Page 160 of Priest and his Anarchist

“Luna?” I stop, the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight. The snap of a twig, the flutter of a bird, and silence. “Luna!” I yell again, my pace picking up as I follow the footsteps in the snow. I don’t look anywhere else but there, and it’s not until I shift another tree branch out of the way that I see her. Only…

He stands tall like a demon in the night with nothing but the background of moonlight allowing me to see what’s going on.

I search her eyes, and she peers at me with a blank stare, her lashes fanning out over her cheeks. Her mouth is wide open, her brows pulling in.

I can’t see his face shaded by the hat on top of his head. In a sprawl of material, the bottom half of his face is covered. That’s not what stops me.

It is his pants around his ankles, the way his hips go back and forth, her tiny body thrusting the tree. The blood smeared on the side of her face, trickling down her leg. It is her eyes staring back at me with hopelessness. It seeds something in me in that moment.

My feet move without thinking.What am I doing?It is too late. Something hot fills me with every inch of every step. A twig snaps beneath my boot, and the boy stops, stepping backward from her and looking between us both. Racing forward, I catch her as she falls to the ground, and before I can chase him, he’s already gone in the night.

“Come on.” I lean down and scoop her from the backs of her thighs. Her clothes are discarded to the side. “What the fuck.”

A surge of energy stirs beneath me when I grab her clothes, shoving them over her head. When I reach her legs, I close my eyes and force her pants up, opening back on her. She tiptoes away from me when the strip of silk radiates in the snow. My heart rate picks up, anger clouding my thoughts. I swipe it and shove it in my pocket, heat pulling at my chest when I carry her back to my board.

There is a strange scent in the air, the perfume of a florist mixed with—something else. As soon as we’re back where my board is, I grab my jacket and throw it over her face.

Her hair sprawls out over her shoulders when I pull it out from underneath. “I need to tell your mom.”

“Wait!” She grabs my arm. I look between it and her face. Her eyes seem brighter, as if the smell in the air matches the lavender of her eyes. “Please don’t tell her what you saw.”

The world shifts beneath me. “Okay.”

I grab my phone out of the pocket in the jacket she’s wearing and type out a text.

I found her.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

luna

present

Everyone is silent as Priest finishes. “At least I thought I found her.”

“So all this time you didn’t change because you were triggered?” Halen asks, her eyes wide with unshed tears. “I hated Darling, not you. I thought you changed and just became nicer.”

I steady myself. “No. I wasn’t triggered. She wasn’t me before this moment. That’s why I was different.”

Mom lowers her head, shaking. Her finger taps on my thigh to the rhyme of a ticking clock, as if trying to run through the scenarios of how this happened. “I’m sorry.”

“Time’s up.” Thank God. “I need to get Madison,” Bishop says, playing with his phone while looking at me. “This is what I meant when I said everyone needs to keep a tracker on their wives.” His eyes flash to Priest. “Especially yours.”

Something gnaws inside my stomach, a placement of questions. I’ve never felt unwelcome within the walls of the Kings, but suddenly with the truth out there for everyone, I can’thelp but feel disconnected. As if I allowed them to believe I was someone else, even if I knew they knew me longer.

I swallow, but before I can push from the sofa and leave the room, questions be damned, my mom stops me, and I move back to my place beside Priest, not on his lap, since Evie is already changing another patch.

“I don’t remember the birth. When I had you, I was held against my will by an enemy of Midnight Mayhem, who was also my family. I—I passed out. I woke and a baby was on my chest, and you were beautiful….” She pauses. “She. You. She—” She pulls away and my heart sinks. She realizes that the baby on her chest wasn’t me. I was someplace else. “I love you.” She taps at my thigh as if reading my anxiety. None of this matters. I’m hoping Bishop caught onto my underlying comment about how this aligns with Madison.

“And where are they now?” Halen asks from the armchair, directly beside me.

I hadn’t realized it, but just behind Halen is War, and beside War and directly behind me is Vaden, and when I turn slightly to the other side of Priest, Stella stands there casually, cleaning her coffin-shaped nails with a knife.

“Dead,” Mom answers Halen flatly. “All of them, and trust me when I say we would know if they were still alive. They’re no longer here. Patience, they’re a thing of the past. This is something—has to be something else.”

“Who were they?” Halen asks again.

“They’re dead,” Bishop repeats without looking from his phone. “We check on them every year but nothing. They were as irrelevant as they are now. A dozen useless fucks that were angry that they weren’t part of all—” Bishop pauses. “That.” He’s meaning Midnight Mayhem.

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