All Chapters of The Crescent Heir : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

-----Sunlight spilled gold and warm through the heavy curtains of Maureen's private apartment, pooling across the floor in long rectangles that crept slowly as the morning aged. Outside, the shower had receded to light drizzles now. Inside, the air was cool, almost too cool, the hum of the AC the only sound apart from the soft clink of glass as Maureen arranged small vials across the low table between them—dried herbs bundled with twine, pressed silver-grey flowers flattened between sheets of paper, something metallic and faintly luminous that caught the light at all the wrong angles, like it didn't quite belong to this world.Anna sat cross-legged despite her belly, leaning forward with the eager curiosity of a child being shown something forbidden."Wolfsbane." Maureen tapped the first vial, and her voice lost every trace of its earlier playfulness, settling into something flat and careful, the voice of someone reciting a lesson that had once cost her dearly to learn. "It kills mot

------Anna couldn't stop turning on the bed. Sleep refused to take her, no matter how many times she shifted, no matter how many positions she tried. Her thoughts churned in a haze, her mind racing through everything at once and making sense of nothing.Maureen's words had stung — sharp, deliberate, the kind of thing meant to leave a mark. But Emmett's? Emmett's had cut far deeper, quiet and clean, the kind of wound you don't feel until much later, when it's already bled you dry. Her stomach twisted every time the thought resurfaced. Fear and dread crawled up her skin like something with too many legs, settling cold around her heart."Nature made JB a monster." She muttered the words to the ceiling, eyes fixed on nothing. "It wasn't his fault at all. None of it." She rolled onto her side, one hand drifting to rest against her belly, as if to shield the life growing there from the thought itself.She didn't see it coming. Didn't feel it arrive. That was the unsettling part — how compl

-------The Blood-moon sanctuary had a particular atmosphere on days like this — the kind that pressed down on the shoulders before anyone said a word.Deimon had called the meeting that morning with one intention: get things in motion, and get them moving fast. What he's been told isn't what one ignores and let it seat in the mind for too long, lest you forget it.He sat at the head of the table and watched the faces around him — pale, tight-jawed, eyes carrying the specific weight of men and women who understood, without being told, that something irreversible was unfolding. He made a quiet sound inside his chest. He wasn't going to blame them. They had every right to wear that expression. He wore it himself beneath the surface, though he'd sooner bite his own tongue than let it show.What unsettled the room most wasn't the meeting itself.It was the man seated in the Diviner's chair.Romulus.The Desert Wolf sat among them like a stone sculpture standing amongst revered pedestals.

The next few days, Deimon went around the Crescent, rounding up allied clans one by one, quietly mobilizing them into an army of his own making. He ignored every warning his advisers gave him, brushing off caution the way he brushed off weakness, and he wouldn't hesitate to mark anyone who stood against him as an enemy. Power had a way of narrowing a man's vision, and Deimon's had narrowed to a single, gleaming point. He had accepted Chief Adolphus's offer to sit among the Crescent godheads, certain it would grant him real power, or at the very least, a foothold against the Ozeths.-----"The Abbas are ready to march with you, Master Ashworth," Jabari said, voice low and even.The two of them lay relaxed in a steaming bath at a resort, bodies sinking into the heat as a group of women worked over them, oiling their skin and kneading muscle with slow, practiced hands. Steam curled slowly off the water, carrying the scent of jasmine oil and something muskier beneath it, the kind of indu

The moonlight was deliberately doing too much tonight. Like it had reserved it's light specifically for this occasion.It poured through the windows uninvited, catching the edges of everything — the bedframe, the glass on the nightstand, Sophia's skin. Especially her skin. Romulus noticed that last part in a way that was becoming difficult to manage.His hands found her hips, and the sound that left him was low and involuntary."You're so beautiful," he breathed. A moan escaping him lips.Sophia stopped.Not slowly, not with warning. She simply stopped, the warmth evaporated from her voice like it had never been there."What was that now?"Romulus blinked. "Uhh... I said you're very—"She was already gone. She unmounted herself with the calm of a woman who had never once lost control of a room, and sat at the edge of the bed, one hand rising to smooth her hair, like nothing had happened. Like she hadn't just pulled the floor out from under him.Romulus sat there — confused, breathless