Ziri Ink의 작품

RowanThe third rogue incident made no sense.I had the report spread across my desk alongside the two previous ones, all three side by side, and I’d been staring at them for the better part of an hour trying to find the thread that connected them. Location, timing, targets, method. Nothing lined up cleanly enough to be a pattern but nothing was random enough to be coincidence either.Someone was feeding information to the rogues.That was the conclusion I kept arriving at and kept not wanting to sit with because of what it meant. An inside source. Someone with access to border patrol schedules, pack movement, enough operational detail to keep the incidents just below the threshold of a full response while still doing consistent damage.I pushed the reports aside and looked at the map on the wall.Three incidents. Outer territories, different sectors, nothing taken, two wolves injured. It looked like probing. Testing response times, testing coverage gaps, building a picture of where w

AthenaAmara told me at breakfast.Casually, between bites of toast, the way she delivered most information she considered unremarkable. “I got lost last night and Rowan walked me back.”I set my cup down. “You got lost.”“A little bit.”“Amara.”“I woke up and the corridor looked different.” She took another bite. “He was in his study. He was working.”I looked at her. She looked back at me with those silver eyes, completely unbothered, like she hadn’t just told me she’d wandered a wolf palace alone at what must have been some awful hour of the night.“Why didn’t you come to my room.” I said.She shrugged. “I didn’t want to wake you.”“I would want to be woken.”“You looked tired.”“Amara—”“He was nice about it.” She said it like that settled something. “He walked slow so I could keep up.”I picked my cup back up. Didn’t say anything else because there wasn’t anything to say that wouldn’t come out more tangled than I wanted it to. She’d gone looking for comfort in the middle of the

RowanIt happened at two in the morning.I was at my desk, which was where I usually was at two in the morning, working through the rogue activity reports that kept not making sense no matter how many times I read them. Three incidents, outer territories, no clean pattern, no demands, just damage and disappearance.The pain came without warning.Not the dull pulse I’d gotten used to, the low constant reminder that the curse was there and moving. This was different. This was every nerve in my left arm lighting up at once, a white hot thing that started at my wrist and drove straight up to my shoulder, and I knocked the report off the desk getting my sleeve up.The veins had crossed my elbow.I sat very still and breathed through it, both hands flat on the desk, watching the black lines pulse visibly under my skin. Moving. I could actually see them moving, slow and deliberate, branching.I had maybe eight months before they reached my heart.The witch had been specific about that part.

AthenaThe dress was red.I hadn’t picked red on purpose, it was just the one that fit the occasion and didn’t make me look like I was trying too hard or not trying at all, which was a narrow target to hit. Chase had looked at it when I’d held it up and said that one without hesitation, which was good enough for me.Amara had opinions about the earrings. I went with hers.She was staying in the east wing with one of the younger female staff who had taken to her with an enthusiasm that Amara had accepted as her due. Her name was Peri, she was maybe nineteen, and within twenty four hours Amara had her completely managed.“Be good.” I told her at the door.“I’m always good.” She said, which was not strictly true.“Be good in a way that Peri can verify.” I said.She considered this distinction. “Okay.”I walked to the dining hall with Chase at my shoulder and told myself it was just dinner. Just a room full of people and food and conversation. I had sat in rooms full of people who wanted

RowanHe was already in the east hall when I arrived.Sitting at the far end of the table like he owned it, one ankle crossed over his knee, a glass of something dark in his hand at eleven in the morning. That was Rurik. Always already there, always already comfortable, always making sure you noticed both things.We shared a father. That was the beginning and end of what we shared.He looked up when I walked in, smiled with all his teeth. “Brother.”“Rurik.” I pulled out a chair on my side of the table and sat. Didn’t pour a drink. Kept my hands visible and still, an old habit from negotiation training. Show them your hands, show them nothing’s coming, let them relax just enough.“Congratulations are in order I hear.” He swirled his glass. “The runaway princess has returned. And with a gift.”“Watch your mouth.”He raised both hands, the picture of innocence. “I only meant the child. A daughter, yes? She has your eyes, they say.”“Who says.”“People talk.” He shrugged. “Palaces talk.

AthenaI made a mistake.Not a catastrophic one, nothing that couldn’t be managed, but I let my guard down for approximately forty minutes in the east grounds watching my daughter befriend a wolf, and now I was paying for it by standing in my room thinking about what Rowan had said.I’m bad at this. I’m working on it.Six years ago he wouldn’t have said that. Six years ago he wouldn’t have crouched down to her level in a corridor and answered questions about wolves for twenty minutes with the patience of someone who actually had it and not just the performance of it.People changed. I knew that, had lived it myself, had changed so completely from the girl who’d broken a bond on her knees spitting blood that sometimes I barely recognized her.That didn’t mean I had to do anything with the information.I changed out of the east grounds clothes and sat at the small desk by the window with my sketchbook. Drawing helped me think, always had, my brain settled when my hands were doing someth

LEON’S POVI took the phone off speaker.“Say that again,” I said.“He’s not being held,” Bryan said. “My contact watched him for twenty minutes. He’s moving around freely. Talking to Allison. Nobody’s guarding him, nobody’s restraining him.” A pause. “He walked out of that press conference and went straight there, Leon. He knew exactly where he was going.”I set the phone down on the table.Kate was already there before I could say anything. Reading my face, putting it together, the way she did things quickly and without needing them handed to her step by step.“He’s with them voluntarily,” she said.“Yes.”She sat back in her chair. Something moved through her expression, not quite betrayal, more like the specific exhaustion of someone who had extended a version of grace toward a person and was now watching that grace get used against them.Oliver hadn’t been grabbed outside that press conference.He’d walked away from it on his own two feet and gone directly to the people who had f

KATE’S POVI stepped back from the phone.Not far. Just enough to put a breath of space between me and that screen and the words on it and the way Leon’s face had gone when I’d read them.He hadn’t denied it.That was the part I kept coming back to. He hadn’t said it immediately the way innocent people said things immediately, the automatic no that came before thought. He’d just stood there holding the phone and looking at me with an expression I didn’t have a name for yet.“Leon.”“Kate—”“Don’t manage this.” I said it quietly. No heat behind it. I was too tired for heat. “Whatever it is, just say it.”He set the phone face down on the table.That small action, phone face down, told me more than anything he’d said in the last ten minutes. It was what he did when he needed to remove something from the equation so he could think clearly. I’d watched him do it enough times to understand the language of it.He pulled out a chair and sat down.First time all night he’d sat down somewhere

LEON’S POVI read the note twice.Then I set it down on the cushion exactly where I’d found it because some instinct said don’t disturb anything, this is a crime scene now whether anyone has called it that yet or not.The sitting room looked wrong in the specific way rooms looked wrong when something had happened in them recently. Not ransacked. Not violent, at least not visibly. Just off. A glass broken near the chair. Stefena’s bag still on the side table, which meant she hadn’t left voluntarily, nobody left their bag, not even in a hurry, not if they had a choice about it.Justin was gone too.“Check the house,” I said to Kate.She was already moving, out of the sitting room and down the corridor, calling Justin’s name. I heard her take the stairs, heard her voice moving through the rooms above me, and I stood in the sitting room and looked at that empty chair and felt something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in a very long time.Helpless.Just for a moment. Then I pushed it back

KATE’S POVThree days ago.I did the math without meaning to. Three days ago was before the dinner where she’d dropped that photograph of me and Oliver on the table. Before any of us knew Carter had found anything. Before the press conference, before Martha’s name made headlines, before any of it had cracked open in front of the cameras.Stefena had authorised a security firm before everything became public.Leon had gone completely still beside me, phone pressed to his ear, and I watched something move behind his eyes that I’d only seen once before. The night his composure had actually broken in that car, after the dinner, after the photograph.“Send me everything you have on that authorisation,” he said. His voice didn’t shake. It just went flat. “Every detail.”He hung up.For a second neither of us said anything. The marina had gone quiet again, just water against the dock and the distant hum of the city beyond it. Luciana’s sister was sitting on a bench a few feet away, wrapped i

LEON’S POVThe scream cut off almost as fast as it started.I grabbed Kate’s wrist in the dark and pulled her toward the cabin door, my other hand finding the wall, the doorframe, anything solid. Behind me Wakefield was saying something, fast and panicked, but I wasn’t listening to him anymore.“Bryan.”“Here.” Close. He’d already moved toward Carter.“Get my father off this boat.”“On it.”The deck outside was no better, the marina lights along the pier dimmed to almost nothing, just the faint glow of distant buildings and the moon catching the water in broken patches. I could hear movement. Footsteps on wood. Someone running.“Stay with me,” I said to Kate, and felt her hand grip my arm tighter in response.We came out onto the deck and I scanned the dock as fast as the darkness allowed. The scream had come from somewhere to the left, further down the pier, past the next two berths.A shape moved near the water’s edge.I started toward it before I’d fully decided to, Kate right behi

KATE’S POVThe silence after Carter’s voice was worse than the shout itself.Bryan moved first. Low along the dock, fast. Leon caught my arm before I could follow him.“Stay behind me.”“Leon—”“Please.” Just that. Not a command this time.I stayed half a step back. Close enough to see. Far enough that he could tell himself I was listening.We reached the gangway. Bryan crouched near the boat’s edge, signaling something with two fingers, then one. Leon understood it immediately. I didn’t, not until later, but I followed anyway.He went up first.The deck creaked. He froze. Waited. Nothing happened so he kept going, slower now, and I went with him, my heart somewhere up near my throat where it had been sitting most of the evening.Through the cabin window I saw Wakefield standing near a table, hands raised slightly, palms out. The posture of a man trying to look reasonable in a situation that had stopped being reasonable several minutes ago.Natalie stood beside him.And Carter was on