All Chapters of Bloodlines Of Fire And Fate: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

She had barely stopped shaking when he stepped back from her, just enough to study her face. He didn’t drop her wrists. The wall was pressed against her cold spine, his heat pressing in from the front, controlled and unhurried. “I want him to meet me,” the stranger said at last, voice smooth as a blade laid flat. “No guards. No messengers. Just Damon—at Moonsblood Peak.” Evelyn kept her gaze steady. “Why.” “Because he killed my father,” the man answered, each word placed like a stone. “I was young. I learned the lesson… the Abandoned follow power, not promises. He took the throne. I’m going to take it back.” Something in the way he said back told her this wasn’t a rumor he’d picked up in a campfire circle. It had been fed to him young and often. “What’s your name?” she asked. “Soren.” He said it without flourish, as if the name itself was a punishment. Silver eyes flicked to the teal in hers. “I want the title. The weight that comes with it. The name that makes doors ope

Damon slept, but his body did not loosen the way other men’s did. Sleep came to him like a gate he had to lift with his own hands, shoulders braced, weight steady, and even then it never stayed open for long. That night, with the house breathing quietly around him and Evelyn’s warmth a careful distance away, the gate rose just enough for memory to step through. The dream took him back to the year the pines were small and the forest still young. He had only recently taken the title, the word Alpha settling on his shoulders like a new cloak, slightly stiff at first, then inseparable from his shape. The Abandoned were still testing him, poking at the seams to see where the fabric thinned. He tested himself, too, in a hundred small ways no one saw. He remembers thinking that to lead was to carry and to listen, and to keep his claws sheathed until unsheathing them mattered. He was on patrol when Varos first hailed him. The air had that metallic bite that tasted like blood. Varos came

The house woke before the sun did. Not with clatter or voices, but with purpose, the kind that moves through walls and warms the air the way a fire does when it remembers its own work. Evelyn rose into it quietly, letting the blanket fall and the cold sting her awake. Her body still carried the echo of last night’s fear and the steadier imprint of Damon’s hands, the way his voice had met her panic and turned it into something she could hold without breaking. Three nights. Moonsblood Peak. Soren’s challenge laid like a blade across their path. She dressed in layers that did not bind her movement: linen, leather, the battered jacket she’d taken from a raider a lifetime ago and never let go. Her wrists were bare; the skin where silver had eaten into her was almost healed, the pale newness of it a bright thread among older scars. She braided her hair back and tucked a small charm Aleta had once given her under the laces at her throat, a disc of antler carved with a single spiral, the

Damon watched her from the doorway, arms loose at his sides, feeling like an intruder in a room that had become quiet for him alone. Evelyn stood in front of the mirror, braiding her hair with careful fingers. She didn’t notice him at first—she was too focused on the small task—but the way her hands trembled a fraction as she pulled the braid through made him want to reach across the room and steady her. He kept his hands to himself. He always kept his hands to himself. Pride sat heavy in his chest, the sort of quiet pride that wasn’t about show. He had cataloged readiness in men and maps and blades his whole life, and this felt like that tally being marked in a different column. Alongside that, something else pressed at him, an unfamiliar ache and a warmth he could not name at first. “Love,” Caleb said from the place where the wolf lived inside him, blunt as rock. “You know the word. Don’t pretend.” Damon's jaw tightened. He hated words that slipped into him uninvited. He

The mountain loomed before them like a sleeping beast, its shadow swallowing what little courage Evelyn thought she still had. Moonsblood Peak. The name alone had weight, as if it carried centuries of whispers, rituals, and blood-soaked promises in its echo. Her boots crunched softly against the rough stone trail as she followed beside Damon. The air was thinner here already, making her lungs work harder. Each breath reminded her of what lay ahead. She didn’t ask questions. Not yet. She knew Damon would tell her only what she needed, only what his controlled, scarred heart allowed. And for once, she didn’t want to press. Some silences were sacred, and this path felt like one of them. The group had split off hours before. Kael, with Mira and Brina chattering at his side, had peeled away toward the safe house Damon secured for them. Aleta had gone ahead, her shadow moving like certainty itself. That left just Evelyn and Damon now, two figures threading their way up the long and