All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

Female Lead POV: Rhen Thornwolf"There are rooms in this pack that have not opened in a hundred years, and you are asking me to walk into one holding a candle and my own trembling hands." I said it to Kieran's father, and I meant every shaking word of it.Alaric did not look at me when he answered. He looked at the sealed door instead, the one carved with a wolf howling at a moon split down the middle. "Fear is reasonable," he said. "I sealed this chamber myself the year my mother died. I have never once wanted to open it again.""Then why open it now," I asked."Because the last time I chose fear over truth, I lost her," he said, and for a moment the Alpha mask slipped enough that I saw the boy he must have been once, small and grieving in a hall too large for him. "I will not make that mistake with my son's mate."Kieran's hand found mine in the dark of the corridor, steady where I was not. "You do not have to do this tonight," he said quietly, only for me."Yes I do," I said. "If I

Female Lead POV: Rhen Thornwolf"He did not run from Vane. He ran toward him, so that Vane would follow the wrong trail and never find us." My mother said it with her hands wrapped so tightly around mine that I could feel her pulse hammering against my own skin.We sat alone in the workroom long after Kieran had gone, candlelight throwing long shadows across shelves that had kept this secret longer than I had been alive. "Corwin knew what I carried before I was even born," she said. "He knew what Vane's family had hunted for four generations, and he knew the night I went into labor that Vane had finally found us.""So he sacrificed himself," I said quietly. "For me.""He sacrificed himself so that you would have the chance to grow up not knowing his name," she said, "which I see now was never a kindness. It was only a different kind of hiding, and I am sorry for every year I let you believe you came from nothing instead of telling you that you came from someone who loved you enough to

Female Lead POV: Rhen Thornwolf"They are voting on whether I get to choose you, and I am standing outside a locked door because Omegas are not permitted in council chambers even when the council is deciding my entire life." I paced the length of the training yard, my voice sharper than I meant it to be, and Sable did not flinch from any of it."You could break the rule," she said. "Walk in there and remind them you are a person, not a topic on their agenda.""And hand them proof that I do not respect the very law they are debating whether to bend for me," I said. "No. I have spent nineteen years learning exactly which rules cost too much to break carelessly. This is not the moment to forget the lesson."The yard door opened before Sable could answer, and Kieran stepped through it looking like a man who had aged years in a single evening, his shoulders carrying a weight I recognized because I had been carrying my own version of it since the blade found my skin. He did not speak. He si

Female Lead POV: Rhen Thornwolf"Say his name with me, just once, so that I know I am not the only one who remembers he existed at all." My mother asked it of me at the memory fire that night, her voice barely above the crackle of burning cedar, and I understood she was not only speaking about the four wolves lost on the ridge."Corwin," I said, and the name felt strange and precious leaving my mouth for only the second time in my life, a father I had never met given weight by nothing but grief and candlelight and my mother's trembling hand in mine.The four names from the ridge were spoken first, formally, by Alaric himself, the pack gathered in a wide circle around the fire while smoke carried each name up into a sky too clear and too calm for how heavy the night felt. I stood near the back with Sable on one side and Kieran on the other, watching families I barely knew clutch each other through grief I recognized in my own bones now, grief that did not care whether the person you lo

Female Lead POV: Rhen Thornwolf"Someone stood exactly where I am standing, touched exactly what I am about to touch, and left the dust disturbed in a shape too careful to be an accident." I said it low, my heart hammering as I crouched beside the shelf where Wren's journals had sat undisturbed only two nights ago.Kieran was beside me instantly, his whole body gone taut and alert, the careful stillness he wore like armor stripped away by something sharper underneath. "How many books," he asked."Three missing," I said, running my fingers along the gap where they had been. "The ones closest to the letter we already read. Whoever took them knew exactly what they were looking for.""Garrick has the only key besides my father," Kieran said, "and my father was with the council all evening. Which leaves very few people who could have gotten past that lock without forcing it.""The lock was not forced," I said, examining the mechanism carefully. "Whoever did this either had a key made, or s