บททั้งหมดของ Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: บทที่ 171 - บทที่ 180

POV: WREN THORNE"There is a mark on the inside edge," Ronan said, crouching beside me in the frost, his voice low enough that only Kade and I could hear it. "Small. Easy to miss unless you are looking for it."The locket burned colder against my palm than any piece of silver had a right to feel, as if it already knew a truth I was not ready to hear and meant to punish me for asking. My fingers would not stop trembling, and I hated that they would not stop, because everyone around me in that frozen clearing was watching to see whether I could hold myself together for one more revelation on a night that had already handed me more than I knew how to carry.I turned the locket over slowly until the moonlight caught a faint symbol pressed into the metal, a crescent wrapped around a single leaf. Not a Thorne mark. Not an Ashborn mark either. I had grown up memorizing both crests before I could properly read, and this belonged to neither."It is Vane," Halric said quietly, watching my face

POV: WREN THORNE"You cannot go to Fenmoor without me," Ivy said, her voice cracking over mine before I had even finished explaining where we were riding. "He is my brother too."We had stopped only long enough to water the horses and let Ivy catch up to us at the river crossing, Elias trailing several careful steps behind her, still bound at the wrists by Magnus's order until his fate was formally decided by someone other than himself. For a moment the sister I remembered from childhood stood in front of me instead of the careful, guarded woman the war had made of her, and something in my chest ached at the sight of it."It could be dangerous," I said. "More dangerous than tonight already was, and tonight was already more than enough for one lifetime.""Everything about this year has been dangerous," Ivy said, lifting her chin. "I am done being the sister who runs from difficult things and lets someone else carry the cost of it. I ran once, Wren. I watched what it did to you. I will

POV: WREN THORNE"He called himself Rhys by the time he left here," Fen said. "Not the name his adoptive family gave him. He chose it himself, the week everything started going wrong for all of us."The candle guttered low on the table between us, and Fen's hands would not stop shaking as she poured tea none of us had the patience to drink, the steam curling up into the cold, close air of her small, tidy kitchen."Why Rhys," I asked gently, wrapping my hands around the warm cup mostly for something to hold onto."He said it felt like a name nobody else was already using against him," Fen said, a small, sad smile flickering across her tired face. "He was always careful like that, even as a child. Watching every door twice before he walked through it, counting exits in rooms most people never noticed had more than one way out."Kade leaned forward, his patience visibly costing him effort with every passing second. "Where did he go when he left Fenmoor?""North," Fen said. "Toward the ol

POV: WREN THORNE"Where did you get that," he asked, voice rough, staring at the small wooden wolf as though it might vanish if he looked away from it even once.He did not move toward it at first, only stared at it the way a person stares at something they have spent years convincing themselves they imagined out of loneliness. The firelight flickered across his sharp, wary features, and I could see him searching my face for the lie he clearly expected to find hiding somewhere behind my eyes."Fen kept it," I said. "She has kept it for four years, waiting for someone with kind eyes to come asking about you, exactly the way you told her to wait."His gaze finally shifted past me to Fen standing just behind Ivy, and whatever composure he had built around himself in the dark of that cave shattered completely, all at once, like ice giving way beneath too much weight."You said you would forget me," he said, voice cracking down the middle. "You said it would be safer that way, for both of

POV: WREN THORNE"What was that," I asked, pulling Rhys instinctively closer as the sound rolled through the pass a second time.The howl rolled through the mountain pass again, low and strange, nothing like a wolf's voice and nothing like a hunter's either, a sound that seemed to come from somewhere older than either pack's history could account for."I have heard it before," he said quietly, still watching the dark passage. "Twice, in the deepest part of winter. I always assumed it was some kind of mountain cat none of the local hunters had ever properly identified or bothered naming."Ronan's expression remained tight with unease, his blade still drawn. "That is not any animal I recognize, and I have hunted every ridge from here to the old Vane border without ever hearing anything like it before tonight."Kade moved toward the cave entrance, listening carefully, his head tilted. "Whatever it is, it is not moving toward us. It is moving away, in the same direction Lady Draven fled o