Underwater: The Silent Luna novel Chapter 139

Chapter 139

He wanted to hear it again.

He wanted to hear her say anything. His name. A curse. A laugh. A simple question. He did not care. He wanted her to speak because she should have been able to all along. Because that voice should never have been stolen from her. Because now that he knew it was there, buried and trapped, he wanted it back for her with a kind of desperation he could feel in his teeth.

He rubbed a hand over his face and exhaled slowly.

The news Camila had given him had enraged him, but it had also made him deeply sad. Sad in that heavy, ugly way that settled beneath the anger and made it harder to breathe. Meadow had lived all these years not knowing what had been taken from her. No fully. Not clearly. She had simply lived in the shape of the damage. Adjusted herself around it. Endured it. Learned to survive, in a world that had been made smaller for her by someone else’s cruelty. And now he knew that the bastard had not only tried to render her mute, but blind, deaf, and dumb all at once. The intention alone made him sick. To want a child so cut off from the world that she could neither tell nor defend nor reveal. There was no excuse for that. None.

Camila had said they could not yet tell if it had been done by an Alpha or a hypnotist. Someone with enough force to compel her mind and bury her under layers of command. But Camila had also said they would peel back those layers. That they would release her. She had warned him that it would be hard on Meadow, that recovery would not be simple, but she believed it could be done. Ethan had clung to that. Not because he trusted easily when it came to things this important, but because he had to. Because for the first time there was an actual path in front of them. Painful maybe. Difficult definitely. But real.

Someday, he thought, he would hear Meadow speak his name.

That thought stayed with him as he turned to look at her.

She was still confused. That much showed plainly on her face, in the way her brows sát slightly drawn, in the way she looked at things like they had shifted shape while she was not looking. Camila had broken through something, but Meadow herself had no full recollection of what had happened during that moment. She remembered the doctor telling her to watch her index fingers as they came together independently, remembered following the movement, remembered the strange pull of it. But the rest sat beyond her

reach.

She looked at Ethan and signed slowly, uncertain.

“What is the matter?”

He looked at her lips as she formed the sign. It hit him hard again, that odd split between what had always been and what now could be. She did not know. She was asking him what was wrong, not knowing the world had just tilted under both their feet.

“You can speak.”

Her whole body changed at once. Her eyes widened. Her hand flew to her mouth as if to hold it closed, as if too late she could keep the possibility from escaping. The shock on her face was so naked it twisted something in him.

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12:21 Wed, Jun 17 MD

Chapter 139

He wheeled his chair toward her and touched her hand gently.

“Meadow, I heard you speak, and I heard Nightshade speak through you.”

She stared at him like she could not decide if he had lost his mind or if she had. The idea was too big. Too impossible against

everything she had lived with for years. Ethan understood that. He did not rush her. He only held her hand and let her feel that he

was serious.

“Someone compelled you never to speak again. Do you remember anything that happened when you were a child?

She shook her head.

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Underwater: The Silent Luna