All Chapters of Moonbound: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The fire began before anyone smelled the smoke.At first it was just warmth in the walls—a subtle heat hiding beneath marble and silence, a warning no one wanted to name. The Valehart mansion had always known how to hide its sins.Evelyn stood on the west balcony when the first spark touched air. The valley below was drenched in moonlight, the gardens too still. Somewhere deep inside the house, a door slammed, followed by voices—low, sharp, familiar.Helena and Lucien.She knew that tone: command meeting defiance.Evelyn gripped the railing. The metal was cold against her palms, grounding her for a moment before the scent of ash drifted through the corridor behind her.She turned.

The first thing she remembered was light.It wasn’t sunlight. It was colder, sharper—moonlight fractured through glass, slicing the darkness into pale ribbons that coiled around her limbs. Evelyn tried to move, but her body felt submerged, caught between waking and drowning.In the distance, something whispered. Her name—once, twice—then the sound of claws on marble.A shape emerged within the dream: a wolf, vast and silver, its eyes the same pale blue she had tried to forget. Blood clung to its muzzle like a second shadow. Behind it, the moon burned red, a wound that refused to heal.She reached for it.The wolf bowed its head. Then the light split apart, collapsing into flame.When

The smoke of the ritual had not yet thinned.It lingered in the halls, in the folds of drapery, in the pulse beneath Evelyn’s skin. She could still smell the iron in the air—a ghost of the circle’s light, sharp and faintly sweet, like burnt silver. Every step she took echoed a little too loudly, as if the house itself were listening to what she had become.The Mark no longer burned. It breathed.Each faint shimmer beneath her skin felt like an inhale the moon refused to release.Lucien was gone before dawn.No one said where, but the servants moved in silence sharper than grief. When Evelyn passed them in the corridor, they lowered their eyes. It was not fear; it was reverence spoiled by pity.

The tide gnawed the island like a patient animal, withdrawing in a slick ribbon that left the stones raw and dark. Ashmere did not welcome ships; it permitted them. And tonight it permitted Evelyn—no lantern but the pale coin of the moon behind cloud, no companion but the memory of a voice that had taught her gentleness could be sharpened into a blade.She stepped from the skiff and felt the island weigh her. Salt in her hair, iron on her tongue, the braided silver at her wrist gone cold as if the metal were remembering a winter she had never lived. The old lighthouse hunched above, blind and black, and beyond it the cliff veined with red as if the rock itself had learned to blush.“I’m here,” she told the wind, and if the wind understood promise it did not show it.The path climbed narrow between

By midmorning the city smelled like steam and ink and first bread, and for once none of those perfumes had to argue with the copper breath of a ritual. Valehart House, which had taught itself to distribute its gravity through song and knife, leaned into a new habit: daylight. Curtains were tied back. Windows were open. Rooms tried on honest air the way a child tries on a parent’s coat—tentative, proud, a little afraid of tripping.Lucien set his palm on the banister as if testing the weight of the day. Under his hand the wood was smooth in the place generations had held themselves together. He took the stairs with the deliberate cadence of someone choosing to be watched.In the foyer, Evelyn waited with her coat buttoned but her scarf untied, red hanging loose like a promise that had not yet decided what shape to take. Beside her Maera adjusted a glove