All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

POV: KieranTen days had never felt so much like a countdown until I stood on that ridge and watched Malachi Vane vanish back into the tree line as though he had never been there at all."We cannot simply let him walk away," Dorian said, arriving too late to see anything but the empty ridge and the shaken faces of everyone who had. "Kieran, if that was truly Malachi Vane standing in the open, this changes everything about how we prepare for the next ten days.""He wanted to be seen," I said. "He held up a token with the same symbol from the blade, from the marking on Rhen's door. He is not hiding his connection to whatever this is. He is announcing it.""To what end?" Dorian pressed. "Hunters do not announce themselves for sport, Kieran. Every move Malachi Vane has made in the years I have tracked him has served a purpose, however cruel. If he wanted us afraid, that fear is meant to push us toward some decision he has already planned for.""Or away from one," Rhen said quietly, still

Male Lead POV: Kieran Ashvei"You would rather I stayed ignorant than risk what the truth might cost this family, wouldn't you, Father?"My father had never once raised his voice at me, and somehow that made the silence after my question so much worse."An archive beneath the hall," I said again, standing across the study from him, my hands clasped behind my back the way he had trained me to stand since I was a boy. "Father, I need to know what is kept there."Alaric Ashveil did not look up from the papers on his desk. "You need to know a great many things, Kieran. That does not mean I am obligated to tell you all of them tonight.""This is not idle curiosity." I stepped closer, and I felt the old instinct rise in me, the one that told me to soften my voice, to make myself smaller in front of him the way I always had. I pushed it down. "Malachi Vane stood on our ridge in plain sight and held up a token carved with a broken circle. He knew about the ceremony's new date before half the

Male Lead POV: Kieran Ashveil"Months, Kieran. I have spent months proving my innocence to people who never once considered giving me the benefit of doubt."Dorian slammed the ledger onto the table hard enough to make the candle flicker, and the fury on his face told me he had finally found something worth the sleepless nights he had spent chasing it."Look at the ink," he said, jabbing a finger at the page. "Kieran, I have read this ledger a hundred times trying to find where my own handwriting was forged. I finally stopped looking at the letters and started looking at the ink itself."I leaned over the table. "What am I looking at?""Every entry in this ledger for the last three years was written with iron gall ink, the same batch we have always used in the record hall. Except this one." He pointed to a single damning line, a supposed record of stolen supplies traced back to my mother's old allies, the entry that had first cast suspicion on Dorian's loyalty months ago. "This entry w

Female Lead POV: Rhen Thornwolf"If we are wrong about this, Kieran, it will not simply cost us. It could cost this entire valley the only warning it has left."Kieran's hand tightened around mine the moment I showed him the inscription, and the look on his face told me he recognized the words before I even finished explaining where they came from."Beneath the roots where the first branch bends toward the old wall," he read aloud, tracing the tiny letters with one finger. "Rhen, I know exactly where this is. There is a single ancient oak near the ruins, the one everyone in my family has always called the boundary tree without ever explaining why.""The ruins where the curse was spoken.""The very same." He looked up, something fierce and determined settling over his features. "My father's archive held maps of the old grounds, sealed away for a century. One of them marked that tree with a symbol I did not understand until right now.""Then that is where the second half of the stone is

Male Lead POV: Kieran Ashveil"Get down, Rhen, now!"Pain exploded across my ribs before I even registered being struck, and for one terrifying second the whole clearing tilted sideways as I hit the ground hard.The blade above me caught the moonlight, and I understood with sudden, brutal clarity that I would not get my arm up in time to stop it.Then something moved faster than I could track, a blur of motion and fury that slammed into the hunter from the side hard enough to send him sprawling. I blinked up, dazed, and found Rhen standing over me, her whole body shaking, her eyes wide with a shock that mirrored my own."Rhen." I forced myself upright, ribs screaming in protest. "How did you.""I do not know," she said, staring down at her own hands like they belonged to someone else. "I was behind the wall, and then I was not, and I moved faster than I have ever moved in my life."There was no time to make sense of it. Two more of Vane's men were already closing in, and Sable was loc