= Mikael =
“Well… you really shouldn’t.”
The words left my mouth after a stretch of silence, flat and restrained, as if saying them with enough distance might make them true. I held her gaze, waiting for something, but none of it eased the weight settling in my chest.
She wasn’t wrong. No one should feel anything close to happiness upon learning they were Luneborne. Being one didn’t mean power or prestige. It meant danger. It meant becoming a target the moment the truth slipped into the wrong ears. I should have known better than to let my reaction falter, better than to linger on the thought of her carrying that burden.
This was a mistake.
Why did I care, anyway?
To me, she was supposed to be nothing more than a pawn—useful, expendable, replaceable. Someone whose existence served a
