hardened.

The fact that her memory had been buried too made it worse. It meant Meadow herself did not know. It meant she could not point and say who had hurt her. Could not give him a face, a name, a trail. The person had made a mess of his wife and then hidden the evidence inside her own mind. It was evil. There was no softer word for it. It was abuse, ugly and deliberate. Ethan had seen cruelty before. He had lived through enough of life to know people could be vicious. But there was something especially foul in hurting a child until her voice disappeared, then digging your claws deeper when her wolf arrived.

He leaned back and stared ahead, but all he kept hearing in his mind was Meadow’s voice.

He had heard it.

That was the part that kept circling back and back until the rage tangled with something softer and almost painful. Her voice had been real. Soft. Gentle. Even with the hysteria that had wrapped around it in that moment, it had been beautiful. Ethan could still hear it if he closed his eyes hard enough. It had not been loud. It had not been dramatic. But it had gone through him anyway. The sound of it had touched something raw in him because he had never expected to hear it. Not really. Maybe he had hoped in some foolish hidden part of himself, but hope and expectation were not the same thing. Yet he had heard her. Meadow. His wife.

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12:21 Wed, Jun 17 MO

Chapter 138

Speaking.

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12:21 Wed, Jun 17 MO

Underwater: The Silent Luna