Lahat ng Kabanata ng MOONBOUND: THE HUMAN HEART: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

The news reached Nikolai before dawn. He had been standing in the courtyard, his hands pressed against the cold stone of the clock tower, his forehead resting against the wall. He hadn't slept. He couldn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Ela's face. The way she had looked at him in that underground room. The way her voice had cracked when she said you knew. The way she had walked out the door and into Lukas's arms. He had watched her leave. He had stood in the doorway like a coward and watched her drive away with the one man who wanted to destroy them both. He should have stopped her. He should have run after her, grabbed her hand, begged her to stay. But he hadn't. Because part of him believed she was right to leave. He had lied to her. He had kept secrets. He had let her fall in love with him without ever telling

Lukas watched them for a long time. He stood in the shadows at the end of the corridor, his back pressed against the cold stone, his green eyes fixed on the cage where Ela and Nikolai lay tangled together. The knife was cold in his hand, the blade gleaming faintly in the dim light. It would be so easy. One throw. One strike. One moment of violence, and Nikolai Volkov would be dead. The bond would be broken. The curse would have nowhere to go. And Ela would have no one left to turn to except him. But he didn't throw. He didn't strike. He just watched, and he waited, and he smiled. Killing Nikolai now would be too easy. Too quick. Too merciful. Lukas wanted more than death. He wanted defeat. He wanted Nikolai to watch as everything he loved was taken from him piece by piece. He wanted Ela to come to him not because she had no oth

Ela did not sleep that night. She sat on the floor of her room with her back against the door and her mother's file clutched to her chest, and she stared at the wall and thought about everything Lukas had said. His words played on a loop in her head, each repetition cutting a little deeper. You are the key to everything. The curse, the bond, the Volkov bloodline. It all flows through you. She had always been a pawn in someone else's game. First Nikolai's, then Lukas's. Even her mother, she now realized, had been a pawn. A woman caught between powerful families, used and discarded when she was no longer useful. The only difference was that her mother had managed to escape with her life, at least for a while. Ela was not sure she would be so lucky. The black veins had spread to her shoulders now. She could see them in the mirror,

The silence in the ritual chamber was suffocating. Ela stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the ashes of the burning photograph and the fading glow of the symbols on the walls. The red candles had gone out, and the only light came from the narrow shaft above, where the moon had already begun to move past its alignment. She felt hollow. Not empty, not exactly, but hollow. Like someone had reached inside her chest and scooped out everything that mattered, leaving behind only the shell of who she used to be. She pressed her hand to her sternum, where Nikolai had lived inside her for so long, and she felt nothing. No warmth. No pull. No tether connecting her heart to his. He was gone. The bond was gone. And she did not know who she was without it. Nikolai was on his knees on the cold stone floor. He had fallen when the ri

Ela could not process what was happening. One moment she had been sitting on the stone bench, staring at the fountain, lost in the hollow emptiness that had become her entire existence. The next moment, a stranger was holding her hand, pressing his lips to her knuckles, telling her that she belonged to him. She looked at Sasha's face. At his ice-blue eyes, so similar to Nikolai's but somehow different. Colder. Wilder. More dangerous. His hair was not white-blonde like Nikolai's. It was black, dark as ink, falling past his shoulders in tangled waves. His skin was pale, almost luminescent, and it was covered in tattoos. Intricate patterns, ancient symbols, images of wolves and moons and things she did not recognize. He was beautiful, in a way that made her uncomfortable. Not soft like Kai. Not polished like Lukas. Not broken like Nikolai. He was something else entirely. Something primal. Something that had been forged in fire and ice and ha