The Luna Cure

FIFTY

It was December 27th.

I didn't remember that when I woke up, maybe due to the disorientation of the sun in my eyes, or the very little sleep I had gotten since the last time I was awake, but it hadn't even come to my mind. Not until after lunch, when Hayden brought it up.

I had been minding my own business, putting my plate in the sink, when he spoke up from behind me. "Hey, it's your birthday tomorrow."

"Goddess, he's right." My mom added, a hand on the side of her face.

Nolan spoke up. "I forgot how quick that was after Christmas."

I quickly set my dish into the sink and spun around, raising my palms up. "Stop. Please."

"I never would've guessed you were a Capricorn." Maggie added. "Virgo, definitely. Not so much Capricorn."

I blinked. Capri-what? "I don't even know what you're talking about."

She gasped. "You don't know the zodiac signs?" Shaking her head, she got up and made her way to me. "Give me your phone, you're learning this."

Handing my phone to her, I watched as she went on it and started swiping and clicking like mad.

"So, your birthday." Max started, trying to bring the topic back.

"No." I was not going to talk or think about that stupid thing, and I certainly wasn't going to celebrate in any way shape or form. Honestly, I just didn't want to think about it at all. My birthday simply did not exist.

"Come on, Flo. Let us all do something." Isaac chimed in. "All the booze you could imagine."

My face remained unamused. "Yes, because I'm a raging drunk and that's all I care about. Have you ever seen me drink?"

He seemed to think about it for a second, but Harrison spoke up instead. "We don't have to have everything be about alcohol," He shot a glare at Isaac, "but we should still do something. We missed so many birthdays."

Dante cringed the slightest bit at that last comment, reflecting my internal reaction. I shook my head. "No."

Isaac pouted. "All I wanna do is give my little sister a great time for the big one nine—"

"Nineteen is not big at all. Ten is. Sixteen is. Eighteen is. Nineteen is not." Goddess, I don't think there was a date I despised more than my birthday, and no one could stop talking about it. It's unimportant! Doesn't matter in the slightest! Shut up about it!

"It's the last year before you're twenty, though. Last teen." Isaac argued, a fact I hadn't thought of.

Last year before I'm twenty.

Goddess, that was an awful thought. I was eight. Now I'm almost twenty. The years in between were hell and never-ending, dominated by pain, loneliness, and terror, but now I was almost nineteen. I had a mate and a niece and my mate was the crown prince and I'll literally never be able to get over that stupid trick of fate. The Prince Dante Valentino-Lancaster was now my mate.

My thoughts ran on for too long, and Dante must've realized just how uncomfortable I was thinking about the years that had gone to waste, thrown away by my own stupidity, because he saved the conversation—and in doing so, my sanity, with my family bombarding me with questions that I could not handle.

"Maggie, you seem to know a lot about the zodiacs."

She glanced up from my phone, nodding. "My sister bet me a hundred pounds that I couldn't learn all of the signs and basically everything about them when I was fifteen, and I don't like to lose. It's the Aries in me."