Novels by Didi's Pen

Lyra's POVI found him in the corridor outside his study.He was alone, which was unusual at this hour; normally there was at least one of his wolves nearby, or Gareth with something requiring attention. Tonight the corridor was quiet, and he was standing at the window at the far end of it, looking out at the dark grounds below with the particular stillness of someone whose thoughts were somewhere they hadn't finished with yet.He heard me coming and turned."The hand," I said when I reached him. "At dinner. You said it was a necessary signal.""It was," he said.I looked at him. "Was it?"The corridor was very quiet.He held my gaze for a moment, and I watched something move behind his eyes, the specific quality of a man looking at a question he has already looked at and has not yet decided what to do with.He didn't answer.I let it go. Not because I believed the explanation; we both knew the explanation was technically true and substantially incomplete, the same way because the que

Lyra's POVThey arrived at noon.I heard the horses first—more of them than the messenger had suggested, which told me that Isolde had decided at some point between sending word and crossing the border that this visit warranted a larger show of presence than she had originally indicated. That was probably deliberate. Most things Isolde did were deliberate.I was standing in the main entrance hall with Kael when they came through the gates.Isolde descended from her carriage with the unhurried grace of a woman who had never in her life needed to rush toward anything because things had always arranged themselves to wait for her. She looked exactly as she always looked—composed, elegant, warmly purposeful, the expression of someone arriving somewhere she had every right to be.Ronan came after her.He looked different from the ceremony hall. The composed certainty he had carried on that dais was still there, but something underneath it had shifted—a restlessness in the way he held himsel

Lyra's POVI sat at the writing desk in my room with the letter for a long time before I opened it.Not because I was afraid of what it said. More because once I read it, I couldn't unread it, and right now the envelope was still just an object. The moment I broke the seal, it became something I had to decide how to feel about.Then I opened it.Elara's handwriting was the same as it had always been: precise, slightly slanted to the right, the handwriting of someone who had been drilled in penmanship and taken it seriously.She had written two pages.The letter did not begin with an apology.It began with, "I don't expect you to want to hear from me. I wrote anyway because I think you deserve to know the truth of it, even if you choose to do nothing with what I tell you." I read that twice before I kept going.She told me about Queen Isolde. Not the version of Isolde that existed in public, composed, queenly, and politically immaculate, but the version that had come to Elara privatel

Lyra's POVHe came to find me the next day.That was the first unusual thing. In the two weeks I had been at Blackthorne, Kael had never sought me out before midday. Our interactions happened at meals or in passing, or when I went looking for him with something specific to say. He did not come to me.He knocked on the door of my chambers at the hour after breakfast, and when I opened it, he was already moving."Walk with me," he said.It wasn't a question, but it wasn't quite a command either. It was the tone he used when something needed to be discussed and he had already decided where.I followed him.He took me to the small study off the west corridor, not his main study, the one he used for official work, but a smaller room with two chairs and a low table and a window that looked out over the inner courtyard. The kind of room that said this was a conversation, not a briefing.He closed the door and remained standing."Queen Isolde is coming to Blackthorne," he said.I looked at hi

Kael's POVMy wolf had not been still since the night she arrived.I'd managed it the way I managed most things: through discipline, through routine, through keeping enough distance between what I felt and what I allowed myself to act on so that the gap became something I could live inside. It was not comfortable. It was functional, which was the only standard I had held myself to for the past four years.Functional was enough.It had to be enough.I sat at my desk in the hour before dawn with Isolde's letter in front of me and the rest of the Keep quiet around me, and I did what I had been doing since the day I brought Lyra Ashbourne through my gates. I worked. I reviewed correspondence. I built the kind of careful, documented picture of a political situation that allowed me to act on it when the moment arrived.I didn't think about the way she had looked at me across the dinner table three nights ago when I asked her what she had wanted before all of this.I didn't think about the f

Lyra's POVThe question was still sitting with me the next morning.What did you want before all of this?I had gone to bed without answering it and woken up no closer to one. That bothered me more than I wanted to admit, not because the question was unfair, but because I had spent so many years being certain about what I wanted that the absence of an answer felt like discovering a room in a house you thought you knew completely.I got dressed, pushed it to the back of my mind, and went to find Kael.He was in the study off the east corridor, standing at the large table with a map spread open in front of him. One of his senior wolves stood across from him, pointing at something near the northern border. They both looked up when I appeared in the doorway.Kael said something quiet to the man, who rolled the map and left."I want a formal role," I said, stepping into the room. "Something functional. Something that puts me inside this pack rather than beside it."Kael looked at me. "Not