Blood Marked: The Bone Moon Alphas

Chapter 6 Blood Heals, Blood Binds

Rhys Alistair did not train like the other Alphas.

Kieran trained with pain. If you did a form wrong, his shadows corrected you by wrapping your wrist until you felt bone. Jax trained with fury — he threw lightning at you until you learned to dodge or you got burned. Silas trained by making you relive your worst memory on loop until you could think through it.

Rhys trained at 5:17 AM in the healing wing, before the volcano sun rose, because he said blood was quietest then.

“You’re late,” he said when I slipped in, still in my borrowed oversized Nocturne sweats. My basement room was freezing. His wing was warm, smelled like herbs and antiseptic and him — snow and copper.

“I got lost. This place is a maze.”

“No, you were arguing with her.” He nodded at my head.

Nyx had been arguing for twenty minutes that we should skip training and go bite Kieran again because his shadows had looked “lonely” last night.

He’s right, we were, Nyx said smugly.

Rhys pulled on thin black gloves, then took them off again. “No gloves. You need skin contact. Sit.”

He sat me on the edge of an infirmary bed. He was in a soft grey sweater that made him look less like an heir and more like a boy. Up close, I could see the faint black veins under his eyes he tried to hide with concealer. The curse Lucien talked about.

“Show me your arms,” he said quietly.

I hesitated, then pushed my sleeves up. The silver lines that had appeared in the library were brighter now, like liquid moonlight moving under my skin, from wrist to elbow. They pulsed in time with my heart — or was it Nyx’s heart?

Rhys didn’t touch yet. He just looked, fascinated and sad.

“Do you know what my power does?” he asked. “Everyone thinks I’m the healer. The nice one. I can heal a paper cut, yes. But I can also make blood boil. I can make a wolf’s heart stop with a thought. My great-grandfather ended a war by making an entire enemy pack bleed from their eyes.”

I swallowed. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I need you to be scared of me a little. So you understand what you just did to me last night was impossible.” He finally took my wrist, his cold fingers circling it. “When you touched me in the kennel, you didn’t just heal me. You balanced me. No one has ever been able to pull the rot out of Blood Alphas. We just... accumulate it until we die.”

His thumb brushed over a silver vein and it flared. A jolt shot up my arm, not painful — warm, intimate, like being seen.

“Again,” I whispered. “Do that again.”

He did. And this time, he let his power rise. A small scalpel appeared in his other hand. He cut a shallow line across his own palm. Black blood welled up, thick and wrong.

“This is what my blood looks like now,” he said, voice tight with shame. “Rot.”

Without thinking, I grabbed his bleeding hand with both of mine.

“Kaia, don’t —”

Nyx surged forward, taking control of my hands. Silver light poured from my palms into his. The black blood hissed, then cleared, turning bright, brilliant red.

Rhys gasped — a real, sharp gasp — and his knees buckled.

But the exchange had a price. A matching cut sliced itself open on my own forearm. Blood, my blood, red and normal, dripped onto the white sheets.

Rhys’s eyes went feral. He grabbed my arm and put his mouth to the cut before I could protest.

He didn’t bite to hurt. He licked. One long, slow lick, and the cut closed under his tongue.

His eyes rolled back. “Gods.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

He looked at me like I was a revelation and a death sentence. “I can see you. All of you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Blood memory. When I taste someone’s blood, I see their memories. Yours —” His voice broke. “Lira holding your head under water in the bath because you didn’t scrub fast enough. Gregory making you sleep outside in winter when you were ten because you didn’t shift to keep warm. The boys in Ashen Hollow kicking you because you had no scent to make them stop.”

Tears I had trained myself not to cry for ten years burned my eyes.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t look.”

But he was already pulling me into his chest, one hand in my hair, the other still holding my healed arm like I might vanish.

“You survived all that wolfless,” he whispered into my hair. “Do you know how strong that makes you? My wolf — he’s been crying since I was born because of the rot. Last night, after you touched me, he stopped crying for the first time.”

I was shaking. Not from cold. From being held like I mattered.

Nyx was purring so loud my whole body vibrated. This one. This one we keep. He tastes like devotion and bad coping mechanisms. My favorite.

Rhys pulled back just enough to look at me. His lips were stained with my blood. His green eyes were gold now, wolf eyes.

“Can I?” he asked, breathless.

“Can you what?”

“Kiss you. Properly. Not because of blood. Because I have wanted to since you made my shadows kneel and I thought if I didn’t, I would die with black blood.”

I should have said no. I barely knew him. I was supposed to be invisible. I was supposed to reseal myself.

But I was tired of being nothing.

I nodded.

He kissed me like he heals — slow at first, careful, asking permission with every brush, then deeper when I made a small sound against his mouth. His hand slid to my jaw, tilting me. He tasted like copper and mint and something sweet I couldn’t name.

When we broke apart, both breathing hard, the infirmary lights had blown out. Every single plant in the healing wing had bloomed at once.

And on his collarbone, a faint silver mark was appearing — a tiny crescent moon with a drop of blood inside it. My mark. My first mark.

Rhys touched it, stunned. “You claimed me.”

“I did what?”

A low growl came from the doorway.

Kieran Blackthorn stood there, his entire body wreathed in shadows that were thrashing violently, his eyes pure black.

“So it’s true,” he said, voice deadly quiet. “You can be marked.”