Chapter: Chapter 208AllissaFinn flicked a fleck of black off his cheek and considered the carcass. “Well,” he said. “We just killed dinner.”Ivan, still a bear, swung his head around and made a low, unhappy sound.“Fire salamander,” Finn went on, cheerful now, as if the smell were not trying to climb down all our throats. “Good eating, if you boil it three times over, throw out the first two pots, and you do not mind that the third still tastes like a chimney swept it.” He looked it over one more time. “Okay … nobody is going to eat that.”“Nobody is going to eat that,” Dayanara agreed from the back, flat as a plank.That was when the ceiling answered.
Last Updated: 2026-10-14
Chapter: Chapter 207Allissa“He took my coin and gave me riddles. That is what has me sour.” Finn had been chewing on it since we broke camp, and from the look of him he meant to keep chewing the whole day. “A whole purse, Allissa. Handed to a toothless old man who looked me in the eye and told me the door was south. South. The fire strapped to your ribs tells me that much, and it has never once asked me for payment.”Hollis laughed. It was not a warm sound. Nothing about Hollis ever was. “He knew more than south.”“Then why did he not say it?”“Because he is not a fool, vampire. You walked into his shop smelling like people who mean to find the one door the rest of the world bled to seal shut.” She trotted ahead of us, light over the loose rock, as though it could not touch her feet. “Of course he knew. He was simply never going to tell you. We cannot lose our door. It is the last one standing. He does not know what you mean to do with it, and a door you cannot vouch for is a door you keep quiet. That i
Last Updated: 2026-10-14
Chapter: Chapter 206AllissaI woke warm, loose, better than I had any right to feel, with Lyra’s pebble a hard knot of heat under my cheek. Darren was already up across the room, half dressed, half packed, watching me with a tender look in his eyes.Hollis stood in the open doorway. That was the first weird thing. Hollis did not come to our doors. She kept her distance like it cost her to lose an inch of it. And here she was, over the threshold, staring at me like I had sprouted a second head.“What did you do?” she said.“Good morning to you too.” I sat up and dragged the blanket with me. “Do about what?”“Last night.” She came a step into the room. “Last night you were a bonfire. I felt you through two floors and a wall. I lay there and listened to you burn, and I thought, this is the night it gets away from her. This is the night she takes the inn down with her inside it.” Her eyes went over me like she was hunting the trick in it. “And this morning there is nothing. You are banked down to coals. You
Last Updated: 2026-10-13
Chapter: Chapter 205AllissaWe came down out of the mountain the next afternoon, and there was a town.Warmwell sat in a green fold between two ridges, and it steamed. That was the first thing I saw. Steam, rising off a dozen places at once, because the whole town was built over hot springs and had long since made its peace with smelling faintly of eggs. After the ravine and the giant and a night on cold rock, it looked like the finest city in the world.Ivan saw the bathhouse before he saw anything else.“There,” he said. It was the first thing out of his mouth all day that wasn’t about his own smell. “That one. I am going there. Do not follow me. Do not speak to me until I am clean.” He was already walking.“He’s going to boil himself,” Lyle snickered, watching him march off like it was a pilgrimage. “He’s going to get in and never come out. We’ll have to leave him here. A monument. Here lies Ivan. Finally clean.”“But in the end he will still smell.” Finn laughed.Finn got us rooms at an inn called th
Last Updated: 2026-10-08
Chapter: Chapter 204AllissaWe made camp upwind. Very far upwind.Ivan sat downwind of the rest of us, which was nobody’s choice but his own body’s. He had found a place to rinse off but the smell was still there. Dayanara had collected herbs for him to sleep with that would absorb the scent. Then she started the fire. Lyle continued to pop out a few jokes, which Finn was loving. Darren settled behind me with his legs on either side of mine and his chin on my shoulder, and for a little while it was almost easy.Then Dayanara reached for my hands. “Palms.”She turned them over in hers and read the heat off them like other people read a page. Tonight she was quiet longer than I liked.“Climbing,” she said at last. “Slowly.&rdqu
Last Updated: 2026-10-04
Chapter: Chapter 203AllissaDayanara sagged. Lyle caught the whole of her weight.“He went in,” I said. “Under the mountain. He went in.”“Then we go in after him,” Darren said, and there was no arguing left in his voice.We found a way down that didn’t kill us.By the time we reached the gorge floor, the light was going. The seam stood in front of us and cold river air poured out of it. The water ran in and disappeared. There was a lip of dry stone along one side, just wide enough for feet, and we took it single file with our hands on the wall.Finn went first now, because Finn sees where the rest of us can’t, and suddenly Hollis was there too. She came up behind him withou
Last Updated: 2026-10-04
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 212Darien“He is young and he is unreasonably stubborn, so yes.” She lifted the edge of the dressing, looked, put it back. “He will not use that arm properly for a long time, and he will not like being told so.”I stood over him a while.Four nights ago I listened to this man confirm on a phone that everything was quiet, and I spent the rest of that call with my beast moving under my skin because of the way his voice sounded when he said my mate’s name. I have not changed my mind about him. I am never going to change my mind about him.But he put his body between a demon and Leah’s brother, and he is lying here with his chest opened up for it. And that is something I will always keep in mind about him.“Whate
Last Updated: 2026-10-14
Chapter: Chapter 211Darien“Thousands of them. Out of the west, over ground you can’t bring a column over, in formation. He was at the front of it.”“He wouldn’t take a phone call from you.”“He would not.”“And he came three hundred miles to bleed for my brother’s pack.” Her voice had gone strange. “Darien, what does that mean?” I know what she was saying without saying it. This was not a bad man. You didn’t do something like that just to gain favor with another pack.“I have no idea. I intend to find out before he’s off this ground.”
Last Updated: 2026-10-13
Chapter: Chapter 210DarienAs we approached the ridge, we saw it … smoke. I had been braced for it since the mountain, but bracing for it didn’t stop the way my stomach turned seeing the sight. Knowing it would be there didn’t stop the hope that it wasn’t. That hope was gone now. And the smoke … was not hot. This was cold smoke, hours dead, the flat gray smell of a fire somebody had already beaten out.I felt my heart rate pick up as I braced for the scene we were coming up on. Keanu came up over the last rise and tipped his wing, and I looked down at Moonridge.My eyes widened in shock. It was standing.The perimeter wall had gone in two places and both breaches were stuffed with vehicles and timber, parked nose to nose by somebody who had done it on purpose. Floodlights on poles. A generator hammering away somewhere behind the lodge. The lodge itself had a hole punched through its roof and most of its windows gone. The row of houses behind it had come through with scorch up their walls and their doors
Last Updated: 2026-10-13
Chapter: Chapter 209Darien“Five days.”“Yes.”“Darien …”“I know exactly what I’m telling you, Leah. I’m telling you I bet and I lost, and now I am five days from a fight that will be finished by morning.” I made myself say the whole of it, because she was going to work it out in about nine seconds anyway and she deserved to hear it in my voice instead of her own head. “There is nothing I can do from this mountain. Nothing. I can drive south, and I will drive south, and I will be too late, and I want you to know that I know it.”She was quiet for a moment.“I sent Keanu,” she said.I st
Last Updated: 2026-10-07
Chapter: Chapter 208DarienAnton missed his call on the third night.The first two had come in at the hour he promised, near enough to the minute that I had started setting my watch by it. The first night he was bored and said so. The second night he put Shane on for a moment, and he politely confirmed everything was quiet, and I pretended not to hear the resentment in his voice as he spoke to me. I understood it, though. I’d be sour too if I lost Leah. Still … knowing he was sour meant he still wanted Leah, and I felt my beast stir just thinking about it. Anton came back and asked whether the north road was as bad as he remembered and told me it got worse past the second ridge.It did get worse past the second ridge. We were past it by the third evening, the column strung out along a road that had been built by people who did not own vehicles, with Ashfell a day ahead of us and smoke in the sky over it that we had been able to see since noon.I sat on the hood of the lead car at the top of a rise with t
Last Updated: 2026-10-06
Chapter: Chapter 207LeahTempest found me there twenty minutes later and lowered herself onto the step beside me, which took some negotiating, and which she let me help with. That was new. I did not comment on it, because commenting on it would have ended it forever.“I have a question,” she said.“Ask it.”She looked straight out at the hall. “When the baby comes. I want you in the room.”My hands stopped on the teacup.“Keanu will be there,” she went on, “and he will be useless. He will be loud and useless. Maren will be there and I do not know her well. I would like someone in the room who is …” She stopped, and started again, in her flattest voice, which is the voice she uses when a thing costs her. “I would like you there. That is the question.”“Yes.”“I have not finished asking.”“You’ve finished. It’s yes.” I had to work to keep my voice level. “It was yes before you got to the end of it. We are family, Temp. You are my sister.”She nodded once, and kept looking at the hall, and after a moment she
Last Updated: 2026-10-04
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