บททั้งหมดของ WOLVES OF WINTER MOON: บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

Lyra woke to the sensation of someone watching her.Not touching—not whispering—just watching.The air in Rylan’s chamber was thick with the scent of embers and night-blooming frostvine, and the fire had burned down to a slow red glow. She pushed herself up on her elbows, half expecting Rylan to be the one staring at her from across the room.He wasn’t.He slept beside her, the sheets tangled low around his hips, the muscles along his back shifting with each slow breath. The moonlight through the window carved silver along the lines of him, making him look both impossibly peaceful and devastatingly dangerous.The bond hummed under her skin, whispering his name.Calling.Pulling.Claiming.But what woke her was something colder.A presence.Faint, like a whisper behind a closed door.She swung her legs over the bed and stood, pulling one of Rylan’s shirts over herself. It hung low and loose, smelling of him—wild pine, storm-wind, and something darker she didn’t have the words for yet

Lyra woke screaming.Not from pain—from memory.Stone beneath her knees. Blood on her hands that wasn’t hers. The smell of frost and moonfire. A blade sinking into flesh that was shadow and night. A woman’s voice—her mother’s—steady and breaking all at once.I am ending you.Lyra gasped, jerking upright, lungs burning as if she’d been underwater too long. The world lurched into focus: Rylan’s chamber, torn and splintered from the blast. Lanterns guttering. The window cracked like a spiderweb of moonlight.Rylan was there instantly, hands firm on her shoulders, eyes wild with relief. “Lyra. You’re here. You’re safe.”Safe.The word meant nothing.She clutched at his forearms, nails biting through leather. “I saw her,” she choked. “My mother. The mountain. The seal—Rylan, I remember it.”His breath caught. He searched her face like he was afraid he’d find something else looking back at him.“You shouldn’t,” he said hoarsely. “Those memories are bound to blood. They don’t surface unless

Pain has a rhythm.I learn that somewhere between Lyra’s second shallow breath and the third time my heart stutters like it’s forgotten how to beat.It isn’t sharp—not at first. It’s a deep, dragging pull, like something inside me has sunk claws into my ribs and is slowly, patiently twisting. The bond hums low and wrong, a discordant note that won’t resolve. Every breath tastes like iron. Every heartbeat lands a fraction too late.I don’t let go of her.They tell me later I should have. That it would have been safer to put her down, to step back, to let the healers work without the bond flaring and lashing at them like a wounded animal. But when Lyra collapses into me, when her weight goes slack and her warmth bleeds into my chest, there is no world in which I release her.Mine, the bond insists—soft and brutal all at once.I carry her from the sanctum with my jaw clenched and my vision tunneling. The mountain groans behind us, the seal’s echo still vibrating in my bones. Every step i

(Lyra’s POV — continued)The scream echoes long after my voice is gone.It lives in the stone.In the marrow of the castle.In the place inside me where the bond used to hum.When the darkness lifts, I’m on my knees.The floor is ice-cold beneath my palms, veins of frost spiderwebbing out from where I touched the bond and broke it. The air tastes scorched, metallic, like lightning kissed blood. My magic still crackles under my skin—white, volatile, unfamiliar.Rylan is across the room.Not unconscious.Not dead.Something worse.He’s on his hands and knees, gasping, his body shaking as if it doesn’t know which shape to choose. Gold light flickers beneath his skin, then dies. His wolf claws scrape against the stone before retreating. His breathing is ragged, raw, unanchored.I crawl to him without thinking.The bond does not answer.That absence is a wound all its own.“Rylan,” I whisper, touching his shoulder.He jerks away violently, snarling—not at me, but at the space between us, l

They don’t put Rylan in chains either.Chains can be broken.They put him in silence.The cell is carved deep into the mountain, where sound goes to die. The walls are smooth obsidian shot through with veins of dull silver—anti-lunar runes, old and merciless. They drink magic the way stone drinks heat. The floor is bare. The ceiling low enough that his wolf hates it instinctively.No windows.No guards in sight.Just wards.Rylan tests them anyway.The moment his power pushes outward, the runes flare and the pain hits—not sharp, not punishing, but draining. Like something reaching into his chest and squeezing his heart in a slow, patient fist.He drops to one knee, teeth gritted, breath tearing from his lungs.“Cowards,” he snarls into the dark.The dark does not answer.Hours pass. Or days. Time doesn’t behave normally here. Without moonlight, his internal rhythm stutters, loses its edge. He paces until the cell feels smaller than it already is. He shifts halfway—claws scraping again