Chapter 3
On Monday morning I go back to work.
Not to the briefings — I’m not ready for the sideboard and the cold tea and Ronan’s profile while he talks strategy with people who aren’t me. But I have actual work to do. The Greymist supply agreement is up for renewal next month, and I’ve been the point of contact on it since I brokered the original deal eighteen months ago. Lena Greymist and I spent six weeks hammering out the terms — grain stores for medical supplies, a straight trade that saved both packs a fortune in third-party costs. I wrote every line of that contract. Lena sends me draft revisions on Mondays. We have a rhythm.
I sit at my desk in the Luna’s study — technically Margot’s study, but she gave me the east-facing corner two years ago with a desk and a shelf and said make it yours — and I open my correspondence queue.
Three new messages from Lena. All three are cc’d to Soleil.
The first is a routine confirmation. Renewal timeline, same terms, Lena’s neat handwriting on the formal letterhead. My name at the top. Soleil’s added in a second line 'cc: Soleil Addison, Lead Sentinel — per security review.'
The second is a question about adjusting the grain volumes for next quarter. Addressed to me. Soleil cc’d again. Same notation. Per security review.
The third is from two days ago. It’s addressed to Soleil.
Not cc’d to me. Addressed to her. Lena writes: Following up on your note about the border patrol overlap — I think we can fold that into the supply renewal. Sasha’s been handling the trade terms but if this is a security matter now I’m happy to coordinate with you directly. Let me know how you’d like to proceed.
I read it three times. My hands are in my lap under the desk and they’re ice.
Lena didn’t decide to do this. Lena is practical, efficient, loyal to the deal because it works. Someone contacted her — introduced a security angle to a supply agreement that has never had a security component — and Lena, being Lena, adjusted. She’s not betraying me. She’s being professional. The new point of contact reached out, framed it as coordination, and Lena responded the way any reasonable partner would.
The new point of contact reached out. Soleil reached out. To my contact, about my agreement, with a security angle that didn’t exist until she invented it.
I scroll back through the queue. Two weeks of correspondence, the most recent on top. I count the cc lines.
The Greymist agreement — Soleil cc’d on the last four messages.
The Ashward border marker report — Soleil cc’d starting a week ago. The note reads added for security continuity.
The Stone Run healer exchange program — this one stops me. It’s a healer program. I designed it. It has nothing to do with border security or Sentinel operations. Soleil is cc’d with the notation: per Luna transition coordination.
Luna transition coordination.
I didn’t authorize that. Margot didn’t mention it. There’s no memo, no formal announcement, no Council note. Someone — Soleil, Ronan, both, I don’t know — decided that my correspondence for the pack should be mirrored to the Lead Sentinel without telling me about it. The one transitioning to Luna is supposed to be me. Unless it isn't. Until it isn't.
The study is quiet. Morning light through the east window, dust moving slowly in the beam. My shelf is to the left — three years of binders, reference materials, a small ceramic pot of pens. Margot’s desk is across the room, tidy with enough paper on the surface to make me uncomfortable, but it's how she works best. On the sideboard between her desk and my little corner lies the tea tray with with the blend she keeps for me, untouched today. The pot and mugs are upside down on top of it, unused.
I close my email. Open it again. Count again.
Eleven threads. Soleil is cc’d on seven of them. The earliest addition is sixteen days ago — six days before the fitting room. She’s been on my correspondence for over two weeks, and I didn’t notice because I was busy doing the actual work while she was busy being copied on it.
----
I eat lunch alone in the kitchen, sitting on the counter with my legs hanging, a bowl of soup going lukewarm in my hands because I keep forgetting to drink it. The kitchen staff work around me. They’re used to me — I’ve been coming here since my first week in the Luna’s office, when the dining hall felt too loud and too watched and this was the only room where nobody cared about rank.
Yara finds me. Yara Osbourne, one of the junior diplomats I started training six months ago when Margot said I should begin thinking about a staff of my own. She’s young — nineteen, sharp, a little too eager, which makes older wolves dismiss her when they shouldn’t. I like her. I gave her the Ashward file as her first solo assignment because I knew she could handle it and because everyone else thought she couldn’t. The Ashward pack are allies, but the replacement of markers that have eroded is always prickly. Yara is kind, above all else, but holds boundaries like iron. I thought she'd be good at it, and she was.
She slides onto the counter beside me. Too close, too casual — something is off. She smells like the perfume she wears to impress people and her shoulders are tight under her jacket.
“Hey. How are you doing?”
“Fine. What’s up?”
“Nothing, I just —” She picks at the cuff of her sleeve. “People are saying you’ve been... taking a step back. From the Luna stuff. Petra said you seemed really stressed when she talked to you.” She looks at me sideways. “And I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Because I know the Ascension is a lot of pressure, and Soleil mentioned —”
“Soleil mentioned what?”
Yara blinks. My voice came out harder than I meant it to. The soup is cold in my hands.
“She just — at the Sentinel briefing, she said she’s been covering some of your correspondence because you’ve been overwhelmed with your healer duties. She said it really nicely. She said she didn’t want you to burn out before the ceremony.” Yara’s face is open, concerned, a little nervous. “I thought it was sweet, honestly. Not everyone has a sister who’d step in like that.”
The kitchen is warm. Steam from the prep line, onions caramelizing, bread proving in the corner. My fingers are numb around the bowl.
Soleil stood in a briefing — Yara said the Sentinel briefing, which means the room was full of guards and junior officers and sub-commanders — and said she’s been covering my correspondence. Because I’m overwhelmed. Because she doesn’t want me to burn out.
She told a room full of people that she’s doing my job for me. And she framed it as love.
“That’s kind of her,” I say. “I’m fine, Yara. I’ve just been busy.”
“Okay.” Yara doesn’t look convinced. She bumps her knee against mine — an old gesture between us, something she picked up from me, actually, because I used to do it to her when she was spiraling about her first assignment. The gentleness of it makes my chest hurt. “I’m around if you need anything. And the Ashward issue is going great, if you wanted to see the file—”
“I’d love to see it. Bring it Thursday?”
She nods. Slides off the counter. At the door she turns back. “For what it’s worth? I think you’d be a really good Luna. Like, the real thing. Not just the title.”
She’s gone before I can answer. I sit on the counter with cold soup and cold hands and her words lodged under my ribs like a splinter.
Not just the title.
She’s already talking about as if it's not mine to begin with and she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.
----
It's Wednesday night, and I can’t sleep.
Ronan is on his back beside me, breathing deep and even, one arm thrown above his head. The room is dark. The thermostat hums at seventy-four. I’m on my side, facing him, not touching him, and I’m doing something I haven’t done since I was a child — I’m counting the things that are still mine.
The healer rotation schedule. Still mine. Nobody’s touched it because nobody else wants to do it.
My desk in the Luna’s study. Still there. But the correspondence that flows through it is being mirrored to someone else, the contacts I built are being rerouted, and the work that proves I’m competent is being attributed to a transition that doesn’t officially exist.
The ceremony dress. Still technically mine. Still measured to my body. Still hanging in the fitting room where I last saw it on my twin.
Ronan. Still technically mine. The bond is there — I can feel it in the dark, a thin cord of warmth between his chest and mine, faint, nothing like the roaring pull the stories describe but real. Present. It gets fainter when he’s distracted and stronger when he touches me, and right now, in the dark, with his breath even and his body turned away, it feels like a thread I could snap by breathing too hard.
I used to lie here and listen to him sleep and feel safe. Not the dramatic, sweeping kind of safe — the steady kind, the kind where you know someone will be in the kitchen in the morning, where you know who you'll wake up next to for the rest of your life, where the future has a shape and you can see yourself inside it.
The future doesn’t have a shape anymore. It has a sister who tells rooms full of people that she’s covering for me because she loves me too much to let me fail at the job I was supposedly destined for.
Ronan shifts in his sleep. His hand lands on my hip — heavy, warm, unconscious. He pulls me closer by an inch. Cedar and skin-heat, his scent flooding the narrow space between us, and the bond surges for a second — a bright, sharp pull, the way it used to feel all the time — before it settles back to its thin, unpleasant hum. A reflex. His body remembering mine even while his mind is somewhere I can’t follow.
I let him hold me. My back against his chest, his breath in my hair, his warmth soaking through my shirt. I close my eyes and I let it be enough for one more night because I don’t know how many more of these I get.
In the morning I’ll go back to the correspondence. I’ll find out which threads are still addressed to me and which ones have quietly shifted. I’ll eat breakfast in the kitchen because the dining hall feels like a stage now. I’ll avoid Soleil because I’m not ready to look at my own face and see a concerned expression that I am almost completely positive is an act.
But right now it’s dark and his arm is warm and the bond hums between us, thin and fading, and I lie still and let myself have this last quiet thing.
----
Thursday I bring Yara the Ashward file to review, and she pulls up the most recent draft, and the header has been changed.
It used to read: Ashward Border Marker Replacement — Luna’s Office, S. Addison.
It reads: Ashward Border Marker Patrols — Joint Operations, S. Addison / S. Addison.
Both of us. The same initial. The same last name. My file, my project, my trainee’s first solo assignment — and someone added my twin to the header like a coauthor on a paper she never wrote.
Yara sees my face. Her mouth opens, closes. She didn’t do this. She doesn’t know who did.
“When did this change?” My voice is very calm.
“I — I don’t know. It was like that when I opened it this morning. I thought maybe you —”
“I didn’t.”
We look at the screen. S. Addison / S. Addison. My name and her name, identical, the way our faces are identical, the way our measurements are identical, the way everything I’ve built can be bolted onto her without anyone noticing the seam.