All Chapters of MOONBOUND : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Reya drove me home because my hands wouldn't stop shaking long enough to trust them on a wheel.Neither of us talked. The wipers dragged rain across the windshield in slow arcs, and Redoak Hollow slid by outside in wet, sodium-lit smears — the diner, the feed store, the turnoff toward the pack lands where every house belonged to someone whose family had lived here longer than the town had a name. I'd grown up on these roads. Tonight they didn't look like anything I recognized."You want to talk about it," Reya said finally, "or you want to sit in it a while first?""I want to un-know it." I pressed my forehead against the cold glass. "For about ten more minutes. Then you can ask me anything you want."She didn't ask anything the whole rest of the drive. That was the kind of friend she was.My cabin sat at the edge of the tree line, small and a little crooked, the porch light Kian had installed for me the summer before he — before everything — still burning steady above the door becaus

Kian found me two days later, exactly where he knew he would — the ridge trail above the creek, the one place in the territory that had always belonged to just the two of us before it belonged to grief.I heard him before I saw him. Wolves are quiet by nature, but a mate-bond has its own kind of hearing, and mine had been straining toward the sound of his footsteps without my permission since the moment he stepped back into my life."You used to come up here when you needed to think," he said, stopping a respectful distance away. "I figured some things hadn't changed.""Some things have changed everything," I said, not turning around. The creek moved below us, unbothered, the way it always had been through every version of my life it had witnessed. "You don't get to assume you still know me.""I know that's fair." He came to stand beside me, careful to leave space between us, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all. "I've thought about this conversation every day for

The howl that tore me out of sleep wasn't a full moon call. It was worse — the short, sharp, three-note alarm bark that every wolf in Redoak Hollow had drilled into their bones since childhood. Territory breach. All hands. Now.I was out of bed and half-shifted before I was even fully awake, my wolf surging up under my skin with a snarl that vibrated straight through my teeth. Through the cabin window, the tree line was already alive with movement — shadows breaking into a dead run toward the northern boundary, the same stretch Rhys and I had walked a week ago in careful, unhurried quiet.There was nothing unhurried about tonight.I shifted the rest of the way on the porch, clothes torn and left behind because there wasn't time to be precious about fabric, and I ran.The scent hit me half a mile out — rank, unfamiliar, wrong in the particular way a rogue wolf's scent is always wrong, like something that used to belong to a pack and had rotted loose of it. Underneath that, threading th

War council convened in the pack house library an hour before dawn, maps spread across the same table where Rhys's father had once taught him to read pack boundaries as a boy — a detail Vane mentioned quietly, almost to himself, while he pinned the northern territories down with a paperweight shaped like a howling wolf.I wasn't supposed to be in this meeting. Alphas, betas, senior wolves — that was the usual roster for war planning, and I was none of those things. But when Rhys had looked around the room taking count of who needed to be there, his eyes had found mine and simply stayed, an unspoken you're staying that nobody in the room thought to argue with."Rourke doesn't move fast," Kian said, tracing a line across the map from the northern border down toward Redoak. "He builds patience into everything. If he's sending scouts now, that means he's been planning this for weeks, maybe longer. The attack last night wasn't the opening move. It was a probe — testing our numbers, our res

The two days passed like held breath.Redoak trained in shifts, ate in shifts, slept in shifts — every fighter sharpening the same readiness over and over until it stopped feeling like preparation and started feeling like waiting to exhale. I coordinated the evacuation routes until I could walk them blind, herded anxious families toward the safe houses carved into the hillside caves at the territory's southern edge, and tried not to think too hard about what "if this goes wrong" would actually mean for the people I was moving to safety.On the second night, Rhys found me checking supply stores in the cellar beneath the pack house, and something in the set of his shoulders told me the countdown had run out."Dawn," he said quietly. "Scouts confirmed Rourke's people are moving. They'll reach the pass by first light."My stomach dropped, though I'd known this moment was coming since the first war council. "Then it's tonight. Whatever we still need to say to each other.""Sable—""I mean