The Rejection Bond Burns

I woke at three in the morning with a sound coming out of my throat that I did not recognise as my own voice.It took me several seconds to understand what was happening, that I was awake and in my room in Nightfall and not back in the ceremonial circle, because the rejection bond had been so vivid in the dream that the boundary between sleeping and waking had dissolved completely. I was sitting upright in the bed with both hands pressed against my chest and my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my fingertips, and the bond was tearing through me in waves the way it had on the night of the ceremony, hot and vicious and completely indifferent to the fact that I was supposed to be healing.I pressed the heels of my hands against my sternum and breathed slowly and deliberately, counting each breath the way Sena had taught us in early morning training when she wanted us to bring our heart rates down after a hard set. In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for four. I did it over an

First Blood

The portrait was still in my head three days later when I walked onto the training ground for the morning session.Mira had not explained it yet. She had taken one look at my face when I stepped into the herb room and seen whatever she needed to see there, and then she had closed the leather book carefully and told me to come back when I was ready, that the information would keep and that some things needed to be approached slowly. I had wanted to argue with her but Zane had looked at me from across the room with that steady expression that somehow communicated both that he agreed with Mira and that he would tell me everything when the time was right, and I had swallowed the urgency and walked back to my room and spent three days training harder than I had ever trained in my life because moving my body was the only thing that kept my mind from spinning in circles.Sena ran us through the standard morning sequences first, the same combinations I had been drilling for the past week, and

Caden Hears a Rumor

The training yard had emptied out quickly after what happened.Sena had called the session early without explanation, which was the kind of decision that required no explanation when everyone present had just watched a new wolf throw a seasoned warrior fifteen feet across the yard without laying a hand on him. The other wolves had filed out in a silence that felt different from the usual end of session quiet, more careful, more considered, the silence of people who had witnessed something they needed time to process before they could talk about it properly.I had stayed behind and sat on the low stone wall at the edge of the yard and looked at my hands for a long time, turning them over and back, studying them like they belonged to someone I had only just met. They looked exactly the same as they always had. Same knuckles, same small scar across the back of my right hand from a training accident two years ago in Silverstone, same bitten-down nails from the habit I had never managed to

All Chapters of TOO LATE, MY LUNA: Chapter 11 - Chapter 13

The Rejection Bond Burns

First Blood

Caden Hears a Rumor