All Chapters of The Luna's Deception : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

The silence after the screaming was its own kind of sound.I kept both hands on the obsidian and stood in it and let it press against me from every direction. A thousand wolves at my back and not one of them speaking. The moat had closed behind us the moment the last wolf crossed, the black energy sealing itself back into place like a wound closing over, and now there was nothing between us and this wall and the wall had nothing on it. No gate. No handle. No seam where a door should have sat.Just stone.I let the silver run along the surface the way I had let it run along the moat, feeling for the original foundation beneath Morvanna's construction, for the places where the stone remembered something different than what she had shaped it into. The obsidian was dense and cold and it did not want to be read. It pushed back against the silver the way a locked room pushes back against a key that does not quite fit, and I held the silver steady and kept the pressure even and did not force

The door hit again before I reached it. Harder this time. A fist, or a shoulder, something with enough force behind it to crack stone that had stood for centuries.I did not slow down.Morvanna's voice followed me across the courtyard, low and certain. "The door will not open for force, Granddaughter. Only blood opens it. Yours."I stopped in front of the iron and looked at the seams where age had eaten into the metal. There was no inscription here, no hidden truth waiting under a layer of lies. This was simpler than the gate behind me. This was a lock built by someone who wanted a body in front of it and nothing else.I was done giving her bodies.I raised my hand and called the silver, and it answered faster than it ever had, cold and sharp and already shaped before I finished asking for it. North ice formed along my palm and grew outward, ten feet of it, glowing pale blue like something pulled straight from a winter sky that had never seen a sun. I felt the weight of it settle

I hit the ground hard, rolled once, and came up already reaching for the silver. Dust and broken marble covered every surface around me, faint light coming from somewhere far above where the hall used to be.Bella was three feet away, pushing herself up on one arm. Marcus was further back, already on his feet, blood at his temple, eyes scanning the dark before his balance had even settled."Bella. Marcus." I moved to them fast. "Are you hurt?""Nothing broken," Marcus said. "Where is Kieran? Alexei?""Scattered. I do not know."The space around us was a cavern, not a room, stone walls curving upward into darkness the fall had come from, and the air carried a cold that had nothing to do with mine. Older. Wrong in a way I did not have a word for yet.Bella was still beside me. "Something is here."I turned and saw it standing over a shallow ledge of rock ten feet away, a shape built out of smoke and something darker than smoke, shifting at the edges the way flame shifts, except where

The footsteps in the tunnel resolved into Alexei before I had time to raise the blade again, stumbling out of the dark with one arm pressed against a gash along his ribs, alive, moving under his own power."Alexei." I caught him before his knees gave. "You are hurt.""Less than I look." He waved off my hands and turned toward Kieran, still kneeling, still bleeding from the shadow's last strike. "What happened here?""Later," I said. "Help me with Marcus."Marcus had gone quiet behind me, the adrenaline that carried him through the fall and the fight finally running out now that the danger had passed, and when I turned to him his legs folded without warning. I caught him before he hit the stone, and up close I saw what the fight had been hiding from me. Weeks of captivity had stripped the weight off him entirely. His skin had gone thin over his bones, his color wrong, his breathing shallow in a way that had nothing to do with the last few minutes."Marcus." I lowered him carefully, h

The doors did not open on their own. A man stood in front of them instead, tall, unarmed except for a coil of wire at his belt that caught what little light reached this deep, silver-threaded, deliberately shaped into something meant to hurt a wolf specifically.I knew him before he spoke.The line of his jaw. The particular way he held his shoulders, relaxed and unbothered, a man who had spent years believing the room around him belonged to him no matter who else stood in it. I had seen that posture from the floor of a cellar more times than I had ever let myself count."Hello, little wolf," he said.Kieran's hand tightened on mine. "Sera. Who is this?""He watched me for three years," I said, voice level, "before I ever knew what silver was."The man smiled and drew the wire from his belt, letting it uncoil slowly, testing its weight in his palm the way he used to test it before every session in that cellar, a small ritual meant to remind me what was coming before it came."You loo