The Night the Moon Bled
Chapter One
The wind cut like knives, but I was already burning.
Snow lashed my face as I walked barefoot to the center of the sacred clearing. Twenty-one winters old tonight, and every wolf in the Iron Fang Pack had come to watch me either shift or die. No one spoke. No one came closer than ten paces. They never did.
I wore only a thin white shift. The elders said the moon wanted me naked before her. I think they just wanted me to freeze faster if things went wrong.
They always went wrong with me.
The crimson moon hung low and obscene, so close I could see the craters like open wounds. Elder Thorne raised his staff. His voice cracked in the cold.
“Liora Veyn Vaeloria, Bloodborn daughter of the fallen Luna, the moon calls your wolf. Let it rise or let it take you.”
I closed my eyes.
Come on, I begged whatever beast lived inside me. Don’t make me die alone out here.
The first crack was my spine.
The second was my scream.
Pain detonated. Bones shattered and re-forged in heartbeats. My skin split, black fur pouring out like spilled ink. I dropped to all fours, claws gouging frozen earth. But the shift didn’t stop at wolf. Something older, hungrier, tore loose behind my eyes.
Power exploded outward, not sound, but a blade of pure thought.
Every wolf in the clearing slammed to their knees. Blood streamed from noses, ears, eyes. Warriors clawed at their skulls. Elder Thorne’s staff snapped in half. The ancient moonstone altar, older than the pack itself, cracked down the middle with a boom like thunder.
I rose on trembling legs, no, paws, and saw myself reflected in a warrior’s wide, terrified eyes: a monstrous black she-wolf with ember-red eyes and shadows writhing from my fur like living smoke.
The pack was screaming. Some shifted and attacked shadows that weren’t there. Others fled into the trees.
And then the hoofbeats came.
A war horn split the night. Black riders burst from the treeline, wolves the size of ponies racing beside them. They wore the sigil I’d only heard whispered: a broken fang dripping blood.
The Blackfang legion.
At their head rode death in human form.
He wore a cloak of wolf pelt, hood thrown back, dark hair whipping in the wind. Snow hissed off his armor. Scars carved his face like someone had tried to kill him and failed spectacularly. Even from fifty paces I felt the weight of his stare, gold eyes glowing, fixed on me like I was prey he’d tracked for years.
My wolf went perfectly still.
Mate.
The word wasn’t mine. It belonged to the bond, and it slammed into my chest with the force of a warhammer.
He felt it too. I saw his nostrils flare, saw the reins jerk in his gloved hand as his stallion half-reared. For one heartbeat the world narrowed to just us, predator and predator, moon and blood and destiny.
Then he smiled, slow, savage, and terrifying.
He swung down from the saddle before the horse fully stopped. Warriors dropped to one knee as he passed, but he never looked away from me. Snow crunched under his boots. Thirty paces. Twenty. Ten.
I tried to back away and discovered I was still half-shifted, claws sunk deep in the earth, shadows coiling around my legs like pets.
He stopped an arm’s length away. Up close he was enormous, towering, radiating heat and the scent of pine smoke and fresh blood. His voice rolled out, low and lethal.
“You’re the one who just cracked my wards from fifty miles away.”
It wasn’t a question.
I bared fangs longer than my human fingers. “Get out of my clearing.”
His laugh was dark velvet. “Your clearing? Little curse, I felt that scream in my bones. You just announced yourself to every dark thing in Varkast.”
He stepped closer. Shadows hissed and retreated from him like they knew better.
I snarled, lunging.
He caught me by the throat mid-air.
One second I was leaping for his jugular, the next I was pinned against his chest, his gloved hand locked around my neck, thumb pressing the frantic beat of my pulse. The contact burned hotter than the shift.
Mate, the bond roared again, furious and exultant.
His eyes bled from gold to black. “There it is,” he whispered, almost reverent. “There’s the curse I’ve been hunting.”
I tried to rake his face. He tightened his grip just enough to make the world tilt.
“Easy,” he crooned, like I was a spooked mare. “I’m not going to kill you.”
Then, louder, to the clearing: “Yet.”
Behind him his warriors fanned out, herding my panicked pack like sheep. Someone sobbed. Someone else shifted and tried to run, only to be tackled and bound.
Cassian Draevyn, Alpha of the Blackfang legion, the wolf who had slaughtered entire packs for less than what I’d just done, leaned in until his lips brushed the shell of my ear.
“You and I are going to have a very long conversation, Bloodborn.”
I spat in his face.
He wiped the saliva away with his thumb, then licked it off, eyes never leaving mine.
“Delicious,” he said. “I’ll taste the rest later.”
Before I could snarl again, he spun me, yanked my arms behind my back, and snapped cold iron manacles around my wrists. Not silver, iron. The kind that didn’t burn, only held. My power recoiled, confused.
He threw me over one broad shoulder like I weighed nothing. My shift shredded the rest of the way, leaving me bare against the frozen night and the heat of his body. His arm locked across the backs of my thighs, fingers perilously close to where the bond was already making me slick despite my fury.
“Alpha!” one of his wolves called. “The elders—”
“Alive,” Cassian barked without breaking stride. “I want answers. The rest can run or bleed, their choice.”
He carried me to his stallion, a monster of a beast that snorted steam. With humiliating ease he tossed me belly-down across the saddle, mounted behind me, and pinned me there with one hand splayed possessively over my naked back.
The last thing I saw of my old life was Elder Thorne on his knees in the snow, blood painting his beard, staring after me with something that looked like relief.
Then Cassian’s thighs tightened, the horse lunged forward, and the forest swallowed us.
Wind whipped my hair across my face. Every jolt of the gallop ground me against the saddle and against him. The bond thrummed like a second heartbeat between my legs, furious and hungry and terrifyingly sweet.
I hated him already.
I wanted him more.
He leaned down, mouth at my ear again, voice cutting clean through the thunder of hooves.
“Name’s Cassian Draevyn, little curse. And you just became the most dangerous prisoner in Varkast.”
His hand slid lower, cupping my ass in blatant claim.
“Try to run,” he promised, dark and velvet, “and I’ll hunt you to the edge of the world. Then I’ll chain you to my bed and f**k the truth out of you one scream at a time.”
The horse leapt a fallen log. I gasped at the impact, arousal and dread twisting tight.
Somewhere behind us, the crimson moon watched and bled.
And ahead, in the black heart of the forest, the Blackfang war-camp waited to swallow me whole.
I had been born cursed.
Tonight, destiny had finally come to collect...
