Chapter: CHAPTER 98The compound's annual internal assessment arrives twelve days later, and I almost forget about it entirely in the wake of everything else, until Edan corners me at breakfast with a printed schedule and a look of pointed disbelief that I have not already memorized it.This is not optional, he says, sliding the schedule across the table. It is not a drill, it is not a spar with your friends on the practice field. This is every candidate across every track, ranked against each other, in front of the full instructional staff and whichever compound leadership decides to observe. It happens once a year. It matters.I know what it is, I say.Do you, he says. Because you have spent the last two weeks buried in review board documentation and family revelations large enough to reshape a pack's leadership, and I am not certain any of that has left room in your head for the fact that today you are being formally ranked against candidates who have trained here for years longer than you have.I hav
Last Updated: 2026-10-27
Chapter: CHAPTER 97The review board convenes six days later, faster than Kade expected, which he tells me privately is itself a signal, because boards that intend to bury a complaint quietly do not move with this kind of speed. Boards that move quickly have already glanced at the documentation and decided it cannot be allowed to sit.We are not permitted inside the hearing room itself, not as witnesses called to testify in person, not yet, Kade explains, but as the officer who filed the original report and now stands behind this second, larger submission, he is granted a preliminary session with the board's senior counsel, and he asks me to come with him as far as the outer chamber, so that I am present when word comes.The outer chamber is a long room with high windows and hard benches, the kind of space built for waiting rather than comfort. My father is there when we arrive, already seated, Serra beside him, both of them dressed with a formality I have not seen from either since the day I left Ironve
Last Updated: 2026-10-25
Chapter: CHAPTER 96Two days after we deliver the folder to my father, Vael finds a different target, which tells me more clearly than anything else could that he understands exactly how much danger he is now in.Mira comes to find me at the mess hall, and I know before she says a word that something has shifted, because Mira does not interrupt meals for small things. She sits across from me, sets her tray down without eating from it, and waits until the two candidates beside us finish their conversation and drift toward the door.Vael spoke to me this morning, she says. Alone. He made sure of that first.I set my fork down. What did he say.He was very careful about it, she says. No direct threats. Nothing that would look like a threat if someone else repeated it back to him in a hearing. He mentioned that my father's elevation this season has made him a great many enemies, more than my father realizes, and that men in his position sometimes find their support eroding in ways that look, from the outside
Last Updated: 2026-10-24
Chapter: CHAPTER 95My father's study light is already on when we arrive, the door open the small deliberate distance he has been leaving it since Bren went to him, an invitation he has never had to voice aloud.He looks up when the four of us file in, and I watch him read the room the way he reads every room, cataloguing faces before words, and something in his expression tightens when he registers the folder in Mira's hands and the particular gravity all of us are carrying.What happened, he says.I do not sit. I stand in front of his desk the way I have stood in front of it my whole life, waiting for verdicts I was never allowed to argue, except this time I am the one bringing the evidence, and the weight of that reversal steadies me more than I expect it to.Commander Vael approached me twice this week, I say. The second time, he told me my mother's retirement from training was not voluntary. That someone pressured her into it. Someone who was not you.My father goes very still, the specific stillnes
Last Updated: 2026-10-22
Chapter: CHAPTER 94Kade listens to the whole of it without interrupting, which is its own kind of answer, because Kade interrupts when he thinks something can be resolved quickly and stays silent when he understands it cannot.When I finish, he is quiet for a long moment, turning a training baton over in his hands without seeming to notice he is doing it.He would not say that without something to back it, Kade says finally. Vael does not deal in unverifiable claims. It is not his style. If he told you the pressure was applied by someone other than your father, he has documentation, or access to documentation, that supports it.Then we find it first, I say. Before he decides how to use it against me, or against my father, or against whoever this actually is.Kade looks at me for a long moment, and something in his expression shifts, not surprise exactly, more the recognition of a decision already made settling into place.We will need Mira, he says. Her father's standing gives her access to compound adm
Last Updated: 2026-10-20
Chapter: CHAPTER 93He waits four days before he approaches again, which I understand now, after Kade's account of him, is deliberate. Patience is not a virtue for Vael. It is a tool, the same as anything else, and he wields it the way I wield the redirect chain, without wasted motion.He finds me this time not at the training field but in the administration corridor, near the records office, where I have gone to file an updated equipment request for the final weeks before the Trials. I do not hear him approach, which unsettles me more than it should, since Raya usually catalogues footsteps before I am consciously aware of them. He has the particular gift of some very confident people, the ability to occupy a space without disturbing the air in it.Candidate Cole, he says.I turn, and I keep my expression even, the way Kade and I discussed. Patient. Undecided. Not closed.Commander Vael.I understand you have been asking questions about me, he says, and there is nothing hostile in the observation, only a
Last Updated: 2026-10-19
LOGIN
