Chapter 33: The False Luna Falls

Iris saw the knife and screamed. That was how Nora knew the weapon mattered. Guards had dragged Iris into the hall as a witness against Callum, but she had spent the session smirking through bruised pride. The second Seraphine opened the velvet box, Iris's face emptied of color. "No," Iris whispered. "You said you destroyed it." Seraphine looked bored. "I said many useful things." The knife lay on black velvet, its handle carved with thorns, the blade bright as moonlit ice. A lock of dark hair wound around it, brittle with age. Nora's stomach clenched. "That is my mother's." "A consent token," Seraphine said. "Given when she agreed to Thornveil protection." Nora looked at Iris. Iris shook her head once. Not denial. Warning. "She did not agree," Iris said. The room turned toward her. Seraphine's expression remained pleasant. "Careful, child." Iris laughed, high and cracked. "Do not call me child now. You fed me lies for years." Rowan stared at her. "Iris." "Shut up." She rounded on him. "You wanted a crown and I wanted hers. We deserved each other." Nora had imagined Iris's fall would feel satisfying. It did not. It felt like watching a mirror break and realizing she had once been cut by every shard. Iris faced Venn. "Thornveil gave me the tonic. Thornveil gave me the false Luna dye. Thornveil told me Nora's mother had run from a contract and that Nora's womb had to stay empty until Rowan signed Blackridge over." Seraphine sighed. "Emotional girls are so expensive." Iris ripped open her collar. The false mark had rotted into a black crescent. "You promised this would make the pack love me." "I promised it would make them obey you. You confused the two." The cruelty was so clean Nora almost pitied Iris. Almost. Venn lifted his rod. "Iris Bell, are you confessing to conspiracy with House Thornveil?" Iris's eyes found Nora. For one second, they were children again in their father's cold house, Iris stealing Nora's ribbons because no one bought her any, Nora pretending not to see because pity was easier than fighting. "Yes," Iris said. "And if I am falling, I am not falling alone." She lunged for the velvet box. Darius moved, but Iris did not reach for the knife. She grabbed the hair. The lock burned blue in her hand. Seraphine's smile vanished. Iris screamed, but she held on as images burst across the hall: Nora's mother chained in a Thornveil chapel. Seraphine younger, cutting her hair. Blackridge's old Alpha signing a silence pact. A baby carriage in snow. Nora gasped. Darius caught her. The image shifted. Nora saw her mother hiding something beneath the Luna stone. The objection. The truth. Then a final whisper pressed into the moon necklace: "If my daughter carries the crown, tell her she is not the first." The vision shattered. Iris collapsed, her palm burned raw. Seraphine's composure was gone. Venn's clerks wrote as fast as their hands could move. Nora stepped toward her sister. Iris looked up through tears. "I still hate you." "I know." "But she hated us both." Nora looked at Seraphine. The older woman no longer smiled. "Yes," Nora said. "Now we prove it." Seraphine lifted the silver knife. "You will try," she said, and plunged it into the Luna stone.