Cassia’s smile held a softness at odds with her electric energy. “That’s Aero. Eight hundred years of calm to balance my chaos.”
“Do me!” Junie bounced on her seat cushion.
“I already know yours.” Lunaria couldn’t help the smile. “You’re chaos personified. Your chart looks like someone threw glitter at a star map and called it destiny. But there’s a steady point in the center—Leo, grounding you. Without him, you’d probably have set vital information on fire by now.”
“Rude. Accurate, but rude.”
“You’re good at this,” Avine said when Lunaria finished. “Really good. Have you always been able to see so clearly?”
“Since I was sixteen.” Lunaria didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain what that clarity had cost her, what she’d been forced to see.
“Do Hux.”
The room went still. Junie’s request hung in the air, seemingly casual but loaded with meaning Lunaria couldn’t identify.
“He’s not—” She started to refuse.
“Please?” Junie’s expression had shifted from teasing to concern. “He’s been weird lately. More closed off than usual, which says a lot. Leo’s worried about him.”
“I don’t have his birth information.”
“March 15th, thirty-eight years ago, 2:47 AM.” Narla’s voice was quiet. “Wyatt looked it up once. Law enforcement records.”
No escape route. No graceful way to decline without explaining why she didn’t want to look at the chart of a man she’d met exactly once and couldn’t stop thinking about.
Against her better judgment, Lunaria reached for the stars.
Hux’s chart formed in her mind’s eye. She saw the structure first—the rigid lines of a life built on duty, on control, on expectations inherited from generations of capable men. The lion energy pulsed beneath it all, surprisingly strong, surprisingly contained, a weight pressing it down.
And then she saw his fate line.
She went still.
It wasn’t empty. She’d expected empty—a void, an absence, matching the void she’d sensed in him during their brief meeting.
It was overshadowed.
A massive darkness sat directly on his destiny, blocking it from view. Darkness that wasn’t absence but presence—deliberate, imposed, feeding on the light that should have been there. His capacity for a fated bond, for the love that had transformed every other chart she’d read tonight, was being smothered by a darkness that had no business existing.
This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t chance or bad luck or cosmic indifference.
Someone had done this to him.
“Luna?” Junie’s voice came from far away. “You okay?”
Lunaria yanked herself out of the reading. Her hands were shaking. She gripped her wine glass to hide it, took a long swallow to buy time.
“Fine.” She forced her voice steady. “Just tired. Long day.”
“What did you see?” Cassia leaned forward, that crackling intensity focused entirely on Lunaria now. “You went white. What’s in his chart?”
“Control issues,” Lunaria said, which wasn’t a lie. “Very structured. Very rigid. The lion is suppressed—he doesn’t let it out much, does he?”
“No,” Avine confirmed quietly. “He’s never been like that. Even as a child, from what I understand. Very contained.”
“That’s all?” Junie pressed. “Nothing about why he’s been acting strange? Nothing about?—”
“That’s all.” Lunaria met her cousin’s gaze evenly. “Charts aren’t magic eight balls. They show patterns, not explanations.”
