The bond was screaming.
Not like a sound but like a storm tearing through my blood.
Ronan was gone.
His heartbeat, once the anchor that steadied me through gods and fire, was slipping away, fading beneath a silence that felt too final.
The night after the Blood Moon, burned out was colder than any I’d ever known. The forest was hushed, every leaf holding its breath. The silver veins in the trees no longer glowed, they pulsed faintly, like dying stars.
Callen stood before me, his face pale in the ghostlight.
“My Luna,” he said softly, “we found his trail near the southern ridge. Then… nothing. It’s as if he vanished.”
Vanished.
That word shattered something inside me.
The others whispered behind us, fear wrapped in. Some said the Moon had claimed him for defying her. Others murmure
