All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 221 - Chapter 230

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"If we wait until morning, Kieran, we may be handing Vane exactly the gift he came here to collect, and I refuse to be anyone's gift."I said it standing at the mouth of the narrow stone stair Tamsin had shown us, hidden beneath the orchard's dead heart, descending into darkness the old woman swore she had never once had the courage to enter herself. Kieran's jaw was tight, torn between the caution that had been bred into him since birth and the urgency none of us could pretend away any longer."I am not asking you to wait," he said. "I am asking you to let me go down first.""You cannot close a binding you are not built to touch," I said gently, though my heart pounded at the thought of what waited below. "Dorian and I have to be the ones to go down there. You already know that.""Knowing it does not make it easier to watch," Kieran said, and something raw broke through his careful control for just a moment, a crack in the composure he had spent his whol

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Dorian, I know you are still in there, so fight this, because I refuse to lose you to a voice that has no right to wear your face."I heard Kieran's words as though they were traveling to me through deep water, my knees pressed hard against the cold stone floor of the chamber, my whole body still trembling from whatever the pulsing stones had tried to pour into me only moments before. I could not seem to make my limbs answer me the way they should have.Dorian stood over me, but it was not truly him standing there, his eyes gone entirely black, his voice, when it rolled out of him, carrying that same terrible, grinding echo I had heard from the stones themselves. "More guardians," the voice said through him, almost delighted. "How generous of you all to keep arriving."I tried to speak, to warn Kieran back, but my throat would not cooperate, and all I managed was a thin, useless breath that no one but me seemed to notice at all. Somewhere beneath the fea

Point of View: Kieran Ashveil"The hunter you captured last night finally decided to talk, Kieran, and I think you should hear this yourself before I repeat it wrong and give you the wrong nightmare."Sable met me at the door of the makeshift holding room Alaric's guards had set up in the Duskmoor border post, her expression grim in a way that told me whatever waited inside would not be easy to hear. I had barely slept since the orchard, my shoulder still aching where the silver bolt had grazed it, my mind still circling Rhen's mother's letter like a wound I could not stop touching."Tell me anyway," I said. "I would rather hear it twice than not at all."Sable exhaled slowly. "He says Cade Halloway is not directing Vane's people from far away like Ysolde assumed. He says Halloway has been here, in Duskmoor territory, for nearly two weeks, close enough to have watched everything we did at the orchard with his own eyes."The words landed like a blow. "Two weeks. Sable, that means he wa

Point of View: Kieran Ashveil"If that is truly Cade Halloway walking out of the treeline with his hands raised, Elara, then someone needs to explain to me right now why he looks like a man surrendering instead of a man about to attack."I said it low, my whole body tensed and ready to shift the instant anything about the approaching figure suggested a trick, Elara and Sable flanking me on either side with weapons drawn despite the man's empty hands and slow, deliberate steps."Because I am not here to fight you today, Alpha heir," Cade Halloway called out, stopping a careful distance away, his voice carrying an exhaustion that matched the prisoner's description of him almost exactly. "I am here because I felt the second binding begin closing a moment ago, and I needed to see with my own eyes whether it took her the way the first one nearly did.""Took who," I demanded, though the answer settled cold and certain in my chest even before he spoke it."The girl," Halloway said. "Rhen Tho

Point of View: Kieran Ashveil"Before you decide whether to trust anything else I tell you, Alpha heir, you should know that I was never the one giving Vane's remaining hunters their orders, not for the last several months at least, and that fact alone should frighten you considerably more than I ever did."Cade Halloway said it quietly, seated across from me and Alaric in the same Duskmoor border post where his own hunter had confessed days earlier, his hands loosely bound out of necessity rather than any real belief he intended to run. Two days had passed since the orchard closed, and the exhaustion in his face had only deepened rather than lifted with rest."Explain," Alaric said, his voice carrying the particular weight he reserved for moments he suspected would matter far longer than the conversation itself.Halloway shifted in his chair, the chains at his wrists rattling softly against the wood. "I would rather tell you willingly than have it dragged out of me piece by piece. I