روايات بقلم Serena

NathanMax waited until we were well clear of the party before he said anything, leading me down the block to where he’d parked, the noise of the house fading behind us into something more like distant static. I could still feel the alcohol humming through my system, blunting the edges of everything, but whatever Max had found out was apparently serious enough that he didn’t bother waiting for me to sober up first.“I’m all ears,” I said, leaning against the side of his car, arms crossed.“I made some calls after the thing in the woods,” Max said, glancing around the quiet street out of habit before he continued, the same reflexive caution I’d trained into every wolf under my protection since the day I took over this territory. “Called in a favor with a contact who used to run with Thornwood before he left a couple of years back. He confirmed it. They’re looking for a girl from a Specific bloodline, apparently, though he didn’t know the details just that whoever’s giving the orders wa

NathanI’d been ignoring it for too long. I knew that even before I walked into that party, even before the third drink I probably shouldn’t have had loosened whatever fraying grip I still had on my own restraint. I needed to figure out what Ellie actually was, she can't be just a human, not just some girl who’d wandered into my life at exactly the wrong moment, but something else, something that made my wolf sit up and take notice in a way it had never done for anyone before her.Mate. The word had been circling my head for weeks now, and I kept shoving it back down every time it surfaced, because accepting it meant admitting to something I wasn’t sure I had any right to claim. But it was there anyway, undeniable, humming low under my sternum every single time she got within twenty feet of me, an ache that sharpened into something almost unbearable whenever she was close enough to touch and I made myself keep my hands to myself anyway.I hadn’t meant to drink as much as I had that ni

EllieI didn't want to go. After the phone call with my mom… the way she didn't want to tell me anything, the half explained mess about my grandmother wandering off from her care facility and turning up hours later three towns over, disoriented and unable to explain how she’d gotten there the last thing I wanted was to put on tight clothes and pretend to have a good time at some off-campus party. But Judy had shown up at my room that evening with her hair curled and two dresses draped over one arm, absolutely unwilling to take no for an answer.“You’ve been weird and stressed for weeks,” she said, holding up the shorter of the two dresses like it was a legal argument. “One night. That’s all I’m asking. We dance, we drink overpriced jungle juice out of a cooler, we forget about grandmothers and hockey captains and clinical rotations for like four hours. Then you can go back to being depressed.”“I’m not depressed.”“You’re a little depressed,” Joslyn said from the doorway, already dres

NathanShe looked worried. I didn’t want to ruin the study group, I know how serious Ellie is about school, and that’s the last thing I wanted to be responsible for wrecking, on top of everything else I’d already put her through.“You’re doing it again,” Ellie said, glancing up at me over her article.“Doing what?”“Staring. Like you’re trying to solve a math problem written on my face.” She said it lightly, but there was an edge of real curiosity underneath it, like she actually wanted the answer this time instead of just calling me out on it.I hesitated, weighing how much of the truth I could afford to hand over without handing over everything. “I was thinking about something,” I admitted. “Not the project.”“Care to share with the group?”I almost didn’t. Every practical instinct in me said to deflect, to make a joke, to steer this conversation back toward something safe. But something about the quiet of the study room, the two of us tucked away from the rest of campus for the fir

NathanI found out about the group project assignment the same way I found out about most things involving Ellie lately through some cruel, inconvenient twist of coincidence that felt less like chance and more like the universe actively conspiring to keep putting us in the same room whether either of us wanted it or not.Professor Halloway posted the pairings for our environmental science final project Tuesday morning, and I scrolled through the list on my phone half paying attention, already dreading whatever mediocre partner I’d get stuck with for the next three weeks, right up until I saw her name sitting next to mine.Black, Nathan….. Harper, Ellie.I stared at it for longer than I should have, some stupid, traitorous part of my chest doing something warm and hopeful that I immediately tried to shut down. She hadn’t spoken to me since the football field. Not one word, not a text, not so much as a glance in the hallways we occasionally crossed paths in, and I’d told myself that was

EllieI didn’t remember falling asleep. I only remembered the dream, vivid and relentless in a way that felt less like imagination and more like memory, though that made no sense at all given that nothing in it had ever actually happened to me.I was running. Barefoot, through a forest so dense the moonlight barely made it through the canopy above me, my lungs burning and my legs screaming with an exhaustion that felt entirely too real. Behind me, I could hear them not footsteps, not anything so ordinary as footsteps, but something lower and more guttural, something that moved on four legs instead of two, branches snapping under weight that didn’t belong to anything human.I didn’t look back. Some instinct deep in my chest told me that looking back was the one thing I couldn’t afford to do, that if I turned around even for a second I would see teeth and eyes reflecting moonlight and something that wanted to tear me apart before I ever made it out of these trees.I woke up gasping, tan

NinaIt started like every other morning, I woke before Enzo, which had become unusual over the past months, and lay in the early light listening to him breathe beside me, the particular peace of an ordinary day with nothing urgent waiting at its center. No tribunal session, no crisis requiring his immediate attention, just a normal morning, starting the day the best way, in bed with my mate, without the weight of the world on us.He stirred eventually, reaching for me before he was fully awake his hands wrapping around my stomach, the particular instinct of a man whose body had learned where I was supposed to be even before his mind caught up.“Morning,” he said, voice rough with sleep.“Morning,” I responded, wrapping my hands around him too, burying my face in his neck. We lay together for a while longer, the unhurried quiet of two people who had earned the right to simply exist together without anything requiring them to move yet.“Want to go for a walk in the garden?” he asked ev

EnzoI found Thomas in the training field at dawn, exactly where I expected him, going through the slow deliberate forms he had taken up since his strength fully returned, the particular discipline of a warrior who had lost months of conditioning and was patiently rebuilding it.He saw me approach and did not stop moving, which I had learned was simply how he operated, conversation and motion existing comfortably alongside each other.“You’re up early,” he said.“I wanted to catch you before the day got busy,” I said.He finished the form he was working through and turned to face me properly, reading something in my expression with the particular attentiveness that had not dulled even slightly through everything he had survived.“This is a specific kind of early morning visit,” he said. “I recognize the look.”“Do you,” I said.“I raised a daughter,” he said. “I have seen this look before, on a much younger version of myself, the morning I asked Elena’s father if I could court her.” H

PetraThe vote was held in Crestmoon’s great hall, the same hall where Dexter had once delivered orders that few had dared question, transformed now into something it had never been in living memory: a room full of wolves who were about to decide their own future for the first time in the pack’s history.I had not campaigned, exactly. I had simply done the work for the past two months, the daily unglamorous labor of holding a fractured pack together while it figured out what it wanted to become, and let the wolves decide for themselves whether that work meant something.Enzo stood at the back of the hall with Nina, present as observers rather than authorities, they let me make decisions on my own leading the pack, decisions that would help make it better, which had been his specific insistence when the tribunal asked whether Silver Fang wished to oversee the proceedings.“It is not my pack’s vote to oversee,” he had told Rowan. “We will be present as witnesses if Crestmoon wants us th

JessicaThree weeks in silver-warded custody had given me considerable time to think.Not the performative reflection of someone preparing a defense. Something quieter than that, the specific clarity that came from being removed from every circumstance that had previously required me to act a version of myself for someone else’s benefit. No Dexter to manage or help me or talk me through it, I was utterly alone.No mage’s amplification pulling at something inside me that had never quite been mine to control. No Enzo to perform indifference toward or Nina to resent.Just the cell, and the silence, and the slow accumulating weight of years of bad choices condensed into a single uninterrupted reckoning.I had decided, somewhere in the second week, that I was not going to act remorseful for the tribunal. Not because I felt none, everything was differen, it was more complicated than that, but because performed remorse was simply another version of the manipulation that had defined most of m

EnzoI found the letter three days after the wedding.Anthony’s quarters had been cleared out weeks earlier, his personal effects boxed and catalogued by the pack administrators handling the transition, but a final box had been overlooked in the back of the archive room, the particular forgotten corner where things ended up when no one was certain whether they mattered enough to sort properly.I had gone looking for old territorial maps for the Crestmoon transition planning.What I found instead was a smaller box, tucked behind the maps, containing the kind of personal correspondence that elders sometimes accumulated over decades of pack service. Letters between Anthony and my father. Notes from council meetings going back further than my lifetime. And, near the bottom, an envelope that had never been sealed properly, the flap simply tucked rather than sealed, as if the writer had changed their mind about sending it at the last moment.The handwriting on the front was unfamiliar.To E

LilyThe morning of the ceremony was clear and gold, exactly the kind of weather my mother had spent three weeks anxiously checking forecasts to secure, as if she had any actual control over it and was simply going to manifest good weather through sheer force of maternal will.It had worked, apparently.She stood behind me in the small preparation room off the great hall, fussing with the back of my dress with the particular focused concentration of someone determined not to cry before the actual event required it.“Mom,” I said. “You can stop adjusting it. It’s fine.”“It’s not perfectly fine,” she said. “There’s a small pull on the left seam.”“There is not a pull on the left seam.”“There might be.”“Mom.”She stopped, hands resting on my shoulders, and met my eyes in the mirror.“I’m allowed to fuss,” she said. “I didn't plan years of birthdays, I didn’t fuss over you enough, and then I was worried sick for four months where I thought you might be dead and I am going to fuss over