All Chapters of Bound by Moonfire: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The night clung to the camp like a second skin. Smoke from the cooking fires had long since gone out, leaving only the faint scent of char and spice mingling with the damp earth. Most of Crescent slept, their breaths rising and falling in a steady rhythm behind the walls, unaware of the cracks beginning to form beneath their feet. Liora did not sleep. She hadn’t, not really, since she saw Hale on the riverbank with the woman. Since she’d caught the sharp edge of betrayal carried in whispers across the water. She lay on her cot staring at the ceiling beams, her wolf restless, pacing circles inside her chest. Sleep taunted her, tugged her eyelids heavy, but the moment she drifted, she’d see him again—Hale’s faint smirk, Risa’s parchment—the two pieces fitting together too neatly, as if they’d been carved for each other. Liora rose quietly, pulling her cloak around her shoulders. The air outside was crisp, the mist thick enough to swallow shapes whole. The guards barely glanced at he

The mist was his ally. Always had been. Where others saw obscurity, Hale saw concealment. Where they flinched at half-glimpsed shapes, he found cover. The fog smothered sound, masked scent, blurred the line between hunter and hunted. And in these shifting veils, his plan wove itself tighter by the night. Crescent thought itself safe behind stone walls and watchtowers, but Hale knew better. He had lived inside their defenses once. He had studied their habits, their arrogance, their complacency. A fortress was only as strong as the secrets it failed to guard. And Crescent bled secrets like an open wound. He watched from the ridge, cloaked and still. Below, the faint orange glow of campfires licked upward, muffled laughter and clatter drifting faintly through the fog. Wolves at ease. Soldiers relaxing after watch. The rhythm of a people who believed they had time. Hale smiled. Time was the one thing they didn’t have. He turned his gaze slightly eastward, where the silhouette of a

Dawn lifted out of the pines like breath from a sleeping beast, cool and pale and edged with mist. Cael walked the perimeter while Crescent was still rubbing sleep from its eyes, letting the rhythm of his steps steady the noise in his head.Patience, he’d told himself. You’ll wait. You’ll watch.Every lesson he’d learned as a soldier said it was the right call. Every beat of the bond said otherwise.He could feel Liora somewhere inside the walls—warm, steady, moving through the first tasks of morning—and his wolf paced at the awareness. The kiss in the fog still lived on his mouth, a heat that refused to cool. But even there, in the soft place where he’d finally let himself want without caution, he’d heard the shape of her silence.Not yet.He turned the last corner of the outer path and found Kade already waiting for him, arms folded, eyes narrowed against the light.“You were right,” Kade said, skipping greeting. “I pulled the last eight days of roster swaps. There’s a name that doe

The first howl cut through his sleep like a blade.Cael was already on his feet when the second rolled in—low, urgent, the kind that warned rather than mourned. He dragged on his boots, swept up his blade, and pushed into a dawn shrouded in fog.Crescent snapped awake around him. Wolves spilled from doorways, some shifting mid-stride, iron and wet earth filling the air. The eastern wall loomed ahead, its timbers half swallowed by mist. Beyond it: movement. Too quick. Too neat.“Report!” Cael barked, striding for the rampart.A young guard skidded to a halt beside him. “Shadows at the east! Small force— fast. They scatter when we press. Not raiders.”Not an attack. A probe.“Hale,” Cael said, the name a growl in his throat. “Hold lines tight. No one chases without my order.”By the time he reached the parapet, Liora was already there, crouched in the lee of a merlon, eyes fixed on the fog. Even in the gray light her gaze was sharp enough to cut. Her wolf moved under her skin like heat

The night left more behind than smoke.Liora could feel it clinging to Crescent the next morning, thick in the air like damp wool. The wolves moved through their routines as if nothing had shifted, but she could see it in their shoulders, the stiffness in their laughter, the way their eyes flicked to the walls as though expecting fog to rise again. Hale hadn’t needed blood to wound them—he’d left them with silence, and silence could cut deepest of all.She strapped her blades across her back and slipped into the yard. The sun was pale, thin behind a veil of clouds. She’d hoped light might feel cleaner after a night of smoke, but the world looked washed out, uneasy.Her wolf was restless. Prowling beneath her skin, nudging her senses toward every sound, every shift of air. Something was wrong. Not just out there—in here.And it had a name.Risa.At first, suspicion felt like betrayal. Liora remembered the first weeks Risa had joined Crescent patrols—quiet, competent, eager to prove her