The Night Prince

Blake walks through Night's prison in a shared dream, finding Aurora peering through cell bars.

Blake walks through Night's prison in a shared dream, finding Aurora peering through cell bars. He drags her away from an approaching shadow—the jailer of this otherworld—and pulls her into a cell marked with Night's symbol: a key flanked by crescent moons. When the threat passes, he pushes them into a different dream: his childhood cell beneath a palace, stained with old blood and lit by a single candle. She asks where they are. He says if she remembers in the morning, he will explain. He shoves her through a wall and they fall into darkness. Blake wakes at Lowfell Castle, haunted by the bond's thread of light pulsing inside him—and the knowledge that the God of Night wants the Heart of the Moon to escape his prison.

Blake's plot and James's claim collide with Aurora's emerging wolf

Aurora wakes at Lowfell Castle, sweating in Blake's shirt, the wound in her side still raw from James's teeth. Callum coaches her breathing through the panic. She tells him what Blake confessed: he linked their lives so Callum could never kill him without killing her, planning to challenge for the throne after James is deposed. Callum finds cold comfort in the logic. When their intimacy triggers Aurora's emerging wolf nature, her body seizes with fever—three days of hallucinations where dark prisons and Blake's laughter bleed together. She sleepwalks to Blake's room with a knife to his throat. When she finally wakes, worse news arrives: James holds Callum's closest friend Fiona hostage and demands Aurora in trade. Under wolf law, James's bite marks her as his property.

At the lunar eclipse, Blake claims Aurora before James can

The Wolves gather at a stone circle atop Dawn's Craig for the sacred ceremony. Lochlan, the red-haired alpha of Glas-Cladach, arrives with his clan. The priestess tells how the Moon Goddess tricked Night into imprisoning himself, and candles are raised into the eclipsed sky. Then James strides through the stones with armed men and muskets, demanding Aurora under wolf law. She steels herself to go—to prevent bloodshed—when Blake hooks an arm around her waist and sinks his teeth into her shoulder. Before the priestess and fifty gathered Wolves, he claims Aurora as part of his clan. James leaves satisfied, the fracture between Callum and Blake already spreading. Aurora slaps Blake across the face. Callum slams him into a rock and squeezes his throat—until Aurora starts choking too, the bond transferring the damage.