Chapter 29 The Edge of Redemption

Bonus Arc The Rebuilding Era – 2

Nina’s POV – Crescent Healers’ Compound

The light here never felt clean.

Even the air smelled of damp herbs and dusted shame.

She sat alone in the inner chamber. No chains. No guards.

That was the punishment.

Not being restrained

But being free enough to feel it.

The door creaked.

Selene stepped in, again without a crown.

She always did that. Walked in like herself. Not her title.

“Your sentence has been confirmed,” Selene said. “No prison. No exile.”

Nina blinked. “What then?”

“You’re to stay here,” Selene answered. “Under the Healers. You’ll work. Serve. Study. Repay.”

“For how long?”

Selene didn’t flinch.

“Until you stop seeing redemption as a trick.”

Marcus’s POV – Crescent Garden Courtyard

Silas was already there.

Kneeling, weeding the overgrown roots beneath a moon tree that refused to bloom.

Marcus stepped into the sunlight cautiously.

Silas didn’t look up. “You used to hate gardens.”

“I still do,” Marcus said, settling beside him. “But I hated losing you more.”

Silas’s hand stilled.

A long breath.

“You didn’t lose me,” he said. “You just never asked where I went.”

Marcus stared at him.

Then sat fully beside him.

“I’m asking now.”

Silas’s POV – Finally Answering

“I went to the shadows you left behind,” Silas said. “To the hunger. The loneliness. The silence. You buried me in your grief.”

Marcus’s throat tightened.

“And I thought… maybe if I became useful enough, loud enough, brutal enough you'd see me again.”

He looked up.

“I stopped being your brother the day you started calling me a tool.”

Silence.

Then

Marcus swallowed.

“I don’t know how to fix that.”

Silas smiled, soft and broken.

“Start by calling me Silas.”

Ethan’s POV – The Border Sanctuary

He stood overlooking the Sanctuary gate as the first of the rogue families arrived.

Some from Crescent. Some from the Red Moon. Some from nowhere.

Wolves with no name.

No bond.

But still alive.

He watched as Arden met them calm, efficient, without judgment.

The Sanctuary had once been just a dream.

Now it was a reality. Rough. Untested. Uncivilized.

But real.

Silas joined him, brushing against his side.

“You think they’ll trust this?”

Ethan nodded. “They won’t have to.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ll trust first.”

Nina’s POV – At Dusk

She cleaned the floors.

She cooked broth.

She bathed the wounds of wolves who refused to speak.

And for once, she didn’t manipulate her way out.

Didn’t pout.

Didn’t seduce.

She just worked.

When she finally collapsed onto the cot that night, her hands blistered and her spine aching

She didn’t cry.

She just… slept.

Like someone finally allowed to be .

Silas’s Journal Entry

"Forgiveness is not forgetting.

It’s remembering without bleeding."

We’re not trying to save the world anymore.

We’re trying to live in it.

And maybe that’s enough."

Because survival isn’t the ending.

It’s the doorway to something better.