All Chapters of BLOODBOUND The Four Moons Rising: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

POV: CainI was not a man who frightened easily. This was not bravado; it was the result of a fairly thorough inventory of the things capable of frightening me and the quiet elimination of most of them over the course of twenty-eight years.The book had frightened me.Not its existence. Not even what it said — the mechanics of the bond, the threshold, the consequence of leaving it incomplete. I'd known pieces of that, the way you know a shape in dark water: the outline but not the detail. The book supplied the detail. The detail was precise and cold and answered questions I had been carefully not asking since the moment I'd felt the bond snap against me like a chain pulled taut.What frightened me was her face when she'd read it.Rose had looked at her own name in a dead woman's handwriting and had gone very still in the way of someone taking inventory — sorting through what this cost, what this changed, what this required. She had not flinched. She had not asked for anything. She had

POV: RafeI had not planned to be the one who said it.In truth, I had not planned most of what the last several days had required of me. I was a man who planned — who moved through the world with the particular precision of someone who had learned early that imprecision was a form of cruelty, to yourself and to anyone foolish enough to rely on you. I had a code. The code was not rigid, but it was load-bearing, and I had not anticipated standing in a woman's room in a palace that wanted her dead and discovering that the code had quietly rearranged several of its priorities without consulting me.She'd said: Tell me what you need. Not yes, not let's discuss it, not are you sure. Just the immediate practical question, moving forward, already past the decision.I'd been thinking about that for three hours.Now I was thinking about the guard rotation, the servant corridors Selene had mapped, the precise window of forty-seven minutes between the last of the morning watch and the first of t

POV: RoseWe stopped at a farmhouse two hours east of the city, at the end of a track that had been a road at some point and had since decided not to be. Luca's contact — a woman named Fen, small and weathered with the brisk practicality of someone who had provided shelter to people who needed it before and had no interest in the particulars of why — took one look at the five of us and pointed at the barn."Horses are in the south stall. Don't touch the grey, she bites. Food in an hour."She walked back inside before anyone could thank her."Old family friend," Luca said, to the space she'd occupied."Clearly," said Dorian.The barn was dry and smelled of hay and the particular lanolin warmth of animals that had been sheltering humans longer than they found interesting. We spread across it with the wordless efficiency of exhausted people — Dorian to a corner with the book, already reading; Luca to the horses, because Luca moved toward animals the way other people moved toward stillnes

POV: RoseWe reached the Mourne Pass garrison at dusk, which was either fortunate or engineered, depending on how much you trusted coincidence. I had stopped trusting coincidence approximately three weeks ago, so I arrived already watching.The garrison was built into the rock face, the way Ironmoor had been — but where Ironmoor felt like a weapon, this felt like a statement. Something planted here so long ago it had become indistinguishable from the stone. The gates were closing for the night when we came around the final bend, and the guard on the wall had a crossbow at rest and the face of a man who considered rest a negotiable arrangement.Rafe brought his horse forward. "Garrison Captain Lynd. Tell her Rafe Dusk is at the gate."Silence. The crossbow didn't move. Beside me, Cain had gone still in the particular way that meant he was already counting options.The gate opened.Captain Lynd was small and grey-haired and had the economy of someone who had eliminated everything unnece

POV: LucaI had a system for grief.The jokes were part of it — true, and also a wall. The intelligence network — not really a network, just careful questions asked of careful people, because if I understood the board well enough, I could stop being surprised by it. Everything I had done for three years had been, underneath the doing of it, a conversation with a space where Calder used to be.And none of it — not one brick — had been built on what was true.I gave myself thirty seconds in the corridor. Then I went back in, because the alternative was standing in the dark while forty minutes of lead time became thirty-nine.Calder looked at me the way he'd always looked at me — like I was the person he was most relieved to see and most afraid of disappointing. I had forgotten that look. The forgetting of it, and now the remembering, were both their own kind of violence. I held myself very still inside both of them."Two minutes," I said. "Before I stop being rational. Talk fast."He ta