Chapter 38 Not His, Not Theirs

• Luna's pov
• The sun was barely rising, painting the sky in pale orange and tired blue, but I couldn’t sleep. I sat at the edge of my bed, back at my father's house, fingers clutching the edge of the mattress. My bag was already packed. A burner phone, fake ID, and stacks of unmarked bills—all of it handed to me in a nondescript manila envelope by a quiet man in a grey suit. “You can disappear,” he’d said. “Start over. New name. New life. You deserve peace, Luna.”
• Peace. The word rolled around in my head like a foreign language. What did peace even look like anymore? I’d been knee-deep in chaos for so long that silence scared me more than the gunshots.