Alle Kapitel von THE ALPHA’S BLOOD OATH: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 10

The Obsidian Estate had never looked so wrong.Magnus Ashford stood at the tree line, hidden beneath a canopy of dying oak and shadow, and stared at the place that had once been his kingdom. The iron gates he had commissioned himself, forged with the Silver Moon crest, were draped in black banners he didn't recognize. Music poured from the grand hall. Laughter. The clinking of glasses.They were celebrating.His jaw tightened.Three years. Three years of blood, war, and chains he couldn't see but felt in every breath, every heartbeat, every desperate prayer to a moon goddess who had clearly stopped listening. Three years of fighting a war that wasn't his, for creatures that weren't his kind, in a forest that existed between worlds. And all the while, his home, his people, had been dying.He had known it would be bad.He hadn't known it would be this.The wolves standing guard at the gate were not Silver Moon. He could tell by the way they held themselves too rigid, too arrogant, shoul

He slept in what remained of the old gamekeeper's cottage.It wasn't sleep, exactly more a controlled stillness, the kind Magnus had learned from the Nymph war camps where vulnerability meant death and rest was a luxury rationed like water in a drought. He lay on the rotted floorboards with his coat pulled over him and his back against the wall and his senses perpetually stretched outward, reading the night.The estate was two kilometers northeast.He could still smell her from here.That was the mate bond broken in every conventional sense, or so the Nymphs had claimed when the Blood Oath was first sealed. The bond will hibernate, the Nymph Queen Celeste had told him, her voice like water over cold stone. You will not feel her. She will not feel you. The veil requires silence. And for three years, that had been true. The mate bond had gone dark and cold inside him like an extinguished star.But now that he was back on Silver Moon ground, back within breathing distance of Vivienne Mar

The east chapel smelled like dust and old prayers.It had been his grandfather's place of moon-worship a small stone building at the far edge of the estate grounds, half-buried in overgrown hedgerow, ignored by Isla and Grayson's wolves because it held no strategic value and appeared, from the outside, to be entirely collapsed.The interior was intact.Magnus arrived an hour early. Old habit. He checked every corner, every shadow, every possible entrance point, before he settled near the chapel's single cracked window and waited.She came exactly when she said she would.Vivienne moved through the hedgerow gap with the fluid silence of a wolf who had spent years learning to be invisible in her own home, and stepped into the chapel, and saw him.She stopped.The space between them was perhaps five feet.It felt like an ocean.Magnus didn't speak. He had planned words. Careful, strategic, emotionally precise words he had constructed them over the long, sleepless hours of the previous ni

He found Lucien's grave behind the old apothecary building.It was unmarked. A rectangle of disturbed earth, the grass grown back over it now, blending it back into the ground as if whoever buried him wanted the memory swallowed by the soil. But Magnus knew. He had known the moment he'd skirted the apothecary on his unauthorized pass through the now-empty estate grounds a wrongness in the air there, a specific gravity.He crouched at the graveside and pressed one hand flat against the earth.The Nymphs had many gifts. One, accidentally passed to him through three years of proximity, was a diluted form of earth-reading the ability to feel the residual resonance of strong emotion left in soil. The centaur earth-mages had called it memory-ground.What he felt beneath his palm was rage.Not Lucien's. Lucien had died at peace Magnus could feel that too, faint and serene underneath the violence. The rage was someone else's. Whoever had been present when it happened. Whoever had watched and

The pack elders met him on the second night.Corin had arranged it with four of them, the oldest surviving members of the Silver Moon hierarchy, gathered in the back half of the chapel behind a makeshift curtain that was purely psychological in nature but felt necessary anyway. They were all old. They had all been through things the tracker chips and Isla's reign had not managed to entirely erase from their eyes.Theron, ninety-one years old and built like a man who had decided decades ago that time was not going to do to him what it did to other people, spoke first."You look worse than the rumors," he said."The rumors are generous," Magnus replied."Sit down." Theron gestured at a wooden crate with the imperious casualness of a man who had been giving orders since before Magnus was born and fully expected them to be followed. Magnus sat. "We have approximately forty minutes before Corin's signal tells us to disperse. So let us be efficient.""Agreed.""The Eclipse of Judgment begin