Read Chapter 19: Moonlit Confessions

The portrait of Eilidh Blackwood hung above the fireplace in the study, its faded oils catching the lamplight. She had her mother’s eyes—that same stubborn glint, the same tilt of the chin that Iona had seen in every mirror since she was twelve. She stood before it now, arms crossed, trying to keep her voice steady.

“You knew,” she said without turning. “When you first saw me. You knew who I was.”

Lachlan stood in the doorway, his broad shoulders filling the frame. He didn’t deny it.

“I suspected,” he said quietly. “The locket. Your name. The resemblance was too strong to be coincidence.”

“And you didn’t think to mention it?” Iona spun to face him, heat rising in her chest. “You let me come here, treating your brother, sleeping in your house, walking through your woods — all the while knowing my mother stole something from your family?”

“I didn’t know she was your mother. Not then.”

“But you knew about the locket.”

Lachlan moved into the room, his footsteps slow and deliberate, as if approaching a wounded animal. He stopped at the edge of the lamplight.

“I knew of it,” he said. “As a story. A legend my grandmother used to tell. I didn’t believe it was real until I saw it around your neck that first night in the surgery.”

Iona’s hand went instinctively to her collar, where the silver chain lay hidden beneath her jumper. The locket was warm against her skin, as it always was, a constant presence she had worn since childhood.

“Dr. Campbell said it was a key,” she said. “He said it could bind wolves, or understand the curse. But he wouldn’t tell me more. He said my mother deliberately left those answers behind.”

Lachlan’s jaw tightened. He was silent for a long moment, staring at the portrait of Eilidh.

“The locket was made in 1898,” he said finally. “For a Blackwood bride who was afraid of the change. She loved a man who turned with the moon, but her own blood was weak — she carried the curse but could not master it. The locket was designed to hold her, to keep her human even during a full moon, when the wolf would try to break free.”

Iona frowned. “To prevent a werewolf from turning?”

“Yes. But there was a price. The locket’s power was tied to the wearer’s vow. It only works if the wolf accepts it willingly — if they choose to remain human out of love, not fear.” He paused, his eyes darkening. “My grandmother believed your mother didn’t steal it for herself. She believed Eilidh — your great-grandmother — took it to protect someone else. Someone who needed to break the change.”

“Duncan.”

Lachlan nodded slowly. “Morag was convinced the locket could have stopped him. If she’d had it, she could have kept him human during the weak moon, when the rogue first took him. He might never have slipped so far into the wolf that he forgot himself.”

Iona’s chest tightened. She thought of the diary, Morag’s desperate cursive sweeping across yellowed pages.*A woman named MacRae came from Glasgow carrying a locket that was never hers to take.*

“My mother,” she murmured. “Your grandmother thought my mother stole it from your family.”

“She did take it,” Lachlan said. “But not for herself. Eilidh fled the estate in 1898, pregnant and unmarried. She went to Glasgow, changed her name, and raised a daughter who would become your grandmother. The locket passed through the women of your line for three generations — a safeguard, your mother once told my father, against a day when it might be needed again.”

Iona shook her head, trying to make sense of it. “Your father knew my mother?”

Lachlan’s face went carefully blank. “She came to the estate in 1980. She was pregnant — with you. She stayed for a month, spoke to my father, and then she left. She never came back.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was tight, controlled. “My father never spoke of it. He died two years later without ever explaining what they discussed.”

Iona turned back to the portrait. Eilidh’s painted eyes seemed to follow her, full of secrets older than the estate itself.

“If the locket could have saved your brother,” she said slowly, “Morag could have used it. Why didn’t she?”

Lachlan let out a long breath. “Because the locket was already gone. Morag had given it to your mother less than a month before Duncan turned. She believed your mother was the one who needed it more.”

Iona’s hand closed around the silver chain. The metal felt colder now, heavier with implication.

“But it never worked for me,” she said. “I never changed. I never felt the pull of the wolf.”

“You’re only half-blood,” Lachlan said. “The curse needs the full moon to rise in you, and even then it moves slowly. The locket wasn’t made for you — it was made to *bind* one of us. To keep us from turning when the moon is weak.”

The words settled into her with a dull weight.

“You want me to use it on Duncan.”

Lachlan met her eyes. “Tomorrow is the full moon. He’s getting worse. The rogue infection has spread deeper into his blood — each turning pulls him further from himself. Dr. Campbell believes he has two, maybe three more cycles before he’s lost permanently.”

“You want me to hold a locket against your brother while he transforms into a wolf.” Iona could hear the disbelief in her own voice, the sharp edge of fear. “I saw the dog attack, Lachlan. I know what he can do.”

“He won’t hurt you. Not if the locket works. Not if he knows you’re there to help him.” Lachlan stepped closer, close enough that she could smell the pine and earth that clung to his skin. “I wouldn’t ask this of you if there were any other way. But you’re the only one who can do it. The locket was given to your family for a reason. It chose you.”

Iona’s throat was dry. She thought of the villagers with their guns and their torches, already marching through her mind. She thought of Dr. Campbell’s warning, the old man’s face pale with fear as he told her to stop digging.

*Some answers are buried because they can only hurt the ones who find them.*

“And if it doesn’t work?” she asked. “What happens to me?”

Lachlan’s expression flickered — something raw and vulnerable passing through him before he shuttered it away.

“You run,” he said. “And you don’t look back.”

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The cave mouth gaped black against the hillside, its entrance half-hidden by gorse and bracken. Iona couldn’t see the sky from here, but she felt the rising pressure of the moon in her blood — that strange unsettled hum that had followed her all her life, growing stronger with every passing hour.

Lachlan walked beside her, silent and watchful. The pack had scattered at his command, leaving the approach clear. Only the two of them would enter.

Duncan waited inside, chained to the far wall.

He was still human when they found him, but barely. His skin gleamed with sweat, his fingers clawing grooves into the stone. His eyes — Morag’s eyes — found Iona’s face, and something like recognition flickered there.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he rasped. “Get out. Before I—“

The change took him mid-sentence. His spine arched with a sickening crack, and the air filled with the sound of snapping bones and tearing flesh. Iona had seen animals die, had held her hand inside the cavities of horses and cows, but this was different. This was a man unmaking himself.

She moved anyway.

The locket was hot in her palm, burning with a fever that had nothing to do with the fires of the cave. She pressed it against Duncan’s chest as the wolf lunged toward her — and the change stopped.

The animal froze, one massive paw raised, amber eyes staring into hers. The locket grew hotter still; Iona felt the metal sear through her shirt, felt the skin of her chest blister and peel. She gritted her teeth and held on.

Duncan’s body shuddered. The wolf whined, and something in its face softened — recognition, maybe, or the faintest echo of the man he had been. The locket pulsed once, twice, a rhythm like a heartbeat, and then the great beast collapsed at her feet.

Iona’s knees buckled. Lachlan caught her before she fell, his arms strong around her shoulders. She was shaking, every nerve alive with fire.

The locket had gone dark. In the sudden stillness of the cave, she could hear Duncan’s breathing even out, the rough rhythm of sleep.

“It worked,” Lachlan said, his voice rough with wonder. He cupped her face in his hands, turning it toward the dim light. “You did it.”

Iona tried to smile. The skin of her chest throbbed where the locket had burned her, a bloom of pain spreading through her ribs. The smell of her own scorched flesh was sharp in her nose.

“I’m glad,” she managed. “For your brother.”

Lachlan’s thumb brushed her cheek, feather-light. In the darkness of the cave, with the wolf sleeping at her feet and the moon pressing against the sky above, his eyes were the warmest thing she had seen.

“Stay,” he said softly. “Help me with him. Be a part of this pack. I will protect you from everything else — the council, the villagers, anything you need.”

Iona pulled back, her hand finding the locket against her chest. The burn beneath it pulsed with every heartbeat.

“I need to know the truth first,” she said. “All of it. About my mother. About Eilidh. About why your father knew her and why she left.”

Lachlan’s jaw tightened. For a moment, something haunted passed through his eyes, something older than the curse, older than the moon.

“When you’re ready,” he said, “I will tell you everything. But what I know… Iona, it will change how you see us. How you see yourself.”

She looked at the wolf sleeping in the chains, at the man who had saved her, at the weight of centuries pressing down on all of them.

“Then I’ll be ready tomorrow,” she said.

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