Chapter: Chapter 188AllissaThe red had banked when the blow’s work was done, folding itself back down under my skin, and only a faint hot crawl was left in my palms. Finn watched it go with the gravest face I have ever seen him wear. “Later,” was all he said, when Darren looked the question at him. “Tonight is hers. Later, I will tell you what I know, and then we will make a plan.”The Nursemaid stood at the rim of the circle with his empty arms and his finished song and absolutely nowhere in the world left to stand.It was Lyra who solved it for him, because of course it was. She turned around with Thorin’s hand still in hers, imperious, tear-streaked, three years old and issuing decrees, and pointed one small finger at the warden who had sung her through the end of the world. “He’s coming,&
Last Updated: 2026-08-28
Chapter: Chapter 187AllissaI saw it with my own eyes, the thing that had lived between those two children since a ballroom years ago. A line of light ran from my daughter’s outstretched hand straight into Thorin at the circle’s heart, and Lyra’s silver poured down it like water finding a channel. Thorin’s head came up. His hands came up with it, wrapped in her light, and he turned to the sleeping mountain, and he did something none of us knew he could do. That they could do.Crystal rose out of the circle. It climbed her flanks in clear sheets, over the battered wings, up the great neck, closing around the last of the First like ice closing over deep water, smooth and perfect and impossibly gentle, until the whole sleeping length of her lay held inside it, preserved down to the frost on her scales, and the moonlight came through it and lit her from every side.
Last Updated: 2026-08-27
Chapter: Chapter 186AllissaI was already moving. I had been moving since the ward broke, Darren beside me, the two of us crossing the last of that circle toward the Nursemaid and Lyra while the sky came apart overhead. Ten steps away. Then five. Close enough to see Smoke squashed against her chest and her arms already reaching. And the oldest thing alive spent her final unbroken breath on me.I never saw her choose it. Finn did. Finn moved, and for the first time since I’ve known him, the Vampire King was too slow. Something thin and cold as the dark before the first dawn came up off the stones where she lay broken, crossed the circle, and went into me just under the heart.It didn’t hurt. That was the horror of it. It went in like a key.And something inside me that I had never once felt, in all my
Last Updated: 2026-08-26
Chapter: Chapter 185AllissaMy daughter called her monster down out of the sky, and her monster came.The griffin never slowed. It stooped at the circle with its wings shut. Thorin stood in the stirrups the whole way down, ten years old and wrapped in rippling heat. What came off him wasn’t a boy’s fire, and it wasn’t his father’s. It was older than both, and it was furious. It struck the ward from above in the same breath that Lyra’s silver rose to meet it from below.The two lights found each other through the wording like hands finding hands in the dark.The bond between two children answered the ward and wording at once. Nothing was built to argue with that.The ward didn’t flicker this time. It broke. All of it, everywhere at once, and the sound it made breaking shrieked off the mountainside.Thorin came off the griffin’s back before it touched stone. He landed inside the circle between Onyssa and my daughter, small against everything, and he set his feet as he had once set them on a ridge in front
Last Updated: 2026-08-25
Chapter: Chapter 184AllissaThe word went up over the rite, over the wind, over the moon itself as far as my body was concerned, and my daughter came alive in the warden’s arms, both hands reaching over his shoulder with her fingers spread wide, calling for me with her whole small chest while the oldest working in the world tried to sing above her. “MAMA! PAPA! I KNEW IT!” She twisted around to inform the entire mountain, the wardens, the stones, the bleeding sky itself. “SEE? I TOLD YOU!”I pressed my hands against the bend in the light. “I’m here!” The words tore out of me. “Mama’s here, baby! Mama’s RIGHT here!”Darren’s voice came over mine, breaking on the words. “Papa’s here! We came, sweetheart, we’re HERE!” Ancient law stood between our palms
Last Updated: 2026-08-22
Chapter: Chapter 183AllissaI didn’t get to say be careful. I didn’t get to say anything. The goodbyes happen at a run, over your shoulder, half heard.There was no time for speeches. Eira’s hand closed hard on my arm. “Listen for my word.” Then she and Heath headed into the red dark.Heath took Eira and bent away along the terrace walks, toward the circle’s skirt, to get her close enough to reach the rite’s seam. Squall had the western sky, and any breath now he was going to make the whole mountain look at him. And Darren, Finn, and I had the only road my heart would allow. Up the servant ways. To the door of the man who had become an ally to Lyra.The inside of her mountain was built for wings, and we climbed it on feet, and every stair felt like it took ages.Finn took the point, stealthy as the wind. Darren counted the turns behind him in a whisper. Left, then left, then up. Heath’s drilling lived in all three of us now. We had memorized those lefts and rights in our sleep, and tonight our feet moved
Last Updated: 2026-08-21
The Alpha’s Shadow Luna
Leah gave him everything, her trust, her heart, even the future she thought they would share. But Shane's smiles always found her sister, Mary, and the man Leah loved never loved her back. Broken and humiliated, she leaves to the ruthless Northwind Pack, determined to bury the past and build a life where no one can make her feel invisible again.
What she doesn't expect is Darien.
Cold, dangerous, and the Alpha's advisor, Darien is nothing like the wolves she's known. He sees through her walls with unnerving precision, challenges her at every turn, and refuses to let her fade into the background. But Darien carries secrets of his own, and the pull he feels toward Leah doesn't fit into his carefully laid plans.
Caught between a bond she never asked for and a destiny she doesn't understand, Leah must decide: will she guard her heart behind the walls she built to keep her safe, or will she embrace the power rising within her and become the wolf she was always meant to be?
In the North, not everything is what it seems. The Northwind Pack remembers its legends, and some bloodlines refuse to stay buried.
Read
Chapter: Chapter 194KeanuThe stranger was buying apples when I first noticed him.Tempest had sent me down to the village for sour plums, which she had been eating by the basket lately, and I was three stalls away with a paper bag in my hand when something at the edge of my attention snagged and held.He was nothing to look at. A traveling man of middling age in a good plain coat, road dust on his boots, choosing apples one at a time and turning each in his fingers before setting it in the scale. He paid the fruit seller exactly, to the coin. He thanked her. He said something that made her laugh, and she weighed his fruit with the easy shoulders of a woman talking to the least dangerous person she had met all week.And every scale on my body wanted to stand up.I stayed where I was and picked through plums I had already picked through, and I listened the way the druids taught me to listen, past the market noise, down the thin channel of one voice.“… beautiful country,” he was saying. “The light through
Last Updated: 2026-08-28
Chapter: Chapter 193DarienWe fought. It was good work, the kind that empties the head, and he pushed me the way only Cain could push me, all mass and speed and several dirty tricks. I gave him shadow in return, tendrils attacking his flanks while we traded hands in the center, and my powers held. Ten minutes of sustained work, then fifteen, and the well inside me drew down slow and steady instead of draining out the bottom the way it used to.Then he feinted left, came in low and fast on the right, and there was a moment where I saw it happening and knew my body was half a step behind it.So I left.I don’t know how else to describe the first time. The shadow of the wall lay long across the yard behind me, and I needed to not be where I was, and some new instinct reached for that darkness the way a hand r
Last Updated: 2026-08-27
Chapter: Chapter 192DarienTwo silences had been sitting over my map for weeks. One of them broke on a Tuesday.The reports came in with the morning couriers, three of them within an hour of each other, and by the time Cain spread them across the study table we both understood what we were looking at. The southern rogues were moving again. Not the scattered probing from the weeks before the silence. This was different. Two packs on opposite ends of the southern territories hit on the same night, within the same hour, by groups that struck the weakest point of each perimeter and withdrew before any response could form.“Same night,” Cain said, tapping the two reports. “Same hour. A hundred miles apart.”“Which means communication.”“Which means command.” He straightened, arms crossing over his chest. “Rogues don’t have runners, Darien. They don’t have signal lines or timetables. Somebody is moving these groups like pieces on a board, and they’ve stopped caring whether we notice.”I studied the map. The so
Last Updated: 2026-08-26
Chapter: Chapter 191LeahAnton was not.I called him that evening from the chair by the window, and he picked up on the fourth ring instead of the second. That was the first thing that bothered me.“There she is,” he said. “The queen graces me.”“You sound rough.”“I sound like a man who’s been awake a while. There’s a difference.” Something scraped in the background, a chair or a door. “How’s the family? Is the dragon behaving?”“Which one?”“Either. Both. How is mated life treating Keanu?”“She made a rain cloud over Keanu&
Last Updated: 2026-08-23
Chapter: Chapter 190LeahTwo weeks had passed since Keanu and Tempest came home from the forest with matching marks on their necks, and the whole castle had adjusted around them without anyone saying a word.The kitchen started keeping her bitter mountain tea in stock. The gardeners gave up the entire eastern bed, dedicated to her. Someone moved a chair with a proper back into the solarium, because a pregnant woman needs somewhere decent to sit, and nobody ever admitted to doing it.And every morning I woke up with Darien’s arm across my waist and nothing hurting, nothing draining me, nothing left in my blood but me.“You’re doing it again,” he murmured into my hair.“Doing what?”“Grinning at the ceiling like an idiot.”“I’m well.” I rolled over to face him and found his eyes already open. “I’m allowed to grin at whatever I want.”“You are.” He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, and his thumb stayed against my cheek. “Grin away. I’m going to watch.”We stayed in bed longer than two people with a king
Last Updated: 2026-08-22
Chapter: Chapter 189KeanuShe lowered herself down onto my jacket among the ferns and drew me over her, and when I touched her mark, the fresh gold on the side of her throat, she made a sound I had never heard from her.So I did it again.The bond lit like a struck match. I felt her pleasure crash into mine and double back, her gasp arriving in my chest before it left her mouth, and her eyes flew open and locked on mine because she felt it too, all of it, the ache I had carried for months pouring straight into her.“You feel it,” I said.“Keanu …” Her fingers found the silver-violet mark on my neck and pressed, and my whole body jerked. “Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry … I wish—”
Last Updated: 2026-08-20
LOGIN
