All Chapters of The Price Of Fate: Chapter 231 - Chapter 240

Nyra’s POVThe breath left me for one startled second. Decorations. Candlelight. Music low enough not to be vulgar. Tables dressed in rich dark cloth. Flowers I recognised from the better gardens of Vandwood, the ones girls like me had once only passed from a distance. Pack members in clean formal clothes. Gifts stacked near one side of the room. Elders. Guards. Families. Faces from town. Faces from the academy. Faces that had once turned away. Faces that had once laughed. Faces that now wore smiles and warmth and the carefully practised ease of a pack welcoming its Luna.Ronan came to stand behind me before I could react badly enough for everyone to see.“You said quiet,” I muttered.“I heard special.” He said.“That is not what I said.”“You were going to let the day pass like it meant nothing.” He said.“It means I’m one year older.” I protested.His hand settled at my waist.“It means more than that.”His voice held no performance. Only conviction. I looked at the room again. At t

Ronan’s POVI should not have been leaving her tonight. That thought sat under everything from the moment I stepped out of the celebration hall and into the colder corridor beyond it, and the farther I moved from Nyra, the sharper it got. The hall behind me still carried music, laughter, the scrape of chairs, the rise and fall of a hundred voices trying to turn the night into something bright. Her twenty-first birthday. A night I had wanted to belong to her. Not to the pack. Not to politics. Not to the old fear hanging over Vandwood like smoke. Her.And it was not only her birthday. It was the night her dragon was expected to come. That sat at the front of my mind like a blade. I had known what tonight meant from the moment the day began. I had felt it all through the celebration too, even while I stood smiling at people I did not trust enough to call honest. I knew Nyra did not want the grand affair. I knew she would have preferred quiet, distance, something small with just the peopl

Ronan’s POVI stepped closer to the table. If truth was the only weapon that would cut through their fear, then truth was what they would get.“If those things come through that barrier,” I said, “Nyra is the only reason our side may survive.”The silence that followed was total. Michael stared at me. Josiah looked like he was trying to decide whether I had just exaggerated for political effect or whether I believed every word enough to kill over it. Roderick’s expression hardened into disbelief so brittle it almost looked like fear.I kept going.“You should be grateful she is in Vandwood,” I said. “Because if she leaves before the barrier fails, then our side of it will surely fall.”I did not tell them about Tobias. Not Elaine’s journal. Not the army. Not the exact shape of Nyra’s bloodline or the dragon expected to rise tonight. Those truths were not theirs. Their panic did not buy that access. But I gave them enough. Enough to understand that removing her would not save anyone. I

Nyra’s POVIt happened so smoothly I almost missed the exact moment she shifted from elder at the edge of the gathering to shield in the middle of it.“A shift happens naturally,” she said. “And privately.”Her voice was not raised. It did not need to be. Jorren turned to her, mildly amused.“I am only saying...”Maelin cut across him with one calm hard question.“How many pack members had an audience when their wolf came?”The people nearest us laughed awkwardly. Not because it was funny. Because they felt the shame in it and wanted to smooth it over quickly. Jorren lifted both hands slightly.“I am merely curious. Her wolf is not ordinary.”That word again. Curious. They were always curious when it was someone else’s body, someone else’s pain, someone else’s fear. Maelin gave him a look that was not warm in the slightest.“And that curiosity is none of your business tonight,” she said. “Drop it.”That landed. Even Jorren knew better than to keep pushing once Maelin took that tone wi

Nyra’s POVRonan led me a little farther into the meadow, away from the thinner edge of the illusion and toward a stretch where the moonlight fell cleanly over the grass. We sat there together with the whole strange sky above us and the woods behind like a dark wall that had decided to keep our secrets for a while longer.I settled between his legs almost without thinking. His arms came around me at once. The contrast nearly hurt. From the crowded room full of people pretending I belonged to them. To this. His body warm behind mine. His chest against my back. His arms around my waist. The moon overhead. No audience. No expectation. No one asking to witness my becoming as if it existed for their comfort or curiosity.Here I could breathe. Not fully. But better. For a little while, neither of us spoke. We just sat there under the moon, staring upward while the grass shifted softly around us and the strange half-worn barrier stood somewhere ahead like a wound trying not to show too much