LOGINShare
Chapter 10: What Lies Beneath the Stone
publish date:
2026-04-28 08:05:59
Latest chapter
BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising Chapter 11: The Shape of a Decision
POV: CainI was not a man who frightened easily. This was not bravado; it was the result of a fairly thorough inventory of the things capable of frightening me and the quiet elimination of most of them over the course of twenty-eight years.The book had frightened me.Not its existence. Not even what it said — the mechanics of the bond, the threshold, the consequence of leaving it incomplete. I'd known pieces of that, the way you know a shape in dark water: the outline but not the detail. The book supplied the detail. The detail was precise and cold and answered questions I had been carefully not asking since the moment I'd felt the bond snap against me like a chain pulled taut.What frightened me was her face when she'd read it.Rose had looked at her own name in a dead woman's handwriting and had gone very still in the way of someone taking inventory — sorting through what this cost, what this changed, what this required. She had not flinched. She had not asked for anything. She had
BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising Chapter 10: What Lies Beneath the Stone
POV: RoseThe east transept was used for storage.I hadn't known that before tonight, and knowing it now felt like being handed a piece of a map I hadn't been told I was reading. Wooden crates stamped with the palace provisioner's seal. Rolled tapestries stacked against the far wall like sleeping figures. The smell of dust and cedar oil and something older underneath — something that had nothing to do with palace inventory and everything to do with what Lysa had found below it.Selene had left a lamp.It sat on top of a crate nearest the door, already lit, which meant she'd been here within the last hour. Which meant she'd taken a risk I hadn't asked her to take, and the fact of it sat uncomfortably between gratitude and guilt, and I didn't have time for either.Cain was at my back. Two steps, not thirty seconds — we'd abandoned the pretense when the corridor outside had been empty, and the lamp had been waiting. He hadn't asked if I wanted him closer. He'd simply been there, and I ha
BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising Chapter 9: The Cost of Thirty Seconds
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'
BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising Chapter 8: What the Silence Costs
POV: CainThe girl had good instincts.Cain had known it from the first morning — the way she'd moved through the Selection breakfast like water finding its level, touching nothing, disturbing nothing, learning everything. He'd watched her from across the room with the particular attention he gave to things that might become problems, and had walked away certain she would.He hadn't anticipated this specific shape of problem.I stood near the door of her room while she was still down the hall, breaking bread with a king who wanted her dead, and I was thinking about the set of her shoulders the last time I'd seen them. The way she'd left. Controlled. Deliberate. Not a single movement wasted.I didn't like it. I didn't like any of it."You're doing that thing," Luca said from the window."What thing?""The standing-very-still thing. It's louder than you think it is."I didn't answer. Across the room, Dorian had his papers arranged with the focused precision of a man building a case, whi
BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising Chapter 7: Four Walls Come Down
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
BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising Chapter 6: The Last One to Break
POV: RafeI do not trust things that come easily. This is not pessimism — it is pattern recognition. In my experience, things that arrive without effort arrive for a reason, and that reason is usually that someone wants you to have them.The bond came in the corridor outside the reception, and it came so fast and so total that I spent the following three days treating it like an enemy. Something to be held at the perimeter. Something to be managed, contained, reduced to a manageable distance from the centre of things.I am good at managing distance. I have had practice.I came to Ironmoor because the summons required it and because something has been wrong with the Selection process for years, and I wanted to see it for myself. My pack's elder council thinks I came to compete in good faith. The elder council and I have a respectful but functionally adversarial relationship, which is its own kind of management.The training ground is where I think. Back home I run at dawn — the Highlan
You may also like
Rejected By My Mate
LorreignneScarr1.4M viewsIN THE ARMS OF MY ALPHA
Cassandra M673.2K viewsTHE ALPHA'S VIRGIN SLAVE : SUBMIT ALPHA IAN'S CURSE
Muleba Makukula801.7K viewsAlpha's Blind Luna
MishanAngel914.8K viewsThe Alpha Regrets; He Wants His Luna Back.
Charity writes137 viewsDaddy's Little Brat: The Alpha's Temptress
Nyssa Kim568 viewsREVENGE OF THE REJECTED LUNA
Author Raenaa12 viewsCUM-STURBATION: 20 DADDIES—FORBIDDEN TO THE LAST DROP
M&Cee57.3K views
