Chapter 11

The sound of my own voice coming from inside the seal nearly stopped my heart.

It was me, and it was not. The shape of the words, the cadence, the breath between syllables—all mine. But threaded through it was something older, emptier, stretched thin with hunger and patience. Hearing it was like standing in front of a mirror and realising the reflection had been waiting for me to turn my back.

“At last,” the thing inside the seal said in my voice. “You’ve come close enough to hear me properly.”

Every muscle in my body locked. Neeka surged forward so violently that pain flashed behind my dead eyes. “Do not answer it,” she snarled. For the first time since I had known her, fear was not something she aimed outward. It lived inside her voice.

“Names give shape. Answers give entry,” the guardian warned, the stone under our feet vibrating with the force of her voice. “Do not speak to the hunger as if it is yourself.”

That should have been simple. It was not. Because some traitorous, fractured part of me wanted to listen. Wanted to know why something ancient had chosen my voice, my shape, my silence. Wanted, in the most dangerous way possible, to hear what it knew about me that I did not.

Ty’s hand found mine in the dark. He did not grip hard. He only laced our fingers together, warm and steady and unmistakably real. “Stay with me,” he said quietly. “Not with it. With me.”

The contact nearly undid me. It had become far too easy, over the course of this impossible night, to forget how deeply Ty still knew the shape of my breaking. He could not fix what he had done. He could not restore the years that had rotted between us. But somehow, infuriatingly, he still knew how to hold on to me when the dark started sounding like home.

The thing in the seal laughed softly in my voice. “He always reaches for your hand when he thinks you’re slipping,” it murmured. “He did it that night too.”

The chamber lurched around me. Rain. Mud. My father shouting. Ty’s fingers catching mine in the dark for one desperate second before someone tore us apart. A scream that might have been mine. A woman’s voice saying, Hold her still. Memory flashed white-hot and vanished, leaving me shaking so hard my teeth clicked together.

“Stop,” I gasped, not even sure who I was speaking to anymore—the seal, the hunger, the night itself. “Stop doing that.”

“I am not doing anything your own mind does not already want,” the hunger replied. “You have lived too long in fragments, little Luna. Let me give you everything back.”

“No,” my mother said, sharper than she had sounded since we arrived. Chains snapped tight as she strained against them. “Sila, listen to me. It does not return memories. It weaponizes them. It takes your grief, your rage, your longing, and teaches them how to command.”

Marian gave a breathless, broken laugh from the edge of the circle. “Then perhaps stop explaining and do something,” she hissed. “The blood-lock is tearing. I can feel it.” Beneath her fear was another emotion now—something jagged and ugly and almost ecstatic. She had wanted chaos for so long she no longer knew how to fear becoming part of it.

“Delay much longer,” the guardian said, “and the chamber will choose for you. The first bond must be taken willingly or the nearest living conduit will be forced open.”

Silence crashed down. I felt Ty go rigid beside me. One of the wolves behind us muttered a curse under his breath. We all understood at once: if I did nothing, the seal would not simply wait politely for me to make peace with my shattered life. It would reach for whatever it could use. Marian. Ty. Me. Anyone.

“If it needs a conduit, it can take me,” Ty said.

I turned on him so fast the chamber spun. “No.” The word cracked out of me with more force than I intended. “You do not get to throw yourself into this because you think dying for me would balance some cosmic scale.”

His breath caught. “This is not penance,” he said, and the hurt in his voice was immediate, raw. “If I give myself to anything tonight, it will not be because I think I owe death. It will be because the thought of that thing inside you is worse than anything it could do to me.”

That should have made me angry. Instead, it touched the rawest, most unguarded place left in me. “Stop making it so hard to stay furious with you,” I whispered, and I hated how much truth lived in the words.

The hunger answered immediately, smooth as oil in my voice. “You see? Even now, love is only another chain. Come closer, Sila. Take the bond. Open your eyes. See his face. See your mother. See the truth of the night that made you.”

The temptation was so sharp it felt like hunger in my own body. I wanted that. Goddess, I wanted it. I wanted to see Ty after two years of remembering him by touch and memory alone. I wanted to know whether my mother’s face looked like mine. I wanted the past back in one brutal, honest rush instead of these cruel fragments. Desire surged through me so violently it was almost shameful.

My mother’s voice softened, and that softness hurt worst of all. “I know you want it,” she said. “I wanted everything at once too, when I was your age. That is how it enters. Not through wickedness. Through longing.”

The question tore out of me before pride could stop it. “Then why did you do it?” My throat burned. “Why my sight? Why not tell me? Why let me think I was left because I wasn’t worth staying for?”

For a moment, I thought she would not answer. When she did, there was no defense in her voice, only grief worn smooth by years. “Because sight was the doorway it wanted most,” she whispered. “You were already seeing too much as a child—moods, loyalties, fractures in the pack, things no one else heard or sensed. The binding was cruel. I know that. I made the worst choice of my life, and then I had to keep making it every day I stayed away from you. But I did not leave because you were not worth staying for, little moon. I left because loving you in person would not have kept you alive.”

Something inside me gave way at last. Not neatly. Not enough to forgive. But enough that the old, secret wound of being unwanted split open and let something gentler through. She had hurt me. She had scarred me. She had still loved me. The truth of that was too large to hold all at once.

The chamber solved my hesitation for me. Stone cracked somewhere overhead. Marian screamed again, this time in genuine panic. The hum beneath us rose into a shriek. Water in the side channels began to churn as if boiling from some unseen heat.

“Now, true Luna,” the guardian thundered. “Choose: take the bond by will, or let the hunger choose its vessel.”

I pulled one shaking breath into my lungs and stepped forward.

I never reached the circle. Marian lunged first. With a scream ripped raw by terror, she drove a hidden silver shard into her own palm and slammed her bleeding hand against the stone. The chamber answered with a roar. And somewhere inside the seal, my own voice began to laugh.