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Chapter Ninety-Eight

LUNA

“Oh God!” I sit up straight, ready to jump right out of my skin. I feel as if an HVAC system shut down. Everything is quiet for the first time and I’m forced to realize how noisy the thrall was the whole time.

“How do you feel?” Mom asks.

“Clear. Everything is really clear.” I took for granted that I could see myself from the inside. My mind is not screaming that something’s wrong. My body listens to itself for instructions. My heart pushes its attention where it wants to be, not where it’s forced to go.

This whole time, I wasn’t myself. What was I thinking? How did I even exist in that fog?

Scanning the tabletops, I find the bowl of fruit. I pluck up an orange and wait to feel something. I don’t. Even when I rub the skin with my thumb, I only feel it where the finger and the fruit meet.

It’s just an orange.

I am truly free of thrall. I’m not even a little disoriented. It’s good… so good to really and fully exist.

The tap-tapping is back. Before I look, I know what it is. Who it is and what they want.

It’s a bird. I can’t read animals, but this raven in particular has always transmitted its emotions. At the time, I thought it was the Italian air, but I see it in New York too. This bird is projecting sadness, loss, and grief.

“That’s him?” Serafina flips through her magazine, like the old days. “Shoo it away.”

I’m so grateful to be back inside my own heart and body that the snapping pages make my eyes sting with tears. “Yes.”

“Don’t forget to tell him you’re about to jump off a cliff for him.”

Am I? Now that this is my decision to make, will it be the same?

I stand and go toward the door.

“Luna,” Mom says. “He could do it again.”

As a raven, he can’t. And he can’t change to a man inside the shield around this building.

But his ability to put me in thrall is not the point.

I trust him, and my trust isn’t some magic spell that goes outward from me to him.

It’s not a wish or a hope. It’s factual information transferred from him to me.

He should be able to trust me without having me in thrall. We should make decisions together with free hearts and minds. For the first time since our wedding night, we both have full agency.

I open the sliding door. He’s perched on the back of a chair.

“I know you can’t change into a man here.” I close the door and sit across from him. “And I don’t know what you can understand with those ears.”

The raven becomes a flurry of feathers to fly onto the table between the chairs. He turns his head to the side to stare at me.

“I don’t need to be in thrall to know what I want.” The bird hops onto the arm of my chair. I hold out my hand. He jumps onto it, then on my shoulder. His feathers tickle my ear. “And I want you. My heart wants you. My head. My body. I still love you.”

The raven presses the top of his head to the tender scar on my throat.