All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

POV: Rhen"That is not possible," Dorian said, stepping forward before Kieran could even react, his voice sharp with something that sounded almost like genuine shock. "Let me see it. Now."I held the ledger out carefully, watching his face as he scanned the page, half expecting some flicker of guilt to betray him the way I had learned to read guilt in every person who had lied to me these past few weeks. Instead, what crossed his face was confusion, then something closer to fury, directed not at us but at the page itself."This is not my hand," Dorian said finally, jaw tight. "It is close. Close enough to fool someone who does not know me well. But look at the way the letter Rs are formed, Kieran. You have watched me write reports for ten years. Tell them I am right."Kieran leaned in, studying the page carefully, and after a long moment something eased slightly in his shoulders. "He is right," he said. "It is close, but it is not his. Someone forged this deliberately, and forged it w

POV: Rhen"Do not move," I whispered, my hand closing hard around Sable's wrist. "It stopped when we stopped. Sable, it is doing that on purpose."We had been three steps from my own front door when the air changed, thick and wrong, the way it had the night the hunters ambushed us at the hollow oak. I turned slowly, scanning the tree line behind the house, and found two pale points of light watching us from the dark that were not quite eyes and not quite anything I had a name for."Rhen," Sable breathed, "that is not a wolf.""I know." My heart hammered against my ribs, and beneath the fear something else stirred low in my chest, the same strange readiness that had let me throw a grown man twelve feet without trying. I did not understand it, but I trusted it more than I trusted my own shaking hands. "Get to the door. I will follow you in.""I am not leaving you out here alone with that thing watching you like it already knows you.""Sable, please." My voice cracked on the word, and so

POV: Rhen"Again," Maren said, not even breathing hard while I lay flat on my back in the dirt for the fourth time. "You are still fighting like a girl who expects to lose, Rhen. Your body already knows better. Your mind is the only part still catching up.""Forgive me for not trusting instincts I did not have three weeks ago," I said, pushing myself upright, every muscle in my body aching in ways I had never felt from mucking out kennels."Trust them anyway." She circled me slowly, the way she always did before another pass, patient and merciless in equal measure. "Your blood remembers things you have never been taught. That is not a metaphor, Rhen. It is the truest thing I know about what you are."She came at me again, and this time, when my body moved to block her, I stopped thinking about it entirely, and something in my chest opened like a door I had not known was there. I caught her wrist before her strike landed, twisted with a strength that startled us both, and had her on th

POV: Rhen"You knew," I said, my voice shaking, "you knew about the ruins this whole time, and you let me grow up thinking my own history began the day I was born, not before it."My mother's hands trembled around her cup, the candle between us throwing long shadows across a face that suddenly looked older than I had ever let myself notice. "Sit down, Rhen. Please. If we are finally going to do this, I would rather not do it standing, with you looking at me like I am a stranger."I sat, though every part of me wanted to keep standing, keep demanding, keep pushing until the whole truth spilled out at once instead of in the careful, rationed pieces she always seemed to allow herself. "Start with why you left. Start there, and we will see how much further you are willing to go tonight.""I left because staying would have killed me," she said quietly. "Not from the treaty, not from the packs, but from watching a piece of myself I had already buried try to claw its way back to the surface

POV: Rhen"Say it," I said, standing across from Maren in the ruins at dusk, my whole body rigid with the effort of holding still. "You promised me the whole truth once I was steady on my feet. I am steady, Maren. I have been steady for days. Say it now."Maren studied me for a long moment, the fading light catching the deep lines of worry across her face, and something in her posture finally seemed to give way, like a wall too tired to hold any longer. "Your mother already told you part of it," she said. "She told you the line runs both directions.""She did not tell me what that means.""It means the woman who spoke the curse a century ago did not simply curse the Ashveil bloodline, Rhen." Maren's voice had gone very quiet, very careful, the way Kieran's did when a truth carried too much weight to hand over carelessly. "She was carrying an Ashveil child of her own when she died. A child smuggled out of the valley that same night, raised in secret, told nothing of where she truly cam