The throne room hadn’t changed...not in stone or glass or the high, arched ceilings that still groaned with memory...but something in the air had.It wasn’t incense or blood this time.It was Jasmine.She stood before them barefoot, a sheer mantle of silver smoke draped over her shoulders and nothing beneath it but skin and intention. The floor had been swept clean after the war, but the scent of what had happened still lingered in the cracks… just like her.The Court waited.Old Alphas. New soldiers. Rogues made tame. Women who had once been chained.Roger stood at her side—not in front, not behind. His bruises were still fresh, his lip still split from the night she reminded him how submission could be beautiful if it was chosen.She didn’t sit on the throne. She stood beside it.Let them wonder if she would ever need to sit.Let them burn.A low murmur rippled through the gathered wolves, thick with expectation and unease. Jasmine raised one hand. Silence rolled in like smoke.She
They tried to put her in white.Jasmine stood before the grand mirror... shattered now, cracked like an omen... and stared at the dress someone had dared lay across the bed. Pure silk. Pale. Virginal. As if the past two hundred days of war, of heat, of teeth in her throat and power in her hips, hadn’t happened.She ran her fingers along the fabric.Then let it fall to the ground like a dead thing.She didn’t need silk to be sacred.She didn’t need white to be worthy.When she stepped out into the hall, barefoot, blood still dried beneath her nails, a gown of deep crimson wrapped around her body like hunger made flesh, no one dared stop her.The pack was waiting.And they were starving.The throne room smelled of wolves and ash, the air still thick with the scent of the bodies they’d burned. Soot coated the marble columns. The old banners had been torn down, replaced with rough fabric dyed in shades of wine and rust. Her color. Her claim.Eyes turned as she entered. Dozens of them. Alp
They said the coronation would happen at dusk.But dusk came and went... and Jasmine did not arrive.The court waited—tight-lipped, coiled, dressed in mourning-black and expectation. Candles burned down to stubs. Goblets remained untouched. The throne at the center of the long obsidian hall sat draped in velvet, vacant. Too many eyes flicked to it and then away.A queen who kept them waiting was a queen they feared.Outside, the winds howled through the stone bones of Blackfang’s keep. Smoke coiled up from torches, refusing to rise clean. The air was wrong. Wild. As if something in it remembered teeth.Roger stood at the far end of the chamber, his arms crossed over his chest, blood still crusted beneath his fingernails from the night before. His jaw was locked. His body, bruised and burning from Jasmine’s touch, carried itself like it had been marked from the inside out.And maybe it had.Because he felt it too.The change.The shift.A hum beneath his skin that didn’t come from his
The fire had long since burned out. All that remained were the embers—simmering, stubborn, hot in a way that stayed in the bones long after the flames had stopped trying to devour the sky.Jasmine stood at the edge of it all. The courtyard, the blood, the silence that came after a pack had screamed themselves hoarse. Smoke clung to her hair. Her robe was open, her skin streaked in ash and sweat and grief. There was no one left to seduce. No one left to fight.Only him.Roger sat on the steps like a war beast too tired to bare his teeth. His shirt was ripped open, chest rising and falling in shallow breaths, wounds healing beneath blood that refused to dry. The silver in his hair caught the moonlight. His mouth—usually curled in something cruel or cocky—was soft now. Slack. Human.Jasmine walked to him without sound.Not like prey.Not like a queen.Just a woman who had finally stopped running.He didn’t look up when she sank to her knees in front of him, didn’t move when her fingers b
The fire was still burning.Not in the halls. Not in the trees. But inside Jasmine. In the cracks of her ribs. In the soft space behind her eyes where memories were supposed to sleep. It roared quiet and cruel. And she carried it like perfume.The floor of the throne room was soaked. Not with blood. But with breath—held, broken, spent. The council had scattered after the claiming, their arousal and fear still clinging to the walls like sweat. Jasmine hadn’t spoken to any of them.She hadn't needed to.They already knelt.But now, the moon was low... and something wasn’t right.Not with the air. Not with the silence. Not with the hollow chill that slid down her spine like a ghost dragging fingers made of ice.She didn’t wait for warning.She ran.Barefoot. Through the stone halls of Blackfang’s court, through the heat and echo of its sleeping bones. Her robe fluttered behind her like a wound still bleeding silk. No one stopped her.Not when they saw her face.It was Roger who met her a
The battlefield was already cooling when she saw him fall.Not in surrender.Not in death.But in the kind of collapse that breaks something permanent.Roger didn’t cry out. He didn’t scream. He hit the earth the way mountains do when they finally remember gravity. Hard. Slow. Final.The wolves were still howling, still huddled and licking wounds or limping toward each other like survivors of some forgotten god’s wrath. Jasmine had been walking back to the shattered stone ring, barefoot and blood-drunk, her pulse still singing in her wrists. And then—She turned.And the world went silent.There he was. Bent in the waist. Blood leaking from beneath his ribs like something sacred. One knee in the dirt. One hand pressed into the ground like it might keep him tethered to the living.He looked up at her, and there was nothing regal in his face. Nothing cruel. Just a man who had given everything and hadn’t noticed it until now.Jasmine didn’t run.She walked.Slow.Like every step was a de