บททั้งหมดของ Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

Point of view: Wren“The blood moon rises in eleven days, and this treaty will be sealed by then, one way or another. I will not have my son married to a lie past that date.”Alpha Magnus’s voice carried through the council chamber like a verdict already decided, and I stood at Kade’s side, my hands folded tightly in front of me the way I had learned to hold them years ago, back when hiding my fear was the only power I had.“The wedding is already planned,” Kade said evenly. “There is no reason to move the date.”“There is every reason,” Magnus said. “Garrick Hale is circling this pack, someone inside these walls fed him our patrol positions, and my son’s bride throws grown wolves into trees with her bare hands. I want this treaty finished and sealed under blood moon law before anything else unravels further.”My stomach dropped. Blood moon law. Any oath sealed under it is treated as absolute and unbreakable. If Kade and I stood before both packs on that night and spoke vows meant for

Point of view: Wren“I know you are hiding something, Wren. I just have not decided yet whether I am going to let it stay hidden.”Ronan’s voice stopped me cold in the corridor two days after we returned from the Thorne border, his tone quiet but edged with something sharper than suspicion now, something closer to certainty. I turned slowly to face him, my heart hammering against my ribs.“I do not know what you mean,” I said.“You do,” Ronan said, stepping closer, his eyes searching my face the way a soldier searches a battlefield, looking for the one detail that will tell him everything. “I found something in the clearing the night Garrick escaped. A pendant, half buried in the dirt where you had been standing.”My blood went cold. My mother’s pendant. It must have slipped loose during the fight, the one piece of her I carried with me always, tucked beneath my collar where no one was supposed to see it.“It has a Vane crest on it, Wren,” Ronan said quietly. “I did not recognize it a

Point of view: Wren“Get down!” Kade’s arm wrapped around me a half second before something hurtled past where my head had been, and the crowded hall dissolved into chaos around us.Smoke poured through the shattered window, the same bitter, coppery smoke from the clearing weeks before, and guards shouted orders that scattered into confusion as wolves in human form began shifting where they stood, unsure whether to fight or flee.“It is another distraction,” Ronan shouted over the noise, already moving toward the doorway with a dozen guards falling in behind him. “Garrick is not finished with tonight.”“Then he chose his moment well,” Selene said grimly, appearing at my other side, her eyes scanning the chaos with sharp, practiced calm. “Nobody in this hall is thinking about your name anymore, Wren. They are thinking about staying alive.”She was right. In the smoke and screaming, Magnus’s accusation had scattered into the noise, unfinished, unanswered, the confession I had almost mad

Point of view: KadeI heard my father before I saw him, the particular cadence of his footsteps down stone that meant he had already decided how a conversation was going to end before it began. I had heard that walk my entire life — before punishments, before verdicts, before the night he told me my mother was never coming home. I knew what it meant, and I stepped forward without thinking, putting myself between it and Wren.“Father, this is not the place,” I said.He held up a hand without even looking at me, and the stillness of that small gesture did what nothing else could have — it silenced me completely, the way it always had since I was a boy standing at the edge of his grief, too young to understand it and too afraid to ask.“There has never been a better place,” he said. “My son’s future stands on this. My pack’s peace stands on this. I will hear it from her own mouth, or I will hear nothing at all and act as though the worst has already been confirmed.”I felt Elias go tense

Point of view: Kade“Read it out loud,” I said, kneeling beside her in the dust of that hidden cave, my hand steady against her back — or trying to be, “or read it alone first, if that is what you need.”I watched her look down at the letter trembling in her hands, and I understood, in the way I sometimes understood things about her without being told, that whatever waited inside had been written by a woman who believed she might not live long enough to say it any other way.“I need to hear her,” she whispered, and she began to read.I listened to her mother’s words come out of her mouth, and it was strange — hearing a stranger’s voice, a woman I had never met, filtered through the daughter she never got to raise. My daughter, if you are reading this, then Elias has done what I asked, and kept this trunk hidden until you were old enough, or desperate enough, to need it. I felt Wren’s voice catch, and I tightened my hand against her back, giving her whatever strength I had to give.I w