The Hunter's Moon

By Vesper Starforge

A hunter sent to kill a monster. The monster who chose to spare his life. Some choices cannot be unmade.

Silas has trained his entire life to be the perfect Guild hunter — disciplined, loyal, lethal. When his first solo commission sends him to a terrorized mountain village, he arrives carrying six years of certainty and a blade sharpened for killing. The villagers' fear is written into boarded windows and iron-barred gates. Whatever haunts these peaks has broken something fundamental in them. Silas believes he can fix it. He has never been more wrong about anything in his life.

The Beast he tracks is unlike anything his training prepared him for. It hesitates before violence. It leaves handprints alongside claw marks. And when it finally has Silas pinned — jaws inches from his throat — it chooses mercy. That impossible act of grace forces Silas toward a bleeding, fever-wracked young man named Emrys, hiding in a mountain cabin, desperately lonely, and carrying a curse he never asked for. The hunter and his prey come face to face. And Silas cannot raise his blade.

Choosing Emrys means betraying the Guild — an institution built, Silas discovers, on centuries of manufactured monsters and buried bodies. As Elder Mael closes in with fire and soldiers, Silas must lie to his brothers, race against a rising moon, and venture into a death-trap mountain cave for a cure that may not exist. Every hour narrows their options. Every revelation deepens the cost of the truth they carry.

Between siege preparations and fever breaks, between sharpened blades and shared soup, something irreversible grows between a man who swore his life to duty and a man who had given up on being seen. Silas burned his Guild insignia in the hearth. He cannot burn what Emrys has become to him. Whether they survive to build something from the ashes remains the only question that matters.

A monster-hunter enemies-to-lovers dark fantasy MM romance featuring forced proximity, found identity, and the devastating cost of choosing truth over loyalty.