The salary deduction had done what nothing else that morning had managed to do. All that easy certainty, and comfortable assumptions about where this was heading and how it would end, had quietly packed up and left the moment the numbers became real.
Smug expressions had gone rigid. Confident eyes had gone calculating. And almost as one, they turned toward Daisy because surely she would say something now.
Surely, she would step in. She was going to be their Luna. She had been the one standing in that corner feeding the whole thing through mind link, and they had assumed, without ever putting it into words, that that meant she was in this with them all the way.
They had absolutely no idea what was coming next.
"You all know how much my parents care for her," Ravyn continued, his voice staying even and unhurried, giving the room nothing to grab onto and use. "Had it not been for them, Luna Seraphine—"
"I am no longer your Luna."
