All Chapters of Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: Chapter 331 - Chapter 340

POV: KADE ASHBORN“I did not hide it because I was guilty, Kade. I hid it because the last time I told the truth about my husband, half this castle looked at me like I was a knife in the dark.”Ivy sat on the stone bench in the herb garden behind the kitchens, with frost clinging to the rosemary and her breath smoking in the cold. She held a folded paper in both hands, pressed against her knees. She did not look up when I came through the gate. She looked small, and tired, and very much like a woman waiting for a verdict.I stopped at the edge of the path. The old Kade would have stormed across the garden with his voice raised. That Kade was the reason I had lied to my wife for four days. So I stood still, and I breathed once, slowly, and I made my hands relax.“Wren told you first,” I said. “Before me. Is that true?”“It is true.” Her voice cracked. “In this garden, on this bench. She was sick in the rosemary, and she laughed, and then she cried, and then she made me swear. I swore.

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Our alpha’s mate broke the moon, and now she asks us to be patient while it breaks us. Tell me, Kade Ashborn, how many more wolves must tear at their own kin before you admit the charter was a mistake?”Councillor Hask did not shout it. That made it worse. He stood in the middle of the Hall of Two Banners with his grey beard neatly combed and his hands folded on his belt, and he let each word fall into the silence like a stone into a well. Behind him, the benches were packed. Thorne wolves sat on the left, Ashborn wolves on the right, and Vane survivors crowded the back wall with their shoulders touching. The air smelled of wet wool and fear.That morning, a Vane boy of fourteen had shifted halfway through breakfast. No full moon. No warning. Just a scream, and bones bending under his skin, and his sister’s arm torn open before anyone could pull him away. The boy was in the healers’ ward now, weeping and awake. His sister would keep her arm. That was the only good t

POV: KADE ASHBORN“I know this hut, Kade. I burned it eleven years ago, on orders I never once questioned. I told myself it was empty. I have told myself that every night since.”Ronan said it without turning around. He stood at the edge of the clearing with the dusk behind him, looking at a heap of blackened beams that the weeds had half swallowed. His horse shifted nervously. The hill wind carried the smell of cold ash and wet stone. Ahead of us, the standing circle rose out of the heather like a crown of broken teeth, seven grey pillars with a low flat altar in the centre.I dismounted slowly. I did not speak. I knew that voice. I had used it myself on the worst nights of the war, when a man says a thing out loud because the silence has grown too heavy to carry.“Ronan.”“Do not say it is not my fault.” He wiped his face with the back of a glove. “I was young, and a good soldier, and I believed the loyalist lists. The keepers of the circles were traitors. Vane witches. We were told

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Please do not step on the chalk, big wolf. If the flames go crooked, the song breaks, and the man says a broken song makes people bleed. I do not want anyone to bleed again.”The voice came from the dark at the bottom of the stairs, small and clear and strangely calm. Cody’s torch threw shaking light across a round stone chamber, and I stopped with one boot hanging in the air. A ring of white chalk lay across the floor, drawn in a careful, wobbling line. Inside it burned seven stubs of grey candle, set in a perfect circle. Four of them flickered low and sickly. Three burned bright.In the middle of the chalk sat a girl.She could not have been more than ten. Her hair was a tangle of brown, and her dress had been mended so many times it was more patch than cloth. Her feet were bare and black with soot. Around her left wrist hung a braided cord of three colours, red and silver and green, frayed with age. She held her hands folded in her lap like a child waiting for le

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Wren, listen carefully, because I will not say it twice. When she walks toward the stones, do not carry her back. Walk beside her, and let her finish the song. Promise me.”The old man’s whisper barely stirred the candle flames. Night had fallen over the castle, and the elder’s tower had never felt so small. Maren sat on one side of his bed with a damp cloth in her hand. Wren sat on the other, holding his fingers in both of hers, our daughter nestled against her shoulder. Tansy stood at the foot of the bed in a clean borrowed nightdress, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Ivy hovered by the door. Cody kept guard on the stairs, and Ronan stood in the shadows beside the window, not looking at the child. I stayed behind my wife with one hand on her back.Earlier that evening, the elder had asked to speak with me alone. Cody had carried him a chair by the window, and he had gripped my wrist with surprising strength. “Hold her steady, Ashborn,” he had said. “She will want to r