บททั้งหมดของ Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: บทที่ 181 - บทที่ 190

POV: KADE ASHBORN"You cannot ride into unknown territory the same night you learn your father might be alive," I said, and Wren looked at me like I had suggested she stop breathing entirely.She did not sleep that night, not really, and neither did I. I lay beside her listening to every shift of her breathing, every quiet moment she thought I was asleep and let herself cry without sound, and I understood, more clearly than I had understood almost anything else in my life, that grief delayed for years does not become smaller. It only waits.Somewhere near midnight she finally spoke into the dark, her voice small in a way I rarely heard from her. "What if I find him and he is not the man I remember at all? What if four years, or however many years it has actually been, changed him into someone I do not recognize?""Then you will meet him as he is now," I said, "and decide from there whether there is still something worth knowing in him. You are allowed to grieve the father you lost and

POV: KADE ASHBORN"Wren," the voice called again, cracked and unfamiliar, and I felt her hand grip mine so hard it nearly hurt.The creature led us to a hollow cut into the hillside, half hidden behind a curtain of hanging roots, and the moment we stepped through, the smell of smoke and old herbs told me someone had been living there for a very long time.A man rose unsteadily from beside a low fire at the sound of our approach, tall and gaunt, his hair gone mostly gray though his face still carried the shape Wren wore in her own features, the same set of the jaw, the same sharp line of the brow."You look exactly like her," he said, staring at Wren like a man afraid he was dreaming and did not want to wake."Father?" The word came out of Wren cracked and small, nothing like the steady, commanding voice I had grown used to over this past year.He took a single step toward her and then stopped himself, as though he did not trust his own legs, or did not trust that she would still want

POV: KADE ASHBORN"You brought a stranger into this hall and expect the council to simply accept him as Wren Thorne's resurrected father," Bram said, his voice carrying sharp disbelief through the chamber, and I felt the room's tension coil tighter with every word.We had returned to Ashborn territory only that morning, and already the council had gathered, hungry for explanations none of us were fully prepared to give."I do not expect blind acceptance," Aldric said calmly from where he stood beside Wren, steadier now than he had been at the cave, though still leaning faintly on a cane Halric had fashioned for him along the ride back. "I expect a fair hearing, which is more than most of you offered my daughter's family a century ago."Bram's face reddened, but before he could respond, Magnus raised a hand for silence. "Whatever suspicions remain, Lady Draven's army is not a rumor we can afford to dismiss while we argue over bloodlines. That threat exists whether or not this council b

POV: KADE ASHBORN"She is not alone," Ronan whispered from beside me in the treeline, and my heart sank straight through the cold ground beneath us.We had positioned ourselves carefully around the old mill exactly as planned, hidden well beyond the range Draven's letter had demanded, watching as Wren walked alone down the moonlit path toward the ruined building exactly as instructed.Through the gap in the mill's broken wall, I could see shapes moving in the shadows beyond Lady Draven herself, at least six wolves positioned at angles that made it clear this had never been a genuine offer of a private conversation.My hand tightened around the hilt of my sword until my knuckles ached, every part of me straining against the instruction to wait, to trust the plan we had spent three days building, when every instinct I had ever trusted told me to close the distance between myself and Wren immediately and worry about the consequences afterward."She lied about coming alone," Ronan breathe

POV: KADE ASHBORN"This is where he fell," my father said quietly, standing at the crest of the western ridge in the last gray light of evening, the golden eyed guardian pacing restlessly a short distance away. "This is where I lost the fight that supposedly ended his life."Wren stood close beside him, her eyes scanning the exposed rock and windswept grass as though the ground itself might still hold some answer buried within it after all these years.The wind up here was fiercer than anywhere else we had traveled that week, whipping loose strands of her hair across her face, and I found myself watching her more than I watched the ridge itself, memorizing the particular way she squared her shoulders against whatever this place still held, the same steady courage she had carried since the very first night I met her."There is nothing here," Ronan said, echoing almost exactly what he had said at the empty grave days before."There would not be," my father said. "Corvyn was never a man