Cursed by the Wolf Moon

What the Firelight Reveals

The dining hall had been transformed into something Aria barely recognized as her own home — crystal and candlelight, a long table dressed in white and gold, and twelve strangers seated around it who all seemed to know exactly why they'd been invited even though no one had told her.

Roman kept her close all evening, his hand finding the small of her back with a familiarity that made her skin crawl, introducing her to guest after guest as though she were a piece of art recently acquired and not yet fully appraised. Lord Ashworth. The Countess Belmarsh. Doctor Farrow, who does such interesting work in old bloodlines. Every name slid past her like water, none of it sticking, all of her attention pulled toward the far end of the room where Kade stood at rigid attention against the wall with the rest of the staff, dressed in black, eyes fixed carefully on nothing.

She wasn't supposed to look at him. She looked at him anyway, every few minutes, like checking a wound to see if it had stopped bleeding.

It hadn't.

"You're distracted," Roman murmured in her ear as the first course was cleared, his voice pitched for her alone. "That's unwise, tonight of all nights. Doctor Farrow has a talent for noticing things people would rather he didn't."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do." His grip on her waist tightened, just slightly — not painful, but final, a door closing. "Smile. Laugh at something I say. Give the room a story it can believe."

She smiled. It felt like breaking glass behind her teeth.

It happened during the third course, in the lull between conversations, when Doctor Farrow — a thin, silver-haired man with the unsettling stillness of someone who'd spent decades studying things that didn't like being studied — set down his wine glass and turned his attention, unhurried, toward the back wall.

"Forgive me," he said, to no one and everyone, "but is that one of the household staff, or a Kestrel wearing a very good disguise?"

The table went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet right before something breaks.

Roman's hand went still on Aria's waist. "Doctor Farrow. I don't believe that's relevant to—"

"On the contrary, I think it's extremely relevant, given the nature of this gathering." Farrow rose, unbothered by twelve pairs of eyes suddenly fixed on him, and crossed the room toward Kade with the calm curiosity of a man examining a specimen. "The eyes give it away, you understand. Kestrels can disguise almost everything about themselves except the eyes, when provoked." He stopped an arm's length from Kade, studying him with clinical interest. "Tell me, young man. How long have you been circling this particular house?"

Kade said nothing. His jaw was a hard line, his eyes fixed somewhere past Farrow's shoulder, every muscle in his body coiled with the specific stillness of a man calculating exactly how much violence a room could survive.

"He's new staff," Roman said smoothly, standing now, moving to intercept before this went somewhere he couldn't control. "Hired last month. I've already begun the process of reassigning him elsewhere, as it happens, so whatever concerns you—"

"Reassigning a Kestrel who's already bonding with a Voss?" Farrow's silver brows rose, delighted in the way only an academic discovers something genuinely worth writing about. "Roman, you sly thing. You didn't tell the rest of us the debt collection had gotten interesting."

The word bonding landed in the room like a dropped glass. Aria felt every eye at the table swing toward her at once, and beside her, Roman's expression went from smooth to something colder, more dangerous, the mask finally slipping just enough to show what was underneath.

"That's not what's happening here," Roman said, too fast, too sharp.

"Isn't it?" Farrow turned back to Kade, tilting his head with genuine curiosity now instead of academic interest. "You've been feeling it, haven't you? I can see it from here — that particular kind of exhaustion. Kestrels fight a forming bond as hard as they can, out of self-preservation, and it costs them dearly to lose that fight even a little." A pause, considering. "How much of it have you lost already?"

"Enough," Kade said, low and rough, "that I'm done pretending otherwise for an audience."

The room seemed to hold its breath as one.

He crossed the space to Aria in four strides, ignoring Roman entirely, ignoring the twelve strangers now watching with the fascinated horror of an audience who'd come for gossip and gotten a genuine drama instead. Roman moved to block him — a hand rising, a word half-formed — but Kade simply stepped around him like he was furniture, like nothing in the room mattered more than reaching her.

"Kade—" Aria started, heart hammering, unsure if she was warning him or begging him to keep going.

"I know what this costs," he said quietly, close enough now that no one but her could hear it clearly, gold eyes burning bright and unguarded in the candlelight. "I know exactly what it costs, in front of these people, in front of him. I don't care anymore."

"You should care. He'll—"

"He'll do whatever he was already planning to do. At least this way, it's the truth doing the damage instead of a lie." His hand came up, not quite touching her face, hovering there like he was asking permission he hadn't yet earned. "Tell me to stop, and I will. Tell me you don't feel this too, and I'll walk away right now and let him have whatever story he wants to tell this room."

Aria looked past his shoulder — at Roman, rigid with fury, barely leashed behind an aristocrat's composure; at Doctor Farrow, watching with open fascination; at her father, gray-faced at the head of the table, watching thirty years of careful secrets unravel in real time. And then she looked back at Kade, at the exhaustion and the want written plainly across a face that had spent a month pretending to be furniture in her own house.

"I don't want you to stop," she said.

She felt the room shift the moment the words left her mouth — felt Roman's fury turn to something colder and more calculating, felt her father's quiet devastation, felt twelve strangers recalibrate everything they thought they understood about the evening. None of it mattered as much as the way Kade's whole body seemed to unlock at her answer, tension draining out of his shoulders like a held breath finally released.

He didn't kiss her. Not there, not with an audience, not with Roman four feet away doing badly disguised math on how much damage had just been done to thirty years of careful planning. But he pressed his forehead to hers, gold eyes closing, breathing her in like a man who'd been drowning and just found air.

"Enough," Roman said, his voice gone flat and dangerous in a way that cut through the moment like a blade. "This ends now."

Kade straightened, putting himself deliberately between Aria and Roman, gold eyes flaring bright with a warning that needed no translation.

"No," Kade said. "It's just beginning."

Doctor Farrow, watching all of it unfold with an expression somewhere between delight and academic satisfaction, quietly reached for his wine glass and settled back into his chair like a man who had just gotten considerably more than he'd bargained for at dinner.

"Well," he said, to absolutely no one. "This has become the most interesting evening I've had in years."

End of Episode 4.

Next time on Cursed by the Wolf Moon, Roman retaliates, revealing a secret about Kade's own family that threatens to unravel everything Aria thought she understood about the man she's chosen — and the full moon draws one night closer.