ANMELDENLucas caught me before I hit the floor.The rejection had taken more from my body than I'd realized. Whatever power had detonated through the room, through the manor, through the entire territory, it had used me as its conduit, and now the bill was coming due. My legs buckled three steps past Damien's door, my vision tilting sideways as the corridor walls blurred and swam. Lucas was there before my knees touched stone, his arms hooking under mine and hauling me upright with a grip that said he'd been waiting in the hallway the entire time."I've got you," he said. "Keep moving. We need to go."Behind us, Damien's voice echoed through the cracked walls of his bedroom. My name, over and over, ragged and desperate and laced with a pain that vibrated through the severed bond like feedback from a cut wire. I could still feel him. Not the warm tether I'd lived with for three years, but a raw, open wound where the connection used to be, pulsing with phantom sensation every time he called for
I woke to the sound of Lyra crying.Not the quiet, controlled kind she used when she didn't want anyone to worry. This was the ugly version. The raw, hiccuping sobs of a woman who had been holding herself together for hours and finally cracked. I heard her before I could see her, before I could feel anything beyond the dull, heavy ache radiating from the bandaged wound in my side and the sharp antiseptic sting of the infirmary sheets beneath me.My eyes opened. White ceiling. Harsh light. The beep of a heart monitor marking time in slow, steady intervals. Twenty hours, I'd learn later. Twenty hours unconscious while Ethan Silverclaw fought to keep the silver toxicity from reaching my heart.Lyra sat in the chair beside my bed, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Lucas paced the length of the room behind her, back and forth, back and forth, his boots wearing a path into the tile with the restless energy of a wolf caged in a space too small for his fury.I tried to spea
The blood was warm at first.It spread beneath me in a slow, thick pool, soaking into the forest floor and turning the dead leaves dark. I could feel it leaving my body with each heartbeat, a rhythmic pulse of heat escaping through the hole in my side where the silver-tipped arrow had punched through muscle and lodged itself against something vital. My wolf lay curled around the wound inside me, pressing against the damage with everything she had, but she was fading too. I felt her weakening, her presence shrinking like a candle flame in a drafty room.The Blood Moon hung directly above me, framed by the black silhouette of pine branches. Red light washed over everything, turning the world into a painting done in shades of rust and shadow. Beautiful. I'd never noticed how beautiful the Blood Moon was when I wasn't standing on a platform performing rituals for a man who didn't care.Strange, the things you notice when you're dying.The sounds of battle drifted away. Snarls and impacts
They let me out of the cells two hours before the ceremony, because even Damien Blackthorne couldn't explain an absent Luna on the most sacred night in werewolf tradition.A guard unlocked the gate without speaking, stepped aside, and stared at the wall while I walked past him on legs that had gone stiff from thirty hours on a stone floor. No message from Damien. No apology. No acknowledgment that he'd locked his bonded mate in a cage for a crime she didn't commit. Just an open gate and a silent guard and the understanding that I was being released not because I mattered, but because tradition required a body on the platform.I went to my quarters to change into my ceremonial gown.It was shredded.Laid across the bed in ribbons of ivory silk, slashed with something sharp and deliberate. The silver embroidery that had taken a seamstress three months to complete hung in loose threads, and the bodice was torn clean through the center. A folded note sat on the pillow in handwriting I did
I found Selene in the west corridor, alone, exactly where I expected her to be.She stood beneath the arched windows with moonlight pooling around her like a spotlight, the sacred necklace still draped across her collarbone as though she'd forgotten it was there. She hadn't forgotten. Women like Selene Ashwood didn't forget anything. She was waiting. She'd probably been waiting since the moment I walked out of the dining hall, counting the minutes until I came looking for her, because she understood something about me that I was only beginning to understand about myself.I didn't know how to stop fighting for things that were mine."Selene."She turned with that practiced grace, the silk of her gown whispering against the stone floor. Her smile arrived half a second before her eyes focused on me, perfectly timed, perfectly measured. A performance."Luna Aurora." She clasped her hands in front of her like a woman receiving a guest in her own home. "I was hoping we might talk. I feel li
The ceremonial chest was empty.I stood in front of it with both hands gripping the lid, staring at the velvet lining where the Luna's sacred moonstone necklace had rested since the night Damien placed it around my throat. The velvet still held the impression of the chain, a faint groove pressed into the fabric by three years of weight. But the necklace was gone.My pulse kicked sideways. I dropped to my knees and searched the chest again, pulling out the ceremonial gloves, the silver hairpins, the embroidered sash meant for the Blood Moon rite. I set each piece on the floor with shaking hands, methodical, precise, telling myself I'd misremembered. That I'd moved the necklace somewhere else. That I'd taken it out to polish it and left it on the vanity, or tucked it into a drawer for safekeeping, or done something, anything, that explained why the single most sacred artifact a Luna could possess was no longer where it was supposed to be.It wasn't on the vanity. It wasn't in the drawer







