BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising

POV: RoseThe summons arrives at dawn, slipped under the front door while my mother and I are still pretending to sleep. I hear it — the soft rasp of paper on stone — and I lie still for three more seconds before I get up.My mother is already in the doorway when I open mine. She has the document in her hands, and her face is doing the thing it does when she is frightened — this careful emptying, like she is draining herself of expression so I will not see how bad it is. I have been reading that face my whole life. I see exactly how bad it is.Rose, she says.I know, I say. I take the summons from her and read it twice. The language is formal, flowery, dressed up in the vocabulary of honour and opportunity. Underneath the dress, it says: you have no choice. I fold it along its original crease and set it on the table. I will pack light.You cannot go. Her voice cracks on the last word. She seals it quickly, but I heard it.The alternative is — I begin.I know what the alternative is. S

POV: CainI have spent twenty years making myself into something that does not want. It is, I think, the most useful thing I have ever done. A man who wants is a man with an opening, and openings get people killed — my people, specifically, because my people are my responsibility, and so my wants died a long time ago and I learned to call it strength.She walked into that hall, and my wolf tried to get out of my skin.Twenty years. One inhale.I spend the night after the ceremony in the kind of controlled fury that looks, from the outside, like perfect stillness. Bryn, who has served as my Second for six years and knows me better than anyone alive, takes one look at me in the morning and stays three feet away and does not ask questions. This is why she is good at her job.The Alpha Council meeting is mid-morning. All four of us around a table with the King and his advisors, going through the Selection's protocols with the thoroughness of men who have done this before. I have read the

POV: LucaHere is the thing about grief: after a long enough, you stop feeling it as sadness and start feeling it as weather. It is just the climate you live in. Sometimes it is mild, and you almost forget it is there. Sometimes it rolls in fast and you cannot see six feet in front of you. You learn to function in both conditions, and eventually, people stop noticing you are functioning in any condition at all, because you have gotten so good at the surface.Elena died three years ago. Ruling: accident. The truth is something I have never said out loud to anyone, not because I cannot prove it but because proof in this court is what the King decides it is, and I have spent three years learning exactly how that works before I do anything with what I know.I came to this Selection because the summons was a summons. I also came because something in my intelligence network — which is small, careful, and known to absolutely no one — told me the timing was wrong. Four years since the last Se

POV: RoseThey arrive, all four of them, in the space of about twenty minutes. Rafe I invited. Cain followed Rafe's scent through the corridor with the territorial instinct of a man who has spent too long circling the edges of a situation and finally decided to come in. Dorian was already in the hallway — he had been watching my door, which I only found out later. Luca heard voices from the adjacent room and chose the door over his own thoughts, which I understand.My room is not designed for five people. We manage. They arrange themselves with the unconscious efficiency of people who have been doing this for years, which none of us have, which no one mentions. Cain takes the wall near the door. Dorian takes the chair. Luca sits on the floor with his back to the bed, like it is perfectly natural. Rafe stands near the window, arms crossed, watching.I open Lysa's journal to the first marked passage and I read it aloud.The room is very quiet while I read.Lysa was twenty when she enter

POV: RoseSelene had pressed the linen into my hands like she was returning something borrowed.I didn't look at it until I was around the corner, past the turning, in a stretch of corridor where the wall sconces were spaced far enough apart to leave pools of useful shadow between them. I stepped into one and unfolded it with the unhurried movements of a woman adjusting her dress.Inside: a single strip of paper. Seven words in a hand I didn't recognize.The east transept. Below the floor. Before vespers.I read it twice. Folded the linen back the way it had come. Tucked it into my sleeve and kept walking.Behind me, somewhere in the thirty seconds of careful distance Cain had appointed for himself, I felt the particular quality of being watched by someone who was paying a specific kind of attention. Not surveillance. Something with more weight than that, and less comfort.I didn't look back.The supervised outing had been approved with a speed that should have reassured me, but didn'