บททั้งหมดของ Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 80

Point of view: Wren“Your mother mentioned a second seal,” Marta said, turning the crescent pendant over carefully in her weathered hands, her eyes narrowing with the focused intensity I had come to recognize whenever she sensed a puzzle worth solving. “Pendants like this were never made in pairs by accident, Wren. If there is a second one, it was meant to be worn by someone she trusted enough to split her secret in half.”We had gathered in Marta’s small study at the edge of the healer’s wing, the only room in the territory I still fully trusted, the four of us crowded around a single candle as though the light itself might be listening.“Someone she trusted,” I repeated slowly. “My father, maybe. Or Elias.”“I never had one,” Elias said, shaking his head. “If she gave a second seal to anyone, it was not to me. She protected me from as much of this as she could, right up until the day she died.”“Then who,” I asked, frustration creeping into my voice despite my best efforts to stay c

Point of view: Wren“We intend to tell everyone exactly what you did,” I said, forcing steadiness into my voice even as every nerve in my body screamed to run.Callum tilted his head, studying me with an expression that was almost curious, almost fond, like a man admiring a piece on a game board he had already won. “And who, precisely, will believe you? A pair of letters and a story from a girl the entire territory already suspects of lying about her own name.”“My mother believed it enough to write it down,” Kade said, his voice shaking with barely contained fury. “She suspected you before she died, Callum. She wrote it in her own hand. That is not nothing.”“Grief makes people suspicious of everyone around them,” Callum said smoothly, taking a slow step closer, his hands loose and open at his sides in a gesture meant to look harmless. “Your mother was frightened in the final weeks before the war. She suspected half the court of betrayal by the end. It proves nothing except that fear

Point of view: Wren“What does it mean, the second bloodline,” I asked, my voice tight with a fear I could not fully name, though some cold, instinctive part of me already suspected the answer before anyone spoke it aloud.Elias, who had been summoned the moment Ronan delivered his warning, went very still at the question, his weathered face draining of what little color it had left. “It means Garrick was never only hunting Vane blood,” he said slowly. “It means there is another bloodline he considers unfinished business.”“Whose,” Kade demanded.Elias’s eyes moved to me, then away, guilt and dread tangled so completely across his face that I felt my stomach drop before he even answered. “Wren, your mother was not the only one who survived the massacre that started this war. There was another survivor. A child, smuggled out the same night, raised somewhere far from both packs so Garrick would never think to look.”“Who,” I breathed, though something in me already knew the shape of the

Point of view: Wren“Get behind me,” Kade said instantly, stepping between Garrick and where Cody and I knelt in the smoke choked courtyard, his whole body coiled with barely restrained fury.Garrick did not move closer, simply stood at the edge of the firelight, arms loose at his sides, studying the three of us with the same unhurried amusement he had worn the night he first appeared in Magnus’s hall. “Relax, Alpha,” he said. “I did not come here to fight you. I came to watch the fire finish what should have ended eighteen years ago.”“You set this,” I said, fury burning through the exhaustion in my chest, my arms still wrapped tight around Cody’s trembling shoulders. “You tried to kill a twelve year old boy.”“I tried to finish a bloodline that should never have survived the first fire,” Garrick said, his voice hardening. “Your mother escaped me once. I will not make that mistake twice, not with her children, not with the truth Callum was foolish enough to let slip before your littl

Point of view: Wren“The Rank Law is abolished, effective this morning, in both territories,” Magnus announced, his voice carrying across the crowded hall where Thorne and Ashborn wolves stood shoulder to shoulder for the first time in a century, uncertain but no longer openly hostile toward one another.I stood beside Kade near the front of that hall, Cody’s small hand tucked into mine, still healing but steady enough to stand, and watched as two packs that had spent a hundred years hating each other over a lie began, cautiously, to imagine something different.“Callum’s confession has been read into both packs’ formal records,” my father added, standing beside Magnus in a show of unity that would have seemed impossible only weeks before. “The truth of the Blood Moon War is no longer a secret either pack will be allowed to bury. The Vane bloodline was never our enemy. It was, and remains, a bloodline that suffered the same betrayal both our packs suffered, at the hands of the same ma