CHAPTER 31: Elena's Entrance

MAYA'S POVThe east wing was quiet. Always quiet. I had learned its silences in the time since my arrival, the way footsteps echoed differently in each corridor, the way the old pipes groaned at dawn. Marcus brought meals I barely touched. Sage appeared with tea I let go cold. The windows faced the gardens, frost-laced and empty.And somewhere in this house, Kai moved through his days without coming to find me.I could feel him. A pull I couldn't explain, a compass needle that pointed toward whatever room he occupied. He hadn't crossed the threshold of the east wing since the night I arrived. Maybe he was managing the fallout. Maybe he couldn't face me. I didn't know which possibility hurt more.Morning light slanted through the sitting room windows. I sat with my hands wrapped around a cup I wasn't drinking from, watching frost sparkle on the glass, when the air changed.A pressure shift. The weight of something approaching.I set the cup down.The woman in the doorway was impossible

Chapter 32: The Study

KAI'S POV The study was the only room in the manor where no one entered without permission. I had made it that way deliberately, years ago, when I first took my place as Alpha. A sanctuary. A room where the weight of leadership could be set down, if only for an hour. Where the mask could come off and I could be something other than what everyone needed me to be. Tonight, the mask was suffocating me. I stood at the window, staring out at darkness I couldn't see. My reflection stared back at me from the glass. Hollow-eyed. Jaw tight. A man who had spent the last four days pretending he wasn't falling apart. Behind me, the portrait hung on the wall. My father. The Alpha King. Painted when he was younger than I was now, his expression stern and certain, the weight of a crown he hadn't yet inherited already visible in the set of his shoulders. I had been staring at that portrait my entire life. Had measured myself against it. Had tried to become the man it represented. Tonight

Chapter 33: Nightfall

MAYA'S POVThe balcony faced the forest.I had discovered it on my second night, a small iron-railing platform off the sitting room that I hadn't noticed during the day. The door was heavy, the lock stiff, but I had wrestled it open and stepped out into the cold and found myself looking at something I hadn't known I needed.Trees. Endless trees, stretching toward the mountains in waves of dark green and black. The half moon hung above them, silver and incomplete, casting just enough light to outline the shapes of things without revealing what they were.I had been standing here for an hour.Maybe longer. Time moved differently at Shadow Peak, slippery and strange, the hours bleeding into each other in ways I hadn't learned to track. The cold had seeped through my sweater hours ago, but I couldn't bring myself to go inside. Inside was the room. The bed. The silence.Out here, at least, there was the forest. The moon. The wind moving through the branches like something breathing.The ba

Chapter 34: Morning Pack

MAYA'S POVI woke before dawn.Not because of noise. The east wing was as silent as it always was, the kind of silence that had weight to it, that pressed against the windows and pooled in the corners of rooms. I had learned to sleep inside it over the past few days, had taught myself to stop expecting the ordinary sounds of my old life, traffic, neighbours, the distant bark of someone's dog three floors below. Shadow Peak had its own sounds. Wind in the pines. The groan of old timber settling. The occasional low sound from somewhere deep in the house that I couldn't identify and had stopped trying to.I lay still for a long time, watching the ceiling lighten by degrees as dawn crept through the curtains.The baby moved.A slow roll, deliberate and unhurried, like a question being asked in a language I was only beginning to understand. I pressed my palm flat against my belly and waited. Another movement came. Softer this time. Settling. Like something finding its position and decidin

Chapter 35: The Sage

MAYA'S POVI had been alone with my thoughts for four days.That was long enough to know every crack in the ceiling. Long enough to have replayed every conversation, every silence, every unanswered question until the words stopped meaning anything. Long enough to start going quietly out of your mind.I was standing at the window with cold tea in my hand when the knock came.Not Marcus. His knock was three beats, unhurried. This was two knocks, rapid, and then without waiting for an answer the door opened and a woman walked in carrying a wooden tray as though she had been expected.She was small, but nothing about her was diminutive. She moved through the room with the ease of someone who had long stopped adjusting herself to suit her surroundings. Dark brown skin, natural hair in a bun that had started the morning with more structure and given up somewhere along the way. She set the tray on the side table without being invited, examined the small glass jar sitting on it briefly, then

All Chapters of BOUND MOONLIGHT: The Alpha's Forbidden Mate : Chapter 31 - Chapter 35

CHAPTER 31: Elena's Entrance

Chapter 32: The Study

Chapter 33: Nightfall

Chapter 34: Morning Pack

Chapter 35: The Sage