All Chapters of The Fated Series: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

Ashes at DawnThe smoke still hung over Crescent when dawn broke, a gray veil drifting low across the hills as if the Moon Goddess herself had lowered her head in mourning. The air stank of burned timber and blood. Wolves patrolled the perimeter, some limping, some barely upright, but all stubbornly clinging to their duty. Crescent’s once-proud courtyard was now a triage yard. Blankets, makeshift cots, and the faint copper tang of spilled life covered the stones that only yesterday had been scrubbed for wedding preparations.There would be no wedding now.Balor stood in the shadows of the eastern wall, his amber eyes catching the sun like molten gold, but the fire within them was not love. It was rage. His golden hair, normally combed back with soldier’s neatness, was unbound, loose strands falling across his jaw. He looked like a war god dragged from some bloody myth, his thick frame tense as a bowstring. Evandra approached quietly, but even without sound he knew she was there; the m

Drum of the HeartThey sat a while, speaking low. She told him about the way Balor had looked at the burned hall this morning—as if the fire had scoured him from the inside while sparing his skin. She told him about Stratton’s haunted face, the Crescent Beta’s voice going hoarse as he called the night’s dead by name. She told him about a pup who kept asking where the stars had gone with all the smoke above the roofline.Osiris listened without flinching. He asked for the names she could remember and repeated them back to her, as if in the saying he might carry a corner of the weight. He described Pine Wood winters, rabid cold and the way the northern lights looked when the sky decided to remember it was a cathedral. He said the first time he’d felt Dax rise in his skin, he’d cried from joy and fear at once.Somewhere between one story and the next, the trembling left her hands.“I came because I didn’t know where else to put it all,” she confessed. “The anger. The guilt. The ache that

My Love Spreads WideIf she’d slapped him, it would’ve been kinder than the way he flinched at sorry. Not because she used it, but because she refused to.He surged forward, not at her—never at her—but toward her, a storm rolling to the coast it had already chosen to break upon.I moved without thinking, putting my body between them, feet set wide on the rug, the old ache in my ribcage where a boar-tusk had taken a piece of me singing in anticipation. Our noses almost touched.“Try it,” Dax said inside me, not a taunt. A dare to fate. Make me do the thing I won’t regret.Aloud, I kept my voice level. “No.”He breathed like a bellows. “Move.”“No,” I said again, and leaned in, until the words were for him alone. “Listen very carefully, Crescent. YOUR mate needed you—has needed you for some time—and you have continued to put distance where there should be shelter. You do not get to blame her for seeking what she needs in a mate who will give it to her ten times over. If you do not want

A Luna ResurrectedEvandra’s POVCrescent still smelled of smoke and sorrow. The walls of its great hall still bore black streaks where fire had licked stone, and the air hummed with the restless pace of wolves trying to remember how to breathe after battle. Balor should have been the one directing them, but instead, it was Stratton and I who walked the courtyard, rallying healers, organizing supplies, and stationing sentries on the borders.Balor was a shadow on the edges—present, but withdrawn, his golden hair dimmed by the weight of guilt. Every time I caught sight of him, he was watching from afar, his cold eyes unreadable. I knew what lived there: shame that he’d failed his pack, shame that he hadn’t been the one to pull Crescent back together. He had buried himself in silence, leaving me to carry the mantle.And so I did.I worked with Stratton, his voice rough from sleepless nights, his hands calloused from hauling the wounded. Together we organized the infirmary, turning the e

The Weight of AshBalor’s POVThey now all called her Luna. Not in whispers, not in fevered hushed tones that die against stone. They said it full-throated as they passed her water buckets, as they lifted beams, as they pressed their brows to her knuckles the way Crescent wolves have blessed our leaders since before my grandfather’s time.“Our Luna,” a smith said, tears cutting clean tracks down a face grimed with soot.“Luna Evandra,” murmured a healer, bandages in her arms like a child.“Luna,” the pups echoed, because pups repeat what they hear when it sounds like safety.I stood behind the heavy curtain in my study and watched through a seam of light, the fabric rasping against my throat each time I breathed. If I stepped out, the room beyond would smell like ash and broth and wet wool and Evandra—wildflowers after rain; a sweetness that has no fruit, only the memory of it.Storm prowled my ribs like a caged thing. Go out, he urged, amber eyes bright as the ones in my skull. Stan