All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

POV: Rhen"Get your hands off him before I break both of yours, Alpha blood or not." I said it before I even looked up to see whose boots those were.The pup under my hands was shaking so hard his teeth clicked, a hind leg torn open by a trap line the hunters had strung too close to Thornwolf ground. Blood was soaking into my sleeves. I did not have time to be polite about who was standing over me."Careful who you threaten, kennel girl." The voice was low and it did not shake at all, which is how I knew before I looked up that I had made a mistake.Omegas do not speak to Alphas like that. Omegas do not really speak to Alphas at all, not unless spoken to first, not unless our eyes stay down and our voices stay soft. My mother taught me the rule before she taught me to walk. She never told me why it mattered so much to her specifically, only that it did, that the word Ashveil in her mouth always came out like something bitten off before it could hurt her more.I looked up anyway. Of co

POV: Rhen"Where did you get that," Dorian Greymane said, and his voice had gone very, very still.I had not meant to show anyone the locket. I never took it off, so nobody usually asked, but the feast had me dressed in a borrowed collar shirt with a neckline lower than my kennel clothes, and the little bronze oval had slipped free while I carried water jugs across the courtyard, straight into the path of the Ashveil pack's Enforcer."My mother gave it to me," I said, tucking it back under the fabric fast. "Why."Dorian did not answer right away. He was looking at me the way you look at a puzzle piece that has landed somewhere it should not fit and fits anyway."Can I see it," he said, and though it was phrased like a question, an Enforcer's version of a question tends to arrive with the answer already assumed.I pulled it out again, reluctant, and watched his face do something complicated when the crest caught the torchlight. Two wolves circling a full moon, one dark, one pale, noses

POV: Rhen"You shouldn't be here, and I shouldn't have come looking for you, and neither of those facts is going to stop me from asking what happened in that hall." Sable's voice cracked like a whip across the empty ruins behind the Ashveil training grounds.I had run there without deciding to, the way your feet sometimes know where you're going before the rest of you does. The old ruins sat half swallowed by ivy at the edge of Ashveil land, older than the pack house, older than the treaty, a single standing wall all that remained of whatever had been here before either bloodline claimed the valley."I don't know what happened," I said, which was not entirely a lie. "He looked at me. He stepped away from her. Then guards pulled him out of the hall and I ran before anyone decided I was the reason and dragged me somewhere worse."Sable exhaled hard through her nose, hands on her hips, scanning the tree line out of old habit even here, this deep into land we technically were not supposed

POV: Rhen"You may be his mate, but you are still an Omega standing in my hall, and I decide what happens to Omegas who catch my son's eye without my permission." Alaric Ashveil's voice cut through the room slow and even, the kind of quiet that scared me more than shouting ever could.The hall was full. Every lantern lit, every bench occupied, and every single face turned toward me like I was something to be measured. I kept my chin up, even though every instinct I had been trained into screamed at me to look at the floor and make myself smaller than I already felt."Answer him," Dorian said quietly from his post near the doors. Not unkind. Just tired, like a man who already knew this night was going to cost someone something before it ended."Ask me a question I actually have an answer to," I said, "and I will."A low murmur went through the crowd. Somewhere behind me I heard Sable suck in a breath, the sound of someone bracing for a slap that hadn't landed yet.Alaric stepped down f

POV: Rhen"There's more than the locket," my mother said, her hand shaking around mine in the small guarded room they'd put us in, "and I have been a coward for nineteen years for not telling you sooner."The door was shut. Two Enforcers stood outside it, close enough to hear us if we raised our voices, which meant whatever my mother was about to say, she said it in a whisper that made me lean in until our foreheads nearly touched."Tell me now," I said. "All of it. I'm done finding pieces of my own life carved into somebody else's wall."She closed her eyes, and for a moment she looked so much older than I had ever let myself notice before, like the years she'd spent guarding this secret had physically worn grooves into her face. "Isolde didn't just love Corin Ashveil," she said. "She was his true mate. The pull between them was real, the same as what you're feeling right now, and it terrified both packs enough that someone decided it would be easier to end the pull than to let it ex