Bound By Moonlight to My Mates (by Sofange Daye) novel Chapter 106

Chapter 106

Chapter 106

Aclara

The world feels quieter now.

For the first time in years, maybe centuries, the air doesn’t hum with power or magic, it is just simple. Morning light filters through the cracks in the boarded windows, catching on the dust and making it shimmer. Outside, birds are singing again.

Caleb is still asleep beside me.

His arm is draped over my waist, and his heartbeat is a steady rhythm against my back. The mark he left on me throbs faintly beneath my skin. A wolf’s mark. His wolf’s.

Every time it pulses, my body answers.

It’s strange, feeling owned after lifetimes of belonging to no one. But it doesn’t feel like a chain. It feels like a tether to my soul. It feels like something that will keep me from drifting away.

I should resent it. Instead, I trace the faint crescent shape on my neck and whisper to no one, “I almost forgot what it means to be claimed.”

Caleb stirs, murmuring something in his sleep, and pulls me closer. For a moment, I let him. Then guilt seeps back in like cold water.

Because the longer I stay here, the quieter everything divine becomes. The hum of magic beneath my skin has faded to a low thrum. The connection to Charlotte is barely there anymore. A faint pulse somewhere beyond the horizon.

And worse yet… the zealots haven’t come.

It’s been three days since we stepped into this cabin. Three nights of quiet, uninterrupted sleep. No chanting in the woods. No shadows at the edge of the clearing. No dreams filled with silver flames or divine whispers.

Part of me wants to believe it’s over, that they’ve moved on to hunting other relics of the Goddess. That maybe, in becoming mortal, I’ve finally fallen off their map.

But another part knows better. The zealots don’t forget. They wait.

Caleb wakes with the afternoon sun, stretching like a cat. He looks… lighter. There’s color in his face again, and the exhaustion that haunted his eyes has dulled.

“Morning,” he murmurs.

“It’s not morning anymore.”

He smiles crookedly. “Then good afternoon.”

He sits up, rubbing the back of his neck. “You’ve been awake for a while.”

13:03 Sat, Nov 1

Chapter 106

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“You’re thinking too much again.”

“I always do.”

He leans over, brushing a kiss against my temple. “Then stop.”

It’s the kind of impossible thing only he would say with total sincerity and no sense of irony.

I shake my head, fighting a smile. “How do you do that?”

“What?”

“Act like the world isn’t falling apart.”

He shrugs. “Because it always is. Might as well steal what peace we can in between.”

There’s a logic to that I can’t quite argue with.

He pulls on his shirt and moves to the door, glancing outside. “The air smells different.”

“Different how?”

I stand and cross the small space between us, peering through the crack in the boards. The trees sway gently in the wind. Nothing looks wrong, but something feels wrong.

“Maybe it’s just quiet,” I say.

“Maybe.”

He looks at me for a long moment, eyes searching my face. “You think they’re gone, don’t you?”

“I want to think that.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“No.”

He nods once, accepting that. Then, with that same calm defiance that drives me insane, he says, “Then we keep living anyway.”

The next few days blur into a kind of fragile peace.

We fall into a rhythm. Caleb hunts during the mornings, bringing back food from the forest: rabbits, fish, and sometimes berries if he’s feeling generous. I tend the fire, patch the cracks in the roof, and clean the old maps scattered across the table.

At night, we sit outside beneath the stars. He tells me stories about places he wants to see. Real cities with

neon lights and traffic and people who don’t look twice at strangers. I tell him stories from before there were cities at all.

He laughs when I call the moon by her true name. I laugh when he tries to teach me how to make coffee without burning it.

We talk. We don’t talk. Sometimes we just exist side by side, and that’s enough.

It feels… almost normal.

And that terrifies me because normal never lasts.

The mark on my neck glows faintly one evening as the sun dips below the trees. Caleb’s sitting on the porch steps, sharpening a blade he found in the cellar. I watch him from the doorway, my fingers pressed to the heat spreading through my skin.

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