ANMELDENOSBORNE'S POV I knew that voice the way a child knows his own name.Corvin Cliff taught me to tie a fishing knot. He carried me home on his shoulders the day I fell off the orchard wall. At twelve, I stood beside his grave with a fistful of wild asters, and my father told me a Cliff did not cry in front of others.Now he leaned in a doorway, older and scarred, with a crossbow aimed at my heart. Grief I had buried long ago came up raw, like a wound torn open. Rage followed so fast it swallowed the grief whole."You're dead," I said. It sounded foolish even to me."I was more useful dead." He smiled. "Your family has a gift for it."Gray cloaks crowded the corridor behind him and spilled along the walls, a dozen, then more. The lamps swung on their chains. Every few seconds the ceiling groaned, and grit rained over the silver cages. Somewhere at my back, Aina drew a sharp breath.Corvin studied me like a man pricing a horse. "I hear you shred bedrooms now. I hear you nearly tore a coun
OSBORNE'S POV My mother's face filled the screen, and for a moment I could not make my lungs work.Twenty years. I had carried her ring and her name in my chest like a splinter, and all that time she had been breathing in a cell."She has been alive for years," Malrec said. He watched me the way a farmer watches a gate he has just opened. "I kept her well. She is useful.""Why?" My voice came out scraped raw. "Why has your Circle studied my family for generations? What do you want from us?""You ask the small question, but I will answer the large one." He folded his hands. "The first Beast King was never meant to rule alone."I waited."Your histories call him a conqueror. That is a story we wrote. He and the first Moonbinder were more than mates. Together they made a bloodline that could bind packs who had hated each other for a thousand years. Wolves who would never share a river stood under one moon because of them." His eyes brightened. "Their children could have ended the old wa
AINA'S POV The screen on the wall glowed pale as frost, and I could not look away from it.The woman behind the wire sat on a narrow cot with her left arm pressed against her ribs, the way people hold an injury that never healed right. Gray streaked her dark hair. A yellowing bruise ran along her cheekbone. Yet she sat perfectly straight, as if the cell had no right to tell her how.I had never seen her before, and I knew her at once. The stubborn jaw. The way she lifted her head. I had spent weeks watching that face on her son.Osborne's mother was alive.My wrists were locked to a bench with iron cuffs. Iron, not silver, because iron only bruised. My head throbbed from the gas, and my mouth tasted of pennies. Four guards in gray cloaks stood by the door. Mira was still curled in her cage beside me, eyes huge and wet.I didn't know where Osborne was. The last thing I remembered was his voice calling my name through the green mist. Somewhere in this place he was learning what I was l
OSBORNE'S POV I woke on a cold floor with a taste like burnt sugar in my mouth.For a moment I lay still and let my senses return one at a time. A low ceiling of gray brick. A single lamp behind a wire cage. A door of riveted iron with no handle on my side. My belt was gone, and so were my knives, my boots, and the ring my mother had left me.*Varg.*He answered with a snarl so loud I winced. He had been awake long before me, throwing himself against the walls of my mind like a caged bear. *They took our pack. They took her.**I know.**Then get up.*I got up. My legs wobbled, then held. I pressed my ear to the door and heard nothing. No boots, no voices, not even the cough of a sleeping warrior. Kade, Mara, the five riders, all of them were somewhere else, or nowhere at all.But we were alive. That was the strange part. A man who wants you dead does not bother to carry you to a bed of straw and leave water in a clay jug. Whoever held us wanted something, and he wanted it badly enoug
Aina's POV When I reached the study, the map was already pinned flat under a dagger, and Osborne was holding a black-sealed letter at arm's length, as if it might bite.Seraphina stood beside him with her bruised jaw lifted. "Veyl Keep," she said, tapping the parchment. "A day's ride into the north hills. The cage room lies beneath the old kitchens. I've seen it through someone else's eyes, and I'd know it anywhere."Osborne handed me the letter without a word. I read it once.*Bring the Moonbinder to the fortress, or the girl dies.*"They want me," I said."Which is why you're staying here.""No."His eyes flashed. "Aina, it's a trap. They have written the invitation themselves.""I know it's a trap. I can read." I kept my voice level, though my heart was hammering. "Mira is behind those walls, and I'm the only one who can hear her. When I reached for her, someone reached back. They know my mind now. If I'm close, I'll feel them before any of your warriors can.""If you're close, th
OSBORNE'S POV Seraphina Voss stood in my study at dawn with a torn sleeve and a bruise spreading along her jaw. She no longer looked like the woman who had glided through my halls. She looked like someone who had fought, won, and was still surprised by it."The man who came for me is in your cells," she said. "When he fell, I saw inside his head." She laid a sheet of paper on my desk. The lines were shaky, drawn from memory. "A room under a fortress in the north hills. Low ceiling. A silver cage. Mira is inside it.""Alive?""She was when he last saw her."I studied the map. Above the doorway she had sketched three carved wolves. I had seen that arch in my father's war books, in a chapter I had skimmed as a boy."Veyl Keep," I said.Kade turned from the window. "House Veyl. Theo's house."I traced the map with one finger. The Keeper wasn't only hunting Moonbinders. He was gathering the heirs of both bloodlines and using everyone who loved them as bait."Five riders," I said. "The bes







