All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 331 - Chapter 340

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Get her away from the tree line, now," Dorian shouted, and it took me a full second to place his voice at all, because the ground beneath us had just done something no ground should ever do, and every part of me was still deciding whether to run toward my aunt or away from whatever was coming.The tremor rolled through the meadow a second time, harder than the first, and the twisted oaks groaned in a wind that still refused to blow anywhere else. Sable grabbed Wren's arm and hauled her back three full steps before the journal even hit the ground, and I felt Kieran's arm lock tighter around me, like he could not quite make himself let go of me yet, though some corner of him clearly wanted to be moving.The smell reached me before I could name it, turned earth and something colder underneath, like frost on iron, and for one disoriented heartbeat I was thirteen years old again, standing at my mother's knee while she told me never to walk this particular fie

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Maris," I shouted, because my aunt was swaying, both hands pressed to her own chest, the light climbing her wrists in thin pale lines like frost finding a window, and every other sound in that meadow, the shouting, the clash of bodies, the horn that had not yet begun, fell away behind the single fact that I might be about to lose her the moment I had finally found her.Six hunters had broken formation the instant Sable moved, three peeling toward Dorian, two circling toward Kieran, who had pulled me half behind him without seeming to notice he had done it, one hanging back near the tree line with the strangers none of us had a read on yet. I wanted to help Sable and Dorian both. I could not make myself move away from Maris, my hands hovering uselessly near her shoulders as though proximity alone might slow whatever was climbing through her."They want me near it," Dorian called out somewhere behind me, and I heard the particular strain in his voice of a

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"You are allowed to have doubts about your own family's purpose," I said, and watched Wren startle so badly she nearly dropped the journal in her lap, because she clearly had not heard me approach at all.The horn had not sounded again since dusk fell, and the meadow had settled into an uneasy quiet, my aunt resting against an old blanket near the fire, Dorian and Sable taking the first watch at the tree line, Kieran pacing a slow, restless circuit that had nothing to do with actual patrol and everything to do with a mind that would not stop turning over what Corvin had said. I watched him from across the fire for a long moment before I made myself move, memorizing the set of his shoulders, the way exhaustion had begun to carve small shadows beneath his eyes that had not been there three days earlier.Corvin himself sat apart from all of us, near enough to be watched, far enough to make clear he understood exactly why. Ilsa's people had made camp a stone'

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Say that again, slowly, because I need to understand exactly why forty wolves with a century of grievance would march on a Vaelwood guardian instead of the woman they supposedly came to collect," I said, watching Ilsa's face for the smallest flicker of a lie and finding none."Because Maris is a vessel they already believe they understand," Ilsa said. "A sealed woman, a known quantity, decades old and patiently studied from a distance. Dorian is something my family has never had a chance to examine up close before. A living guardian, paired, proven, walking free instead of buried under a quarry or locked in a meadow. To a bloodline built entirely around collecting power, he is simply a rarer specimen."The word specimen landed in my chest like a physical blow, and beside me I felt Sable go very still in the way she always did right before she stopped being careful with her words."He is not a specimen," she said. "He is a person who has already given mor

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Someone in this camp sent word ahead of us before we ever reached the meadow, and Kieran intends to know who before another sun sets on this territory," I said to Sable, low enough that only she and Dorian could hear me, three days after Delphine's column had melted back over the ridge and left us with far more questions than the fragile peace we had all been pretending to enjoy.The days since had passed in careful, watchful rhythm. Maris regained strength slowly, still shadowed by exhaustion but steadier each morning, taking short walks along the meadow's edge with a caution that broke my heart a little more each time I watched her flinch from open ground she had once called home. Ilsa's people had begun, tentatively, to trust our small strange alliance enough to share supplies and watch shifts. Corvin had said little, spending most of his hours near Wren's fire, poring over the journal with an intensity that looked less like scheming and more like a m