All Chapters of Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

Point of View: WREN THORNE"Cody, please, please still be breathing," I heard myself say before I was even fully awake, my own voice a stranger's in my mouth, certain for one terrible heartbeat that his small chest had gone still beneath my hand while I slept.It had not stopped. His breathing was even, steady, his chest rising and falling in the gray light before dawn, and the silver lines along his wrist pulsed faintly, like something under his skin remembering how to breathe on its own schedule, patient and separate from him. I sat up slowly, careful not to jostle him, and pressed two fingers against the marks. They were warm. Warmer than they had been yesterday, warmer than skin had any right to be in the cold hour before sunrise.I studied his face in the half light, the small crease between his brows even in sleep, the way his fingers had curled instinctively into the blanket sometime in the night. He looked so ordinary lying there. Nothing about him looked like a boy carrying s

Point of View: WREN THORNE"You came," Thane said, before I had even reached the bars, his voice smaller than I remembered it, stripped of the composure that had carried him through decades of quiet betrayal.He looked smaller behind iron bars than he had standing over Magnus with grief cracking his voice wide open, and something about that shrinking frightened me more than his secrets ever had. His hands were loose in his lap, a man who had already surrendered every fight he had left in him, his eyes tracking me the way a drowning man tracks the shore."You asked for me by name," I said, pulling an overturned crate close enough to the bars to speak without shouting. "Not Ivy's name. Mine. Why.""Because Ivy was never the one who mattered to this," he said, finally meeting my eyes fully for the first time since I had entered. "I need you to understand something before the moon rises, something I never told Magnus because I was not certain he would believe it, or forgive me for having

Point of View: WREN THORNE"I have been up all night," Ivy said before I could even ask, her focus fixed hard on the stain she was scrubbing from her sleeve, a task that clearly did not deserve that much attention.Cody slept between Kade and me that whole night after we found him on the ridge, one small fist knotted into the fabric of my sleeve, and I lay awake counting his breaths like they were the only currency I trusted anymore, terrified that if I looked away even once the silver light might carry him somewhere I could not follow."You should sleep," Kade murmured against my hair sometime near dawn, his arm heavy and warm across both of us, his voice thick with the exhaustion he refused to admit to. "I have Ronan doubling the watch. Nothing gets near this tent tonight, I promise you that.""I know," I said. "I keep seeing that feather every time I close my eyes, the silver thread wrapped around it like it was tied by careful hands, patient hands, hands that were not in any hurry

Point of View: WREN THORNE"You must be Wren," Elias said, bowing his head slightly the moment I approached, old Thorne courtesy that felt strange this far from home, strange coming from a man I had never met but had already heard so much about.He turned out to be nothing like the quiet shadow I expected, broad shouldered and sun weathered, with a nervous energy in his hands that gave away exactly how much this meeting cost him, fingers flexing and unflexing like he did not quite know where to put them."Ivy speaks of you more than she probably realizes," he added, when I did not answer right away, my eyes studying him with the wary attention Ronan's training had started sharpening in me over these past few days."She told me about you," I said finally. "Why follow her all the way here instead of simply asking her father for permission, like an honest man would.""Because he would have said no, and I would have respected that no, and Ivy would have married a man she did not love to k

Point of View: WREN THORNE"I saw him," Draven gasped, his eyes wild, fixed on nothing the rest of us could see, and it took three of us to hold him still long enough for the sound to fade into something closer to ragged, disbelieving breath."Not a man," he continued, gripping my wrist with sudden desperate strength once he could finally speak clearly. "A shape wearing a man's shadow, and he smiled at me like he already knew every mistake I was going to make before I made it, like he had watched this exact moment play out a hundred times already.""You are safe now," I told him, keeping my glowing hand pressed to his chest, unsure if the light was actually helping or if he simply needed something warm to hold onto after whatever he had witnessed in that frozen clearing."It is never gone," he said, his grip not loosening at all. "He is patient. He has been patient for eighteen years. What is two more days to something that does not tire, that has never once needed to rest."The other