บททั้งหมดของ Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: บทที่ 201 - บทที่ 210

POV: WREN THORNE"Please," the woman gasped, already on her knees before I had even crossed the threshold, "do not send us away. We have already lost everything once."I stopped just inside the doors of the great hall, the words landing somewhere beneath my ribs before I had a chance to prepare for them, and I understood, watching her tremble against the cold stone floor, that no amount of nights spent with the guardian could have readied me for the weight of being looked at like that, like a promise someone had been waiting a lifetime for me to keep.The great hall at Ashborn had not held this many Vane wolves under one roof in a hundred years, and I felt every one of their eyes on me the moment I walked further inside, some hopeful, some hollow, one or two openly hostile in a way they did not bother to hide. Seventeen faces, seventeen histories I did not know, and somewhere among them, if Ronan's warning meant anything, a handful of names that were not what they claimed to be.Kade

POV: WREN THORNE"He is fourteen," I said, "and you want to test him in front of a hall full of wolves who have already decided what the answer should be before he opens his mouth."The challenge had come that morning, quiet at first, the way these things always seemed to start, an older Ashborn wolf named Torbin standing in the training yard and announcing, loud enough for half the pack to hear, that Cody's rank had never been properly earned, only granted, and that a boy handed status by a council desperate to look united to the Vane survivors was not the same as a boy who had fought for it.Cody stood at the edge of the yard now, jaw tight, refusing to let his hands shake even though I could see the effort it cost him, fourteen years old and already learning the particular weight of being watched by people who wanted him to fail."I can do it," he said, before I could argue further on his behalf. "I would rather earn it in front of everyone than spend the rest of my life with peopl

POV: WREN THORNE"Stop," the guardian's silence told me, the way it always did now, a pressure behind my eyes rather than a word, and I dropped to one knee in the frost damp grass, gasping, the silver ring burning hot enough against my palm that I nearly dropped it.Training with the guardian had changed since the night it first showed me my grandmother, less about vision now and more about control, the animal circling me each night while I tried and failed to call even a fraction of the power I had watched bend moonlight around a dead woman's hand."You are pushing too hard," Selene said from the edge of the field, arms crossed, watching with the particular clinical patience she had brought to every training session since she had become, somehow, more ally than rival. "Your grandmother did not master this in a single season. You will not either.""I do not have a season," I said, wiping frost damp grass from my knees as I rose. "Aldric said weeks, Selene. Not months.""Then you have

POV: WREN THORNE"You challenged Cody yourself," I said, stepping out of the shadows before Kade could stop me, "not because you doubted his rank, but because you needed the entire pack distracted while you mapped this tunnel undisturbed."Torbin froze at the tunnel entrance, one hand still pressed against the old stone, and for a moment I watched him weigh whether running was still an option before his shoulders dropped in something that looked almost like relief at finally being caught."I did not want to hurt the boy," he said quietly. "I told Garrick to make it look convincing, nothing more.""That is not an answer to the question I asked," I said.Ronan's guards closed in from the treeline before Torbin could decide whether to run, and I watched the fight go out of him the moment he realized how thoroughly he had been surrounded, his hands rising slowly, not in surrender exactly, but in something close to exhaustion."Why," Kade said, stepping up beside me, his voice low and hard

POV: WREN THORNE"There is a fourth site," Mira said, her voice shaking as Kade finally broke the last of her chains, "and I do not think it holds hostages at all."We had gotten her and the other two free without a single sound from the front of the mill, Ronan's decoy party still drawing whatever attention Corvyn had left watching the front doors, and yet something about the ease of it sat wrong in my chest the entire walk back along the riverbank, too smooth, too quiet, the way a held breath feels wrong right before it is finally let out."What do you mean," I asked her, slowing my pace to match her unsteady one."The fourth site is where he keeps the ones training for the second blood moon," Mira said. "Not hostages. Volunteers. Wolves who believe he will reward their loyalty once Blood Moon Law makes whatever he plans to do that night impossible to punish afterward."I stopped walking entirely, the cold river air suddenly feeling sharper against my skin than it had a moment befor