로그인Arden’s/Aria’s POVThe moonwraiths circled the ancient root, their forms shifting like smoke in the predawn gloom, I could not feel my fingers. My leg was a fire, but the rest of me was turning to stone I was going to die here, huddled behind a log, and Luma would die because I failed.One of the wraiths drifted closer, my breath slowed as my mind worked for ideas while my eyes darted searching for something. Anything — then it spoke, it did not speak with a voice the words formed inside my mind, cold and clear as ice cracking.“You persist,” it whispered into my soul. “Why?” my teeth chattered as I forced the thought out. “My aunt.”“Flesh and blood a temporary tie, it will break. All things break.” The wraith’s presence felt like the void between stars. “We were sentinels once guardians of bonds, of the threads between souls. We witnessed the first mate-bond woven by the moon we remember its song.”Another wraith slid closer, the cold deepening. “Then came the severers, they used ma
Kai’s POVThe silence was the worst part.The bond was gone but my soul kept reaching for it. A limb trying to grasp a ghost every second was a fresh discovery of the emptiness a new kind of pain, her absence was a hole in the world, a constant cold draft on the inside of my ribs. The academy was in ruins, the air thick with the smell of smoke and blood and grief. My body moved through the aftermath like a king surveying a broken kingdom but my mind was trapped in that room under the blood moon in the silence after the severing.We defended the walls. We saved who we could Malrick’s wolves retreated with the dawn, their job done not to conquer but to cripple to distract. They took Luma, they broke us and they left the wounded. The dead were my responsibility. I gave orders, my voice sounded flat dead. The cadets looked to me for strength. I had none. I was a shell echoing with her absence.Finn found me in the courtyard his face streaked with soot and tears. He is gone alpha, we lost
Arden / Aria’s POVMy feet moved but my heart did not, it was a cold dead weight in my chest. The bond that connected our souls was severed… silence where there should have been music, empty space where there should have been him. I walked away from Kai, from the screams, from the academy and I did not look back, I could not.. the note burned in my mind, a brand on my thoughts_Come alone little wolf__The Ironwood__Three days__Or I’ll send her back to you in pieces__Aunt Luma_He had my aunt, the only family I had left… the woman who saved me and believed in me, who armed me — he had her and he would break her piece by piece until I came. I knew it was a trap I knew it was a blade waiting for my throat but some choices are not choices at all, they are inevitabilities written in blood.I did not take the main paths I slipped into the forest like a ghost, like the boy I once pretended to be, the woods were quiet—too quiet. The normal sounds of night were gone, swallowed by a thick
Kai’s POVI’ve heard of phantom limbs. How a soldier could lose an arm but still feel it, how one could still reach for things with fingers that no longer existed. I used to pity them, imagine the frustration and grief of reaching for what isn’t there.But now I understand.Only that this was worse.Mine was a phantom soul.Aria laid beneath me, her chest rising and falling too quickly, pupils wide with the same terror clawing its way up my spine. She was right here. Right beneath me. I could see her, touch her. Hear her breathing.But I couldn’t feel her. Not a whisper of her through the bond. Not the faintest pulse of the golden thread that had held us together. Not her pain or her joy. Not even the bond tugging at us, leaping in joy. It was cut. Silenced. Severed.I rolled off her, my limbs trembling as the aftershocks of our release twisted into something cold and wrong. “Aria—”She jerked upright, clutching the sheet around her like armor. “I can’t feel you.” Her voice cracked.
Aria’s POVThe blood moon hung fat and red in the sky, painting our room in bruised shades of crimson and shadow. Even the air felt strange—thicker, charged, humming with something ancient. I should have known. I should have felt the warning in my bones the way prey senses a predator lurking just beyond the tree line.But I felt nothing except him.Kai stood by the window, his shirt discarded, the bandages finally removed. His body was a map of healing—pink scars tracing the poison’s path, each one a reminder of how close I’d come to losing him. He was thinner, his cheekbones sharper than before, but strength pulsed beneath his skin, coiling like a sleeping storm waiting to wake.“You’re staring,” he said without turning. There was a smile in his voice, soft and teasing.“I’m allowed to stare at my mate,” I said, moving toward him. The word still felt new. Fragile. Dangerous. Mate. Mine.He turned then—and the sight of him stole the breath from my lungs. The moonlight caught his eyes,
Malrick's POV The silence in my northern stronghold was not peaceful... it was a clenched fist the stone walls absorbed sound, warmth and light reflecting only my own growing fury—the failure of the duel, the humiliation of her public rejection —the smug alliance of Thorn and SilverbaneIt was an itch beneath my skin, a poison in my blood as I sat in the high-backed chair, carved from the bone of a rival alpha, my fingers tracing the grooves of old victories that now tasted like ash This girl. Aria, she was supposed to be a key... a quiet tool to unlock the Silverbane territories and then be placed on a shelf, instead she had become a weapon turned and used against me and that Thorn boy he had stolen what was mine, with or without a mate bond she was mine. Ordinary methods have failed... the academy is now a hive buzzing with their newfound unity I need something older, something absolute. After few nights in the vaults beneath the keep, where the air was thick with the dust of fo







