Novels by Unloyal

Ivy's POVI don't sleep again.I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and listen to the lodge settle around me and think about twigs snapping on empty paths. About the fact that Rook has been trained by the same people who trained me and we both know that if he wanted to follow someone through dark territory without being heard, no one would hear him.He would know that I know.That's the thing about Rook and me; we have always operated in the space of things we don't say out loud.***Rook is already in the great hall when I come down.This is notable because Rook doesn't do communal breakfasts. In eight years I have never once seen him voluntarily sit in a room full of people eating. He survives on coffee and whatever is available to be eaten while standing over a kitchen counter, preferably alone.I get food and sit across from him.He looks up and we lock gazes, the way we always do; the conversation that happens before the conversation, the one where we establish what we alrea

Ivy's POVI leave Maren's building before she can see it on my face.The day passes by. Caelum finds me in the eastern courtyard after lunch and walks me through the territory the way Soren apparently assigned him to, pointing out boundary markers and paths and the things I'm allowed to know about.He doesn't mention last night.Neither do I.We walk and he talks and I listen and catalogue and every time the wind shifts from the north I feel it; that pull, low and insistent, like a string tied somewhere inside me that someone keeps plucking. I breathe through it. I ask appropriate questions about Pack geography and treaty logistics and I am so impressively composed that I almost convince myself.By evening I'm back in my room with the mountain air coming in cold and clean through the window. I'm thinking about what Maren asked me. Has your wolf ever surfaced.I'm thinking about the answer I gave her, which was the truth.And I'm thinking about everything that sits underneath that trut

Ivy's POVI don't answer him.I straighten up, let go of the railing, and put my hands back in my jacket pockets. "I'm tired," I say, "That's all it was."Caelum looks at me for a moment. He doesn't push. He just nods slowly."Goodnight, Ivy," he says.I go inside but I don't sleep.***Morning in Ashveil arrives without asking. I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and catalogue everything I know.Facts. Start with facts.I am in Ashveil Pack territory. I am here for one year on my father's terms. My job is to be present, cooperative, and unproblematic while the treaty holds. I have one objective, and no margin for complications.That's the list.Caelum Dusk asking me how long I've been feeling it in the dark at half past midnight is not on the list. Neither is the way my body moved toward that howl before I told it to.I get up, wash my face with cold water, and decide that both things are going to stay firmly off the list until I understand them better. Understanding first. Fe

Ivy's POVNobody explains the howling.That's the thing that gets me. The sound rises and dies and the Pack at the table just resumes. Forks lifting, wine pouring, conversation picking back up like nothing carved through the air thirty seconds ago. Like it's as ordinary as rain.I look at Maren beside me.She's smiling at something the woman on her left said, completely unbothered.I pick up my fork and eat. But my spine hasn't settled. That pull; low and strange and embarrassingly physical is still sitting at the base of me like a second heartbeat I didn't have this morning. Across the table, Caelum is talking to the man on his right, something about the eastern boundary, patrol rotations, a word I don't catch. He has a way of talking that's different from the men I grew up around. No performance in it. No calculation about how the words are landing. He just says things like he means them, which in my experience is either the mark of someone very honest or someone very dangerous.I

Ivy's POVThe wolves are watching me unpack.Not literally, but the two Pack sentries stationed outside my bedroom door haven't moved in forty minutes, and every time I cross near the window I catch the shift of their shoulders and the slight turn of their heads. I hang the last of my clothes in the carved wooden wardrobe and try to look like a woman who isn't counting exits.Ashveil is nothing like home. Home is underground in neon and concrete and the permanent smell of generator fuel and ambition. This place is timber and firelight and mountain air so clean it almost hurts to breathe. My bedroom alone is bigger than the entire floor I shared with two other girls back in the Syndicate compound. Stone walls. A window that looks out onto a forest that goes on forever.It's beautiful but I hate it. I hate it because beautiful things in my experience always come with a price tag I find out about too late, and I hate it because I've been here less than six hours and I can already fee