All Chapters of THE ALPHA'S FORBIDDEN LUNA: Chapter 231 - Chapter 240

POV: Kaelan Ashwood“You have not slept in four days, Kaelan, and you have not eaten since yesterday. If you fall over in front of the council tomorrow, Damon’s loyalists will cheer, and I will not be fast enough to catch you.”Healer Orla set a bowl of barley soup on the map table so hard that the little wooden markers jumped. She was small and gray and fierce, and she had patched me up since I was six years old. I did not look up from the letter I was writing.“I am fine, Orla.”“You are gray. Your hands shake. You have ink on your chin.” She tapped the bowl. “Eat, or I will tell the elders you are ill, and then you will have a real problem.”I ate. The soup was hot and salty, and I hated how much I needed it. The war room smelled of candle wax, cold stone, and the smoke of the east ridge, which still drifted through the arrow slits three days after the grain store burned. Maps covered every wall. Red pins marked the border packs. A single black pin sat on Gallowmere, Titus Crane’s

POV: Kaelan Ashwood“You came alone. Good. I have one truth left to give, and I will not waste it on your guards. Sit, son, and do not look at me as if I were already dead.”My father’s voice rasped in the dark of the lowest cell. Damon Ashwood sat on a stone bench with a blanket around his shoulders, and the man I saw was not the man I remembered. His hair had gone white. His hands, once so heavy with rings, lay bare and spotted in his lap. A single lamp guttered on the wall, and the damp smelled of old iron.I did not sit. “You have ten minutes.”“That is generous. I shall try to use them well.” He almost smiled. “Is it true what they say? That she has gone looking for the Thornes?”“Do not speak of her.”“I will speak of whom I please. I am the one in the cell.” He coughed, a wet, dry sound. “She has her mother’s courage. I knew it the first day I saw her scrubbing the hall. I hated her for it.”“Why?”“Because every time I looked at her, I saw what I had helped do.”The words sat

POV: Kaelan Ashwood“Tell us again, Alpha, why we should kneel to a Luna who cannot sit at your side? Tell us why our grain burns while she wanders the countryside!”Garrick Dunn’s voice rolled across the courtyard like a thrown stone. He was a thick shouldered man with a scar through one eyebrow, and behind him stood two hundred wolves with torches in their fists. The bells had stopped. The night was black and cold, and the whole yard glowed orange. I stood at the top of the council steps with my heart pounding and my promise to Edda Fenn burning a hole in my pocket.“Garrick.” I kept my voice level. “It is past midnight. Go home.”“I will go home when I get an answer!”“Then ask a better question.”A rumble went through the crowd. Torches swayed. At my elbow, Elder Corwin leaned close and murmured, “They have been drinking since sundown. Be careful.”“I know.”“Do you?” Garrick spread his arms. “We lost a third of our winter store! Our children will eat thin soup! And where is the w

POV: Kaelan Ashwood“Do not touch her, Alpha. Whoever killed her wanted you to see the petal. Look at her left sleeve instead. Her stitches are wrong.”Orla’s voice was low and steady, and I loved her for it. We knelt on either side of Edda Fenn’s body in the dim records room, with one candle between us and the door bolted at my back. I had sent the guards away. I had told them to say nothing. Every minute I stayed there I felt the walls closing in.I turned Edda’s arm. The sleeve of her gray dress was neatly hemmed, but along the cuff a line of tiny stitches ran crooked, as if sewn in the dark by someone in a hurry. I slid my knife under the thread and drew it out. Inside, flattened to a ribbon, lay a scrap of paper.“She hid it,” Orla whispered.“She knew they were coming.”I unfolded the scrap. The handwriting was cramped but clear.The page was not burned. It was cut, and copied in secret. The copy left this keep nine years ago, in the cloak of a girl who did not know what she car

POV: Kaelan Ashwood“Stop. Stop it, Kaelan! You are bleeding, and I cannot tell if it is you or the bond doing it, so hold still and breathe.”Orla’s hands gripped my face. The training yard spun around me, a ring of white faces and wooden dummies and dawn light splintering on frost. I was on my back in the dust. I could taste copper. A warm line ran from my nose to my lip, and my sword lay a yard away where it had fallen from my fingers.“What happened?” I rasped.“You were sparring with Rook. He raised his blade, and you froze. Then you dropped like a felled tree.” Orla’s voice was flat with fear. “Do not move.”I tried to sit. The yard tilted. Rook, my young lieutenant, hovered at my elbow with a sword still in one hand and horror on his face.“Alpha, I never touched you. I swear on my mother’s grave, I never touched you.”“I know.” I coughed. “It was not you.”It had come without warning, in the middle of a breath. I had been smiling at Rook’s bad footwork, and then the bond had c