Bloodbound (Wild Moon #3)

Chapter 1

THE VOID SPEAKS

RONAN

This wasn't ordinary darkness.

It wasn't the dark behind closed eyelids or the bottom of a well where at least you could hear water somewhere below.

This was deeper than that. Heavier. It had mass to it, pressing down on me and crawling into my mouth when I tried to breathe—except I couldn't breathe, because I didn't have a chest anymore.

I existed. That was the only certainty I could hold onto.

I tried to move and my body didn't respond. My muscles didn't even twitch. There was nothing to twitch, nothing to flex, just this terrible knowing that I was still here even though here shouldn't be possible.

I tried to open my eyes and the darkness stayed absolute.

Panic should've flooded my system, should've dumped adrenaline into veins I couldn't feel, but even fear felt muffled here. Distant. Like I was drowning at the bottom of a frozen lake and could see the surface shimmering somewhere above me but couldn't make my arms work to swim toward it.

Then the voice came, and I understood that drowning would've been mercy.

“You were beautiful.”

The words came from everywhere at once. From inside my skull. From the dark pressing against my nonexistent skin. The voice was calm, intimate, the tone a man uses when he's watched you sleep, when he knows the shape of your nightmares and finds them charming.

“Perfect,” it continued, and I could hear the warmth threading through the syllables. Pride, maybe. Satisfaction. “Exactly what you were made to be.”

I tried to answer. Tried to form words in a throat that didn't exist, tried to shape sound with a tongue I couldn't feel, tried to do anything except float here while this thing praised me for actions I couldn't remember.

My mouth didn't work. I had no lips to move, no vocal cords to vibrate, no way to scream or tell this thing to stop talking like it knew me better than I knew myself.

“You should be proud.” The voice wrapped around me the way hands wrap around a throat. “What you did tonight... most would've hesitated. Most would've failed. But not you.”

What did I do?

The thought formed, but the voice didn't answer. It didn't need to. It already knew I couldn't remember, and the silence that followed told me it was pleased about that too.

“Rest now,” it murmured, gentle as a lullaby. “You've earned it.”

No. No. Whatever I'd done, I hadn't chosen it. I didn't want rest. I wanted out. I wanted my body back. I wanted to wake up and find this was just a nightmare born from too many sleepless nights and a mind finally snapping under the weight of things I couldn't forget.

The voice laughed, low and pleased.

“There it is,” it said, and satisfaction poured through every syllable like honey. “That fire. That refusal. You know how rare that is? How valuable?”

I tried harder. Tried to claw my way toward consciousness, toward anything that felt real, but my mental hands found nothing to grip. The dark gave under pressure like water, like mud, like drowning.

“You were made for this work,” the voice continued, relentless as a river wearing down stone. “Shaped by pain and survival into an instrument stronger than flesh. Stronger than will. You don't remember yet, but your body does. Your instincts do. Every move you made tonight was flawless.”

The pressure came then, and I understood that everything before this had been kindness.

I fought it. Tried to twist away, tried to shake it off, tried to scream without a voice that this thing needed to let go, get out, stop touching the parts of me that made me myself and not just meat that moved when commanded.

The pressure tightened.

“Good,” the voice murmured, warm with approval. “Fight. Struggle. It makes you stronger. Makes you sharper. Every time you resist, you prove why you were chosen.”

Chosen for what?

“Soon,” it promised. “Soon you'll stop fighting what you are. Soon you'll remember that this is mercy. That I am mercy. That every moment I give you purpose is a moment you don't have to carry the weight of being nothing.”

I wanted to tell it that nothing was better. That emptiness was safer than whatever this was turning me into. That I'd rather drown in my own absence than let this thing remake me into an instrument that could do whatever it wanted.

“Liar,” it said fondly. “You've never wanted to be nothing. You've spent your whole life trying to be worth remembering. Worth marking the world with your existence. I'm just helping you succeed.”

No.

But underneath it, from somewhere deep I didn't control, another word rose up.

Yes.

The moment I felt that tiny seed of agreement buried under all my horror and resistance, the moment I recognized it for what it was, the voice laughed again.

“There,” it said, satisfied. “That's the truth. Hold onto that. You'll need it when you wake.”

Wake?

The word barely had time to form before reality split open like a knife through fabric.

I fell.

My eyes opened.

Grey. Everything was grey.

I was lying on my back in a field I didn't recognize, staring up at a sky the color of old dishwater. The grass was dulled by frost, and the trees stood black and skeletal at the edge of my vision like they were waiting for the sun to remember them.

I didn't know how I'd gotten here.

The thought came slow, pushing through a fog in my head that felt thick and suffocating. I tried to remember, tried to pull up the last clear memory I had.

Nothing.

Just blank space where the last few hours should've been. Like someone had reached into my skull and scooped out everything after—after what? When had I lost time?

I tried to sit up and my body obeyed slowly, every muscle protesting the movement. When I got halfway vertical I saw them.

Wolves.

Dead wolves.

Seven of them scattered across the field like someone had thrown them mid-fight, their bodies twisted in positions that didn't look natural even in death.

Blood soaked the grass in dark patches, already half-frozen in the November cold.

Steam rose from the corpses in thin threads, which meant they hadn't been dead long. Which meant I hadn't been here long.

My stomach turned hard and sour.

I looked down at myself.

Red. Everything was red. My hands, my arms, my chest where my shirt hung in tatters. Blood matted in my hair, crusted under my nails, smeared across my jaw in patterns that suggested I'd—

I swallowed bile.

Whose blood is this?

Some of it was drying black, which meant older, which meant maybe mine. Some of it was still tacky, still red enough to catch the grey light and gleam wet. There was too much of it. Way too much for one body, or even two.

I forced myself to look at the wolves again.

Pack wolves. Not rogues.

I could tell by the scent even with the reek of death washing over everything.

Rogues smelled different—broken bonds had a particular stink to them, corruption and isolation you could taste on the back of your tongue.

These wolves didn't smell like that. Their fur was matted, ribs showing through their sides, eyes already clouding over with the flat emptiness that came when life left too fast for the body to understand what was happening.

But they'd belonged to someone. Some pack. Somewhere.

I didn't recognize any of them.

That should've been a relief. Should've meant I hadn't killed anyone I knew, anyone from town, anyone who'd be missed by people I'd have to face later.

Instead it just made the horror worse. Because if I didn't know them, if I couldn't remember fighting them, then what else had I done that I couldn't remember? What else was hiding in those missing hours?

Whose pack had they been?

Why were they dead in a field with my hands covered in their blood?

What happened?

The question pounded behind my eyes but produced nothing. No flash of memory. No sensory fragment. Just emptiness where my night should've been.

My hands started shaking.

I needed to move. Needed to get out of this field before someone found me like this—covered in blood, surrounded by bodies, with no explanation except the kind that'd get me locked up or put down or worse.

I staggered to my feet and the world tilted sideways, went grey at the edges, then steadied enough for me to take stock.

Field. Trees. A road about a quarter mile to the east, judging by the way the land sloped down. There were no houses in sight, which was a mercy. No witnesses.

Just me and seven dead wolves and a sky getting lighter by the minute.

I started walking.

Every step hurt. My right leg dragged a little, the knee or the hip or both refusing to bear weight the way they should. My left shoulder felt like someone had tried to pull it out of socket and only half succeeded. Blood squelched in my boots with every step.

I kept moving anyway.

The field gave way to forest, and I followed the game trails by instinct more than sight, letting my body navigate while my mind tried and failed to piece together anything resembling memory.

I'd been home. I remembered that much. Sitting in my house, drinking bad coffee, watching the clock tick toward midnight because sleep wasn't happening anyway and there was no point pretending it would.

Then nothing.

There was no way to know without checking my phone, and I didn't want to stop long enough to dig it out of my pocket if it was even still there.

The trees pressed close on either side, branches skeletal against the lightening sky. Birds should've been singing, should've been waking up and greeting the dawn and doing all the normal things birds did when the world was still sane.

The forest held its breath like it was waiting. Like it knew I was walking through it and didn't want to draw attention, didn't want to be noticed by whatever I was carrying with me.

I walked faster.