All Chapters of Ashbound Moon : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

CHAPTER 2 They didn’t chase me right away. That was the cruelest part. If they’d chased me, it would have meant I mattered. Instead, the pack let me walk through the trees alone, like my existence was a nuisance finally leaving the room. The forest swallowed sound. Snow crunched under my boots. My breath came out in sharp white ghosts. My wolf paced under my skin, restless. Wounded. Angry. Not at Kieran—not only. At the whole pack. At the system. At the way my fate had been spoken aloud like a sentence, not a gift. At the way the Moonwater turned black like it was mourning. I reached the healer’s cabin at the edge of territory and found my mother already there. She’d beaten me home. Of course she had. She stood by the door with a bundle in her arms—my bag, alre

CHAPTER 4 Dax pulled me through the trees, fast and silent, but the bond-pain in my chest kept snagging my breath. Every time Kieran’s scent surged on the wind, my wolf tried to lunge toward it—then recoiled, wounded, furious, confused. “Stop,” I choked, yanking my wrist. “I’m not running because he told me to.” Dax halted so abruptly I nearly slammed into his back. He turned, gold eyes cutting into mine. “You’re running because something else is coming,” he said. As if the forest wanted to prove him right, the air trembled again. The roar rolled through the trunks like a drumbeat under the earth—closer than before. My stomach tightened, instinct screaming to climb a tree, to hide, to become small. Dax didn’t look small. He reached into his coat and pulled out a thin strip of dark cloth. With one quick motion he tied it around my wrist—above the crescent marks—tight enough to an

CHAPTER 6 The passage slammed shut like stone had teeth. I stumbled back, heat rushing into my face, and the amber veins in the rock went dark—dead, as if nothing had ever been there. Dax’s palm stayed pressed to the symbol, jaw tight, eyes blazing. He pushed once, twice, like sheer force could reopen it. “Open,” he growled. The stone didn’t even tremble. Behind us, Kieran hit the ravine floor on one knee with a sound that punched the air out of me. Blood soaked the back of his shirt where the creature’s claws had raked him, dark and thick in the copper light. He tried to stand and failed, teeth bared, breath coming in broken pulls. The thing stalking the ravine lifted its head, tasting the air. Coal-bright eyes fixed on me. Not Kieran. Not Dax. Me. Its mouth opened and a sound rolled out that wasn’t a howl—it was hunge

CHAPTER 8 The scrape overhead turned into a grind. Stone moaned. Dust poured down in a steady sheet, stinging my eyes. The amber lines in the corridor flickered like a dying pulse. Dax shoved Kieran off the wall before a chunk of rock fell where his head had been. Kieran stumbled, catching himself, jaw clenched, blood slick on his fingers. “That thing can’t fit,” I whispered, even as the corridor shook. Dax’s expression said I was lying to myself. “It doesn’t need to fit,” he said. “It only needs to touch you.” A claw punched through a crack above us. Not the tracker’s whole body—just a limb, too long, too jointed, black like burned wood. It hooked into the corridor, scraping for purchase, dragging itself closer inch by inch. My wolf screamed. The pendant in my fist throbbed, cracked stone grinding against my skin. I felt the mark on my wrist flare,

CHAPTER 10 “Found her.” The voice came from the corridor like a blade drawn slow—calm, familiar, cruel. Alpha Rowan Vale stepped into the split doorway, filling it with authority the way a storm fills the sky. He looked untouched by the chase: dark coat clean, silver clasp at his throat, hair neat as ceremony. Only his eyes betrayed him—sharp, measuring, already deciding what to do with my body. Behind him, the corridor crawled with movement: two guards, a priest in gray, and the tracker’s shadow shifting like a wounded animal just out of sight. Kieran lay half inside the chamber circle, coughing blood into the glowing runes. He tried to push up, but his arm trembled and failed. Rowan’s gaze flicked to his son. Not concern. Calculation. “Get up,” Rowan said, voice quiet. Kieran