Chapter 9 The night the moon answered
Aria
The castle held its breath all day.
It wasn’t a sound. Not exactly. It was the way servants moved faster than usual and spoke less. The way guards tightened their formation in corridors that didn’t need guarding. The way even the wolves—those who patrolled in half-shifted forms—kept glancing upward as if the ceiling might crack and reveal the sky.
Tonight would be the peak.
The third night.
The strongest.
Aria felt it in the back of her throat, metallic and sharp, like she’d bitten her tongue and the taste had never left.
She moved when told.
A bath prepared that she barely used. A meal delivered she barely touched. A dress placed on her bed in dark fabric and fine stitching—far too elegant for a girl who still felt like she should smell of flour and smoke.
She put it on anyway.
Not because she cared.
Because arguing took energy she didn’t have.
Because she didn’t know what else to do with her hands or her thoughts or the truth that had hollowed her out.
She wasn’t her parents’ child.
The names she had carried like a shield—gone.
The “aunt” she’d clung to—.
Even the pendant, the one thing she’d believed was only sentimental, had become a cage.
Roman had broken it.
And now whatever lived inside her paced restlessly, no longer muted, no longer contained—present like a storm waiting for permission to break.
She couldn’t explain the sensation. It wasn’t a voice. Not yet. It was pressure. Heat. A constant awareness beneath her skin, as if she weren’t alone in her own body.
When dusk arrived, she stopped pretending she would sleep.
She crossed her room and opened the balcony doors.
Cold air slipped inside, smelling of pine and stone and distant rain. The Blood Moon hovered above the forest like a wound in the sky—too bright, too close, too alive.
Aria stepped onto the balcony and gripped the railing with both hands.
It felt as if the moon were staring back.
She swallowed hard.
The air stilled.
The night did not answer.
But something inside her did.
Aria.
She jerked so violently her fingers slipped on the stone.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
She spun toward the room, eyes wide, scanning the shadows. “Who’s there?”
No one stood behind her.
The curtains moved gently in the wind. The fireplace had burned down to embers. The room was empty.
And yet—
Don’t be afraid.
The voice wasn’t sound. It threaded through her thoughts as if it had always belonged there—steady, calm, impossibly close.
Aria’s breath hitched. “Roman?” she whispered, because her mind latched onto the only name that made sense.
Not him.
The voice softened, not mocking—almost… kind.
I have been trying to reach you for years.
Aria backed up until her spine hit the balcony doors. “This isn’t real.”
It is, the voice said gently. And so am I.
The pressure beneath her skin shifted—less like a storm, more like a presence stepping forward.
“I’m… hearing things,” Aria whispered.
You are hearing me.
Her throat tightened. “Who are you?”
A pause.
Not hesitation.
Reverence.
My name is Selene.
The name settled into Aria’s bones as if it had been waiting there all along.
“Selene,” she repeated, barely audible.
Warmth curled through her chest—not comfort, exactly, but certainty.
Aria’s hands trembled. “Why now?”
Because the wall is gone.
Aria’s fingers flew to her throat instinctively, touching the broken chain that had once carried the pendant. Even without the metal, she could still feel where it had been—like a bruise that remembered.
“The pendant,” she breathed.
Yes. I have been trying to reach you for so long.. since the last blood moon.
A flicker of memory struck her: thirteen years old, curled on the kitchen floor, nails digging into stone, the world tilting red as her aunt screamed and shoved a cloth over Aria’s eyes.
The pain.
The heat.
The sense of something clawing upward.
“I… remember that night,” Aria whispered. “The first Blood Moon. I thought I was dying.”
That night should have been our first shift, Selene said softly. I tried to reach you. I tried to guide you. But you could not hear me.
Aria’s eyes burned. “Because of the pendant.”
Because of the pendant, Selene agreed. It was not only a lock. It was a veil.
Aria swallowed hard. “They put it on me to keep me safe.”
They put it on you to keep you hidden, Selene corrected—not cruelly, but truthfully. Safety was a consequence. Not the purpose.
Aria’s chest tightened. “Then why now?”
Selene’s presence pressed closer.
Because the moon has reached its peak.
Aria looked up.
The Blood Moon pulsed—brighter, as if something behind it had opened its eyes.
A tremor ran through the stone railing under her palms.
Aria’s breath caught.
“Selene,” she whispered, panic rising, “I’m scared.”
I know, Selene said.
The calmness in her voice was terrifying.
It wasn’t indifference.
It was power that did not need to panic.
But you are not alone anymore.
The moon flared.
Not slowly.
Not gradually.
Like a sudden, blinding surge of light that poured across the world.
Aria screamed as heat ripped through her body, not in waves but in one violent, absolute rush. Her knees buckled, the railing slipping from her grasp as she fell forward—
No.
Not forward.
Down.
The balcony floor rushed up to meet her.
Her vision fractured. The edges of the world blurred. For a heartbeat, she was nowhere—her body flickering like a candle in wind, existing and not existing at once.
Her skin burned. Her bones felt too small.
Too tight.
Like she was wearing a body that no longer fit.
Breathe, Selene’s voice urged, closer than ever. Let me take the pain.
“I can’t—” Aria choked, clawing at the stone. “I can’t—”
You can.
The room behind her went dark.
The chandelier’s crystals flashed once… then died.
Every candle guttered out at the same time.
The castle’s glow vanished.
Only moonlight remained.
Aria’s scream tore through the night, raw enough to shred her throat.
And somewhere far below, she heard the castle respond—wolves crying out, alarms ringing, feet pounding down corridors.
The last thing she saw before the world broke completely was the Blood Moon, blazing brighter than it had any right to.
Then everything became heat.
And fur.
And the sound of herself shattering.
Roman
The castle went dark in one breath.
Roman felt it instantly — not as sight, but as the sudden, unnatural silence of magic failing. The air snapped cold. Torches died. Candles vanished into smoke. Wolves howled from courtyards and towers, the Court erupting into confusion.
And through it all—
A scream.
Roman moved before his mind caught up.
Aria.
He ran.
Guards tried to speak to him. Someone called his name. Wolves surged toward corridors.
Roman didn’t slow.
Her scream cut through the stone like a blade.
He reached her wing, heard another cry—higher, breaking—and his instincts went feral.
The door to her chamber was locked.
Roman smashed into it.
Wood splintered.
The door slammed inward.
Darkness.
Moonlight strobing through the open balcony.
And Aria—
On the floor.
Or not entirely.
Her body flickered.
Hazy.
Disappearing and reappearing like the world couldn’t decide what form she belonged in. One moment human. One moment something else pushing through. The air around her warped, rippling.
“Aria!” Roman lunged.
An invisible force slammed into him.
He flew backward and hit the wall hard enough to crack stone.
Pain flared.
His wolf surged up instantly, furious.
Stop, his wolf growled inside him.
Roman shoved to his feet, breath ragged.
“What?” he hissed.
Watch.
Roman’s eyes snapped back to the balcony.
Aria convulsed, her body arching as something vast tried to take shape. The air thickened—charged with raw, ancient power. Moonlight pulsed brighter, and the entire room seemed to bow under the pressure.
Fur spilled across her skin like darkness becoming real.
Bones shifted.
The sound was not gore.
It was inevitability.
Roman stood rigid, hands clenched at his sides as every instinct screamed to intervene—yet his wolf held him like iron.
No, his wolf warned.
Aria’s shape lengthened, broadened, reshaped itself violently. A final shudder shook the floor—
And then she was gone.
Not vanished.
Replaced.
A massive wolf stood where the girl had been.
The darkness hid the wolf’s true coat, but moonlight caught silver markings along her body—pulsing, living, as if constellations had been carved into her fur.
Her eyes lifted.
Silver.
Not gentle.
Not wild.
Ancient.
She looked at Roman.
And he—Alpha King, trained for war, crowned in blood—felt something in his chest go very still.
She turned away.
And leapt off the balcony.
Roman sprinted to the railing.
He saw her land impossibly far below, hit the ground with a grace that didn’t belong to something newly born, and run.
The moonlight struck her fully as she cleared the last of the tower’s shadow.
Red fur.
Moon-red.
Silver markings blazing across her flanks like scripture.
Roman’s breath left him.
“She’s different,” he whispered.
His wolf pressed close beneath his skin, tense and unsettled.
Not like the last.
The red wolf vanished into the forest.
The Blood Moon blazed overhead like an eye that would not close.
And Roman Blackthorn stood in a dark room with a broken door and a cracked wall and the cold certainty that whatever had just awakened…
Had not returned to repeat history.
It had returned to rewrite it.
