Chapter 8: The Bond's Echo

The obsidian ceremonial dagger was cold against my palm, its weight a promise of violence I wasn't sure I could deliver. I'd stolen it from the temple vault, tucked it into the leather strap against my thigh, and now it burned like a brand with every step I took through the Moonfire Forest.

*Choose* the prophecy whispered. *Choose and the scales tip.*

I chose neither. I chose survival.

But my body didn't seem to understand that. Because every few minutes, as I pushed through bracken and shadow, a phantom pulse rippled through my chest—warm, insistent, *wrong*. It tugged at my ribcage like a fishhook caught beneath my sternum, pulling me east. toward the Bloodmoon border. toward *him*.

"Stop it," I snarled at the empty forest, pressing a hand to my sternum. The bond was severed. The ritual was complete. I'd watched Kael's wolf-blue eyes go cold and blank while the rejection words dripped from his tongue like poison. There was nothing left. Nothing but this phantom ache that had no right to exist.

And yet.

The tug came again, sharper this time, and I stumbled. My knee hit the damp earth, and for one horrifying second, I felt *his* heartbeat in my own chest. Fast. frantic. A rhythm like a war drum.

I wanted to vomit.

"You really are pathetic, Nova." The voice slithered from the shadows to my left, and I was on my feet in an instant, dagger drawn. A figure emerged from the mist—tall, silver-haired, with eyes like twin pools of starlight. The Moon Priestess. She looked at me the way one looks at a broken bird. "Still answering a call that was severed weeks ago."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Lies." She stepped closer, and the air grew thin. "The bond you carry is not a remnant of a broken promise. It's a beacon. A scream."

My grip on the dagger tightened. "He rejected me. The bond is gone."

"Is it?" The priestess tilted her head, and a cold, terrible smile curved her lips. "Then why does your wolf still howl his name in your dreams? Why does your hand reach for a warmth that isn't there? Why, Luna, does the Moon herself weep when you sleep?"

I had no answer. Because she was right. Every night for the past week, I'd woken with his name on my lips, my skin burning with phantom heat, my body arching toward a presence that wasn't in the room. I told myself it was grief. Residual trauma. The echo of a wound that hadn't finished bleeding.

But this… this was something else.

"There's a curse," the priestess said softly, and the words hit me like a physical blow. "An old one, woven from shadow and spite. It was placed on the Bloodmoon Alpha's bloodline centuries ago—a hex that forces the heir to reject their true mate under the influence of an ancient darkness. It doesn't break the bond, little wolf. It *corrupts* it."

The forest spun. I grabbed a tree trunk to steady myself. "That's not possible. Kael—he chose to—"

"He had no choice." The priestess's voice was gentle now, and that was somehow worse. "The curse took his will the moment you two were fated. Every cruel word he spoke, every cold look he gave you—it was the hex speaking through him, twisting his love into poison. And when he rejected you, it used that very rejection to feed itself."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to claw her eyes out. I wanted to collapse into the moss and never get up.

"No," I choked. "You're lying. You're—"

"Ask your wolf." Her eyes glowed faintly. "She knows. She's always known. That's why she refuses to accept the severance. That's why the bond still echoes. Because it was never truly broken—just buried beneath a lie."

And suddenly, I felt it. The truth, cold and undeniable, flooding through my veins like ice water. My wolf—silent since the rejection—stirred for the first time in weeks. She whined, low and mournful, and in her whimper I heard a name. *Kael. Kael. Kael.*

Tears burned my eyes. "If this is real… if he didn't mean it… then what do I do?"

The priestess stepped forward and placed a hand on my cheek. Her palm was freezing, but her touch sparked something hot and fierce in my chest. "You undo it. The curse has a source—a shadow anchor that keeps it alive. Destroy the anchor, and the curse shatters. The true bond can be reforged. He will remember. He will love you again."

*Love you again.* The words were a drug, sweet and terrible.

But I was the Moon Goddess's heir. I'd been broken, rejected, abandoned. I'd clawed my way out of the ashes of my old life, and I'd promised myself I would never be that weak again.

"You want me to save him." My voice was flat. "You want me to run back to the man who humiliated me in front of every wolf I've ever known."

"I want you to save *yourself*," she whispered. "The anchor is your mother. The former Luna of the Crescent Moon Pack. She's been dead for fifteen years, little wolf—but her spirit was bound to the shadow realm by the curse's creator. If you go to the Shadowlands and shatter her resting place, you free Kael. You free yourself. You free the bond that destiny itself wove."

My mother. The woman who died in the rogue attack. The woman whose death I'd mourned for half my life.

And now I was being told she was a puppet in a centuries-old scheme.

I looked down at the dagger in my hand. Then east, toward Bloodmoon territory. The phantom tug in my chest pulsed again, desperate. calling.

"One question," I said, my voice barely a rasp. "If I do this… if I break the anchor and free him… will he even want me?"

The priestess's smile was sad. "The curse didn't kill his feelings, Luna. It buried them. And buried things have a way of clawing their way back to the surface."

The night wind howled, and somewhere beyond the trees, a wolf's howl split the silence—deep, raw, achingly familiar. Kael. Calling out in his sleep. Calling for *me*.

I sheathed the dagger. I straightened my spine.

And I turned toward the Shadowlands, leaving a trail of footprints in the blood-soaked earth.

The bond echoed in my chest like a war cry.

And for the first time in weeks, I answered it.