Moonbound Vow

Chapter 9: The Tenth Page

The record hall smelled of beeswax and old grief, and Elara's hands would not stop shaking.

She told herself it was the cold. The cellar beneath the pack house breathed damp through stone walls two feet thick, and the single brass lamp Rowan had lit threw more shadow than light across the reading table. But her hands had been shaking since she'd read the name on the first page — *Sera Vane* — and cold had nothing to do with it.

"Start at the beginning," Rowan had said, and left her to it, settling on the stairs with his bad knee stretched out and his eyes on the door above. Guarding. The old healer hadn't asked why she needed the Registry. Kael's iron key in her pocket had been explanation enough.

Nine entries. Nine women. Two hundred years.

Elara opened her mother's journal beside the oldest ledger and began to build what Maren had built before her: a pattern, drawn in her own hand on the back of a vet-clinic invoice, because she hadn't thought to bring paper and the dead didn't mind borrowing from the living.

*Name. Year. Date of mating ceremony. Date of death. Days between. Notes.*

The first surprise came fast. She had assumed — the way everyone in Silverpine seemed to assume — that the curse struck quickly, a wedding and a funeral in the same breath. It didn't. Luna the third, a woman named Carys Bell, had been mated twenty-six days before the full moon, and lived every one of those days — laughing, the healer's notes said, planning a garden — until moonrise on the twenty-seventh night, when her heart stopped between one breath and the next.

Twenty-six days. And Luna the eighth — no. Elara's pen stilled. Luna the eighth had been mated *two days* before the full moon. Two days a wife, and then the moonrise took her.

"The curse waits for the moon," Elara whispered. "It doesn't care about the wedding. It cares about the moonrise."

Rowan shifted on the stairs. "Your mother said the same thing. Her tenth year of studying it."

The ceremony was the seal — the bond, once sealed by ceremony, could not be broken except by death. That was pack law, older than the curse. The curse didn't hunt mated wolves. It hunted *ceremonies*. It waited, patient as a spider, for the moon to rise on a sealed bond, and then it collected.

Elara stared at her chart until the numbers blurred, and a cold, strange relief moved through her underneath the horror. Kael had rejected her *before* any ceremony — in the clinic, with his voice breaking, before the Goddess or the pack or anyone could seal them. No ceremony. No sealed bond. Whatever the hollow mark was — scar tissue where the bond had tried to root — it wasn't a mating. The curse had no sealed knot to tighten around her heart.

*I'm not safe,* she thought. *But I'm not claimed, either. Not the way they were.*

Unless Dorian found a way to force a ceremony. The thought arrived uninvited and settled like ice water in her stomach. Dorian, who profited from a Luna-less pack. Dorian, who wanted a Luna he could control.

She turned back to the ledger. The brand — every entry described it, and three of the healers had sketched it in the margins: a crescent moon, and beneath it a knot, drawn with the careful precision of men documenting something they didn't understand. But no two knots were the same. Elara laid the three sketches side by side, comparing the loops and crossings the way she'd compare radiographs.

"They're different," she said. "Every brand is different."

"A knot tied around a different heart," Rowan said quietly from the stairs. "That's what the oldest songs say. The curse doesn't stamp them. It *ties* them."

Which meant the brand wasn't a wound. It was a signature — the curse's handwriting, unique to each victim. And a knot, her mother's journal said, could be untied by hands that knew how.

Her pulse quickened. She turned pages faster, chasing the anomaly she could feel hiding between the lines — because Maren had spent ten years on this, and Maren had been the smartest person Elara had ever known, and there had to be something, some c***k in two hundred years of perfect murder.

She found it in the sixth entry, eighty years gone: Luna Wren Halloway. The healer's handwriting changed halfway down the page — shakier, as if written during or just after the death itself. And in the margin, squeezed between the sketch of the brand and the recorded hour of death, four lines in faded brown ink:

*The Moonblessed woman laid her hands upon the brand at moonrise. The heart beat thrice more before it stilled. The brand paled, then darkened again. I do not know what this means. — H.*

Elara read it three times. Her fingertip hovered over the words *Moonblessed woman* and trembled.

"Rowan." Her voice came out hoarse. "Who was she? The Moonblessed woman. Eighty years ago."

The old healer was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had gone careful. "A Vane. Your great-grandmother's sister, if the bloodlines run the way I think they do. She tried to do what your mother tried to do — take the mark onto herself. She wasn't strong enough. Or the curse was stronger then." A pause. "The heart beat three more times, Elara. Three beats that woman bought with her hands. In two hundred years, no one else bought a single one."

Proof. Not theory, not song — proof, in a dead healer's hand: the brand could be touched. The knot could be loosened. Maren's journal hadn't been madness. It had been *inheritance*.

Elara pressed her palms flat against the table to stop their shaking and turned to the last page of the Registry —

— and found the stub of a torn leaf.

It was at the very back, behind the ninth entry, where a tenth page should have begun. Someone had ripped it out cleanly, close to the binding, leaving only a ragged half-inch of parchment. But the tear had been imperfect at the top: three words survived, in the same careful clerical hand as Sera Vane's entry, two hundred years old:

*She was with—*

That was all. *She was with—*

Elara's blood went cold. "Rowan. What was on this page?"

She heard the stairs creak as he came down. He stood behind her, looking at the stub, and the silence stretched so long she turned to look at him. His face had gone gray.

"That page was torn out before my time," he said. "Before my master's time. No living healer knows what it said."

"But you have a guess."

Another silence. Then, so quietly she barely heard: "Sera Vane was the first. The curse was *born* on her. Whatever the pack needed hidden about that night —" He stopped. "There's more about your mother's death than Dorian's boasting told you, Elara. How they staged it. Who helped carry her up that ridge." His hand settled on her shoulder, heavy and warm. "When it's safe — when you're somewhere he can't reach — I'll tell you the rest. Not here. These walls have ears, and half of them report to Dorian."

Elara looked down at the three surviving words. *She was with—*

With child? With her killer? With—

The brass lamp guttered.

Rowan moved faster than a man with a bad knee should have been able to move, crossing the cellar in three strides and pinching the flame dead between his fingers. Darkness dropped over the record hall like a thrown blanket.

"Don't move," he breathed. "Don't speak."

Above them, the cellar door opened.

Footsteps on the stone stairs — slow, unhurried, deliberate. Not Rowan's uneven tread. Not Kael's silent prowl. These steps had all the time in the world, and they were coming down.

Elara's hand found the iron key in her pocket and closed around it until the teeth bit her palm. The hollow mark in her chest went dead cold — the way it had on her porch, the night Dorian came calling.

The footsteps stopped, halfway down the stairs.

A voice drifted out of the dark, amused and colorless and utterly unhurried:

"Reading about the dead, Doctor? Such a morbid hobby."

A match flared. And in its small, hellish light, Elara saw the cellar door above them swing shut —

— and the bolt slide home.