Riven moves first, positioning himself at the front of our huddled group, every line of his body coiled for violence.
“Whoever’s down there,” he calls into the dark, voice echoing off stone I can’t see, every word sharpened into warning, “come no closer.”
The footsteps don’t stop.
If anything, they quicken, unhurried but unmistakably deliberate, drawing closer with every second that passes.
“Riven,” Jodan says quietly, “if it’s more of Thorne’s guards, we’re trapped in a passage with no way to retreat.
We need a plan that isn’t standing our ground in the dark.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” Riven growls, tension coiled tight through every word, “provided anyone actually has one.”
A soft, flickering light appears ahead of us, small and warm, nothing like the harsh torchlight the Council guards carried.
It grows steadily brighter as the footsteps close the distance, until finally, a figure resolves out of the darkness, holding a single lantern aloft, its glow catching on damp stone walls I hadn’t realized were narrowing around us this whole time.
She’s older than any of us, silver threading heavily through dark hair pulled back in a practical braid, dressed in simple traveling clothes rather than armor or Council robes, a long scar tracing one side of her jaw that speaks of a life spent somewhere considerably harder than a royal court.
Her eyes, when the lantern light catches them, are the same amber-gold as Riven’s, and the resemblance doesn’t stop there.
The set of her jaw, the way she holds herself like she’s bracing for a fight she fully expects to win, all of it echoes so precisely that I hear Riven’s breath catch beside me before she even speaks.
“Well,” the woman says, voice rough with an accent I don’t recognize, something colder, harder, from somewhere far north of Mooncrest’s borders.
“Look what the tunnels dragged in.”
Riven has gone utterly still.
“That’s not possible,” he says, voice barely above a whisper.
“You died.
Border conflict, six years ago.
I identified the body myself.”
“Did you,” the woman says, echoing an accusation that’s become horribly familiar over the course of this single night.
“Or did you identify what the border command allowed you to see, because a live prisoner is far more valuable than a dead one, provided the right people know how to make use of her?”
“Mother.” The word cracks out of him like something torn loose against his will.
“Hello, Riven,” she says, and for the first time, something almost gentle enters her voice, though it doesn’t fully soften the hardness carved into every other part of her.
“I’d hoped our reunion might happen somewhere less chaotic, but I suppose tonight has never once cared what any of us hoped for.”
“How,” he manages.
“How are you here.
How do you know this passage exists.”
“Because I helped build it,” she says.
“Long before Selene’s mother ever laid the first stone, this tunnel network belonged to people trying to survive a kingdom that decided our kind of alpha was too dangerous to leave unchained.
I’ve spent six years working my way back toward Mooncrest, one careful step at a time, waiting for exactly the kind of chaos that might let me walk back into my son’s life without the Council noticing until it was already too late to stop me.”
“You knew I was here,” Riven says.
“This whole time.
You knew, and you let me believe you were dead.”
“I let the Council believe I was dead,” she corrects.
“You, I hoped, might eventually sense something was wrong, the way alphas in our bloodline sometimes do when a parent’s bond goes quiet rather than truly severed.
I take it that didn’t happen.”
Riven’s jaw works silently for a moment before he finds his voice again.
“For years.
I told myself it was grief playing tricks.”
“It wasn’t,” his mother says.
“It rarely is, in families like ours.”
Behind me, Wren shifts uneasily.
“I don’t mean to interrupt whatever this is,” she says, “but there’s a small army somewhere behind us that might still be interested in finishing what it started in that chapel.”
Riven’s mother’s gaze sweeps over the rest of our group, cataloguing each of us with quick, practiced efficiency, lingering longest on me.
“You’re the True Luna,” she says.
It isn’t a question, more a statement she’s already turned over several times in her mind long before saying it aloud.
“The one my son’s bond finally settled around.”
“One of three, apparently,” I say, gesturing vaguely toward Wren and the boy.
“It’s been a complicated night.”
“Complicated seems to be understating things considerably,” she says, though something like approval flickers across her weathered features.
“Come.
This tunnel opens into a hollow beneath the old border watchtower, half a mile out from Mooncrest’s boundary wards.
It’s defensible, at least for the next few hours, and it’s the only ground within running distance that Thorne’s forces haven’t already mapped.”
“Why should we trust you?” Lucien asks, still favoring his injured arm, voice sharp with the kind of caution that’s kept him alive through every twist tonight has thrown at us.
“You’ve been absent from your son’s life for six years under circumstances that sound remarkably similar to everyone else’s convenient disappearances tonight.”
“You shouldn’t trust me blindly,” she says, unbothered by the accusation.
“You should trust the fact that every person hunting you through that chapel tonight is also hunting me, has been hunting me for considerably longer than tonight, and that I have far more reason than any of you to see Elowen’s ambitions fail.” Her expression hardens.
“She’s the reason I spent six years in a border cell instead of raising my son.
I have my own debts to collect from that woman, and unlike most of the debts owed in this family, mine don’t require pretending to care about a throne none of us actually asked for.”
“That’s oddly reassuring,” Jax mutters.
We follow her through the remaining stretch of tunnel, the passage widening gradually until it opens into a hollow carved beneath ancient stone foundations, moonlight filtering weakly through gaps in the ceiling above.
A handful of others wait there already, rough-dressed, watchful, weapons within easy reach but not drawn, and something in the way they all straighten at Riven’s mother’s arrival tells me clearly enough who leads this particular group.
There are maybe a dozen of them scattered around the hollow’s edges, tending small fires, sharpening blades, watching our ragged group file in with expressions that range from cautious curiosity to open suspicion.
“We have wounded,” Eryx says immediately, professional focus cutting through his own exhaustion as he takes in Lucien’s arm, my own trembling hands, the raw scrapes along Wren’s wrists where the chains finally fell away.
“I’ll need supplies.
Clean water, if you have it.”
“We have what we have,” Riven’s mother says, already gesturing one of her people forward with quiet efficiency.
“It won’t be Mooncrest’s infirmary, but it’ll hold you together until dawn.”
I sink onto a low stone bench near the hollow’s edge, the adrenaline that’s carried me through the last several hours finally beginning to drain away, leaving something hollow and shaking in its place.
My hands won’t stop trembling, and when I look down at them, I realize there’s still blood on my palms, not mine, though I can’t say for certain whose it is anymore.
Jodan settles beside me without a word, his shoulder pressed warm against mine, and for a moment neither of us speaks, simply letting the quiet exist after so much noise.
“Your aunt,” he says finally, gently.
“I’m sorry, April.
I know that’s not enough, but I am.”
“I keep hearing that scream,” I whisper.
I don’t know if I’ll ever know.” My voice cracks on the last word, and I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, willing myself not to fall apart entirely in front of a hollow full of strangers.
“We’ll find out,” he says.
“Once we’re not actively being hunted.”
Across the hollow, Riven stands apart from the group, his mother beside him, both of them talking too quietly for me to catch the words, though the tension in his shoulders speaks clearly enough regardless of language.
Whatever six years of separation left between them, it isn’t resolving easily, even now.
Selene sits alone near the tunnel entrance, knees drawn to her chest, staring at nothing.
I force myself upright and cross the hollow to sit beside her.
“Are you all right?” I ask, though the question feels absurd given everything.
“My mother tried to sell me into a marriage tonight,” she says flatly.
“For political leverage.
I don’t think ‘all right’ is available to me right now.”
“No,” I admit.
“I suppose it isn’t.”
We sit in silence for a while, watching the small fire someone has started at the hollow’s center, watching Riven’s mother move among her people with the easy authority of someone who has led far larger groups than this one.
“April.” Wren’s voice, quiet, careful, from where she’s settled a short distance away.
“There’s something I didn’t mention back in the chapel.
I didn’t want to say it in front of Thorne, or Elowen, or anyone who might use it against us.”
“What is it?”
Wren hesitates, glancing toward the boy, toward Selene, before finally meeting my eyes, something like guilt shadowing her expression.
“The writing in my cell,” she says.
“The part about the old law choosing whoever holds the others up instead of tearing them down.
I told you that was all I managed to piece together over the years.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No,” Wren says quietly.
“There was more.
I just didn’t want to say it out loud until I understood what it meant.
I think I finally do, and I wish I still didn’t.”
“Wren, what does it say?”
She swallows hard, glancing once more toward the fire, toward the flickering shadows it throws across the hollow’s ancient stone walls, before answering.
“It says the bond can only be completed once,” she says.
“By whoever the moon chooses first.
Which means somewhere in that chapel tonight, before Elowen’s shadow ever reached the roof, before the containment ward broke, the choosing already happened.”
My stomach drops.
“What are you saying?”
Wren’s eyes hold mine, steady despite the fear threading through her voice, and somewhere behind her, the small fire at the hollow’s center throws long, flickering shadows across the ancient stone, making the whole cavern feel suddenly much smaller than it did a moment ago.
“I’m saying the moon already picked one of us, April,” she says.
“And I don’t think it was you.”