All Chapters of Bound by the Moon: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

38 Chapters

Chapter Ten

Skylar had come for me exactly when she said she would. After hiding for what felt like hours, Damon retreated but not after laughing darkly at whoever he thought was hiding from him. Immediately he was gone I ran senselessly and had been back in the cage, waiting, the cloth bundle pressed to the worst of my injuries, the food I’d wrapped in my dress already half gone. She had looked at me once, confirmed I was where I was supposed to be, and left without a word. I had not slept. First, it was the dead wolves – eyes open, fixed on the sky, the smell of them – that moved through my restless dark. Then the forest, the battle, and everything else disappeared. Only he remained. He was more terrifying than the dreams filled with death and blood. Nightmares in a cage. Congratulations Aurora, you just began a premium sentence. I scoffed, annoyed at how foolish and careless yesterday had been. There was nothing about Damon Bane worth losing sleep over, I told myself wit

Chapter Eleven

A scream woke me.At first, I thought my nightmare hadn’t ended, then a rat raced past my ear and the smell of rot welcomed me back to consciousness like an old friend that had been waiting patiently by the door. The scream came again from different angles, louder this time, sending a quaking uproar through the cells, which bounced off stone walls and doubled back.“Shut the hell up!”“Some of us are trying to sleep!”“What is wrong with you?!”The screaming came again. This time from beside me. From the man the enforcers had carried in days ago, the one with the familiar scent I still hadn’t been able to place no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind.My palms flew to my ears. Even the rats had stopped scavenging, their frantic squeaking filling the gaps between screams as though they too could feel whatever pain was bleeding through the walls. Animals always knew before people did. I had learned that much.I couldn’t take it anymore.I dragged myself upright, every joi

Chapter Twelve

“You locked her in a cage.”Damon’s glare found the elder across the room. Eli was wise enough to have put distance between himself and the alpha before speaking — wise enough to know that the wrong word at the wrong moment could close that distance faster than he could blink.“The omega stays in her cage.”“Alpha, I beseech—”“The omega will rot in her cage.”He tightened his fist. Ground his teeth. Why did her name keep finding its way into every room he stood in? Every crisis, every problem, every moment the pack teetered on an edge — somehow she was always in the middle of it.She was a problem. Not a solution. And he was done pretending otherwise.“What exactly do you expect our alpha to do?” Rosalind turned on Eli with the particular sharpness of a woman who had run out of patience for theatrics. “Drag a nameless slave from a dungeon and seat her beside him? Tell the other alphas — tell Orion — that the moon goddess chose a nobody for the most powerful alpha alive?”“The goddess

Chapter Thirteen

At every single moment, the same thought crossed my mind despite the panic eating away at my chest. I chanted to myself. This is it.The day I leave.The day I don’t come back.It didn’t come with hope. Hope was too soft for the disappointment I faced in my life. It came sharper than that, like instinct. Like something that had been waiting for the right crack in the world and I had finally found it.The dungeon had been chaotic for hours.The screaming hadn’t stopped. It had only changed shape. Some had gone hoarse. Some had gone quiet. Some had turned into the kind of sound that didn’t feel human anymore.No one came.No enforcers. No footsteps. No keys.I could feel it in the way the walls trembled, in the way the air tasted sour and heavy, like something buried had decided it was done staying buried.At first, I stayed where I always stayed.Low. Still. Small. Old habits sat in my bones.But something else sat there too now.Something that had been growing in the forest. Since th

Chapter Fourteen

Days passed. The Ashford pack had welcomed me more than I’d ever been. They accepted me and gave me more than I had expected. I was truly safe.Until—I smelled him before the door burst open.That was the worst part.I had been standing at the small mirror in the corner of the room the Ashford pack had given me, doing something I hadn’t done in longer than I could remember. I was looking at myself, really looking. Not a reflection in still water, not the distorted version of myself I carried in my head built entirely from other people’s contempt.This.Clean skin from bathing whenever I liked. Wild dark hair that someone had plaited while I slept. Probably one of the Ashford women, quietly, without waking me. Clothes that fit. A face that was mine and looked, in the pale morning light coming through the small window, like it might belong to someone worth something.I had smiled at my own reflection.I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that either.I was still smiling when hi

Chapter Fifteen

The battle room looked the same.Same oval table scarred with blade marks. Same maps bleeding ink across every wall. Same weapons rack along the far side, each one cleaned and waiting for the next reason to be used. Same cold stone smell underneath everything, the kind that didn’t change regardless of what happened in the room or who stood in it.I had stood here once before, chained, bleeding from Damon’s claws, certain I was about to die.I stood here now, unchained, clean, wearing borrowed clothes that actually fit, and felt somehow more undone than I had that first time.At least then I knew what was coming.They had positioned me in the centre of the room the way you position something you’re examining. Rosalind, the pack’s healer, was to the left, her hands folded in front of her like she was at a formal proceeding. The elders, Eli and Edgar, clustered near the far wall. The beta, Ralph, standing slightly apart from the others, his voice warm and attentive.Skylar stood near the

Chapter Sixteen

My new room had a window. That was the first thing I noticed when the enforcer left me at the door and walked away without locking it behind him. Not the bed, with a frame and a mattress and a blanket that wasn’t damp. Not the small table or the lamp or the walls that smelled of gravel rather than rot. The window. It faced west. The evening light came through it at an angle, landing on the floor in a warm rectangle, and I stood in that rectangle for a long time, doing nothing, just standing in the light. It was the little things. For me, this wasn’t. It was the first room I could remember having that looked like it was made for living. I sat on the edge of the bed eventually and looked at my hands and thought of what I had done. A deal. I turned it over in my mind the way you turn over something valuable — carefully, from different angles, making sure it was real. For the first time since I was seven, since I was sold to strangers who didn’t know what to do with me, I

Chapter Eighteen

Eris.My foster mother stood in the doorway of my room and looked at me the way she had always looked at me. Like I was something stuck to the underside of her life that she couldn’t scrape off.The room shrank.I shrank.I am twenty-two now.Yet, fifteen years of careful fear and survival lived in my body and it responded to her before I could stop it. The urge to make myself smaller, to drop my eyes, to find the corner of the room and press against it. I felt it move through me like muscle memory and I hated it and it happened anyway.She looked around my room. At the window. At the bed. At the lamp and the empty bowl and the clothes Skylar had brought.“You really think,” her voice carried the pleasure of someone delivering news they have been saving, “that the alpha will give you a spot beside his throne.” Her laugh was short and without warmth. “The mad alpha. Damon Bane.” She said his name like a punchline. “He enjoys a spectacle. He likes to be entertained. Why else would he p

Chapter Nineteen

Dawn came quietly to Silvercrest. The kind of quiet that existed only in the hour before a pack fully woke. Before the weight of everyone else’s opinions settled back onto my shoulders – something I had to carry whether I wanted to or not. Skylar was already waiting at my door. No uniform, and her arms crossed, an expression that said she had been standing there longer than she’d like. “You’re late,” she said. “You didn’t give me a time.” “Dawn is a time.” I followed her through the lower pack corridors and out into the cool morning air. We went across the main territory and around the eastern edge of the training grounds to a section tucked behind a storage building. It had flat ground and a few worn posts, the kind of space only a top delta knew existed. No one else was here. It almost looked abandoned and I think I liked it. Doing this away from prying eyes. She stopped in the middle of the space and turned to face me with the expression of someone about to do an i

Chapter Twenty

He is not who you think. The note sat on the table beside my bed all night. I had picked it up more times than I wanted to admit and read it more times than that. By the time dawn came, I had arrived at no conclusions. My head throbbed as my eyes felt the lack of sleep. The timing of this was funny. Right on the night before my first test. When my mind was already loud enough without the addition of anonymous warnings slipped under my door in the dark. I folded and tucked it under my pillow. The pack had gathered in the main courtyard by the time Skylar came for me. I heard them before I saw them. The low murmur of a crowd that had already decided the outcome and was here for the confirmation of it. I had stood in enough rooms like this – full of people who had already made up their minds about me. I knew the specific quality of that sound. It had a texture to it. A particular density. I kept my chin up and walked into it anyway. The test parameters were simple. A targ

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