All Chapters of MARKED BY MOON : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Luna POV The records room is gone before I even open my eyes.I smell it first. Smoke, thick and sour, crawling under my door before the sun is even fully up. My wolf is on her feet inside me before my human mind catches up, and I'm out of bed and moving before I decide to move at all.The hallway is full of people running the wrong way toward the smell instead of away from it, because this is a pack, and packs run toward danger when it hits their home. I run with them.By the time I reach the east wing, there's nothing left to save. The records room is a black hole in the side of the building, walls scorched, roof half caved in, smoke still rising thin and lazy into the morning air like it's in no hurry at all. Everything Cassia touched. Everything I found. Everything that could have proven the truth in front of the whole council. Ash now. Just ash.Kian is already there, standing at the edge of the wreckage with his jaw locked so tight I can see the muscle jumping under his skin. He

Luna POV Nobody can find the old woman.I stand at the edge of the council chamber two hours later, listening to a room full of powerful people argue about a woman locked in a cage downstairs, and all I can think about is the elder who said my mother's name and then disappeared into a crowd of hundreds like smoke."She's not hiding," Kian says quietly beside me, reading my face the way he's started doing again, like five years never happened. "She's being hidden. There's a difference.""That's not comforting.""It wasn't meant to be."The council table is full today, more elders present than I've seen since the night they exposed me. At the head of it, Kian sits with his jaw tight, and directly across from him, an empty chair sits where Cassia used to preside, a hole in the shape of a woman none of them know what to do with anymore."She orchestrated the framing of an entire pack," one elder says, slamming his palm flat against the table. "She is responsible for a war that nearly star

Luna POV Sable's door is already open when we get there.Not forced open. Not broken. Just open, a thin line of candlelight spilling into the hallway, like she's been waiting for someone to come find her all night.Kian's hand goes instinctively to the small of my back as we step inside, and I let him, because after what just happened in that cell, I don't trust anything that looks calm right now.Sable is sitting on the edge of her bed, still healing, a bandage wrapped tight around her ribs where Declan's blade caught her weeks ago. She doesn't look surprised to see us. She looks like someone who's been carrying a weight so long that having it finally taken from her almost feels like relief."Cassia sent you," she says quietly. It isn't a question."She said you know more than you've told anyone," I say. "About the ledger. About my mother."Sable's eyes close for a moment. When she opens them, there are tears in them, and something else too. Something like guilt."My mother made me

Kian POV I hear her before I reach the door.Not a scream. Something worse, a low, breathless sound of pain that no amount of training could ever teach a person to fake, and I'm through her door before I even remember deciding to move, splintering the lock because I don't have time to find the key.Luna is on the floor beside her bed, both hands pressed to her stomach, face white as bone."Luna." I'm on my knees beside her before the door finishes swinging shut. "Talk to me. What's happening?""Cramp." Her voice comes out thin, forced through gritted teeth. "Bad one. It's not stopping."My heart slams against my ribs so hard it hurts. I've fought wolves twice my size without this much fear in my chest. "The baby""I don't know." Tears spring into her eyes, more from fear than pain, I think, though it's hard to tell them apart right now. "Kian, I don't know."I don't remember shouting for the healer. I don't remember carrying her down the hall, though my arms ache with the memory of

Kian POV Cassia's old chambers still smell like her.That's the first thing I notice when we step inside, Luna close behind me, two guards posted at the door with orders to let no one else near this room. Cassia gave us the location before the guards dragged her back to her cell: a loose floorboard beneath the window, third from the wall, where she hid the key the same night she pulled it from Mira's cooling hand."Here," Luna says, already crouched by the window, running her fingers along the wood until one board shifts slightly under her touch. "This one."I kneel beside her and pry it up.The space beneath is empty.Not empty like nothing was ever there. Empty like something was removed carefully, deliberately, by someone who knew exactly where to look. A faint outline in the dust marks where a small object sat for two years, undisturbed, until recently."It's gone," Luna says quietly, though the words are more for herself than for me. "Someone already took it.""Recently." I run