All Chapters of Born of Moon and Magic: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

I don't know how long we might have stood there, the fire and half the courtyard between us and neither of us willing to be the one who looked away first, if Nicole hadn't cut straight through it.I heard her before I saw her — the particular click of heels that weren't made for grass, moving with a purpose nobody else in the clearing seemed to have. She didn't hesitate, didn't pause at the edge of his space the way everyone else in this pack seemed to instinctively know to do, the way even Jackson had kept a careful half-step back from him all night. She walked straight up to Demetrius and slid her arm through his like she was reclaiming something that was hers, pressing herself into his side in a dress that left very little to anyone's imagination — blood red, cut low enough to turn heads on its own, slit high enough that it barely mattered what shoes she'd paired with it. Her mouth was the same red as the dress, freshly done, the kind of red that left marks on glasses and collars a

Armida's pov The feast went on long after the last of the oaths were given, the fire built back up until it threw shadows halfway across the courtyard, food passed hand to hand faster than anyone could really taste it. Someone had produced a fiddle from somewhere — I never did see who — and it drew half the courtyard into something that wasn't quite dancing but wasn't far from it either, boots scuffing dirt, someone's laugh rising too loud and then embarrassed into a cough.I stayed at the edges of it. Watching more than participating, the way I'd found myself doing most nights since I arrived here, except tonight it wasn't shyness keeping me apart from the rest of them. It was him. The way his hand had locked around that blade at the fire like it was the only thing keeping him upright, white-knuckled for just a second before he'd smoothed it away like it never happened.Nobody else seemed to have noticed. Or if they had, they knew better than to let it show.The night thinned out sl

Armida's povNeither of us said anything for a long moment.I didn't try to fill it. I'd spent enough of the last few weeks learning what Demetrius did with silence — how he used it as a wall, how he retreated behind it the second anything got too close — that I recognized this one was different. This silence wasn't him shutting a door. It was him standing in an open one, unsure whether he was allowed to walk through it, and I didn't want to be the reason he changed his mind.So I just stayed, right where I'd already placed myself — close enough to feel the warmth still radiating off him despite the cooling air, close enough that neither of us could pretend the distance between us was doing anything but holding us apart on purpose."I don't know what to do with this," he admitted, so quietly I almost missed it. "I'm not — I've never been good at whatever this is.""You don't have to be good at it," I said. "You just have to not walk away from it. That's usually enough to start."He hu

Armida's pov "Morning," he said finally, like it was nothing. Like my whole understanding of the last few weeks hadn't just quietly rearranged itself in the two seconds it took him to say one word. "Morning," I managed. Neither of us moved right away. There was something almost funny about it, if I let myself think about it that way — both of us standing in a hallway like we hadn't spent last night with his hand wrapped around mine, like we hadn't stood at his parents' stones together and come back from it something other than what we were before. In the daylight it all felt more fragile somehow, more easily undone, like the wrong word might send us both scrambling back behind whatever walls we'd left down in the dark. He didn't retreat, though. That was the thing I noticed most — braced for it out of habit, and it didn't come. "I was about to make coffee," I said, because it was true, and because I needed to say something before the silence turned into the kind of thing I'd

Demetrius POVThe meeting room had outlasted three generations of Black Moon's business before mine, and every wall in it still remembered them — a table scarred deep enough to trace decades of blades set down too hard, the pack crest burned into the stone above a hearth that never went cold, portraits of dead alphas watching from the shadows with the patience of men who'd once sat exactly where I did now. It wasn't built for comfort. It was built to remind whoever held the chair what it had already cost, and what it would cost again.Corwin, Mabel, and Osric- the elders, were already seated when I walked in. None of them rose — I'd put a stop to that years ago, some formality I'd never wanted from the three wolves who'd advised my father before they ever advised me, and who'd had to all but lift me into this chair themselves when the time had come far sooner than any of us were ready for. But the room straightened anyway, the way rooms had learned to be around me a long time ago."Al