LOGINAllissaWe planned the hunt in the family war room with only the people we would trust over a cliff edge.North was all we had. North, a boy’s pointing arm, and a pull he described like a rope tied behind his ribs, and every soul at that table had privately done the same brutal math. We needed him … Thorin was the one person who could find Lyra.“A small party,” Darren said. “Fast, quiet, who can move without being seen. Whatever took her cut its own trail out of the sky. It will see an army coming a week away. It will expect an army. It will not see six. I will be part of the group, as well as my queen.” “Majesty, the kingdom cannot risk both crowns on one road. The twins need their mother. Surely—”“I buried that argument in a war,” I said. “If anyone wishes to dig it up, fetch a shovel and start with your own grave.”Anton took the coordination of the kingdoms, the search grids, the river watches, the thousand eyes that would keep sweeping the map behind us. Asta and Toga claimed
AllissaThe room breathed. And into that breath, with the regret of a surgeon, Anton spoke.“Then let me say the ugly thing,” the werebear prince said, “so no one worse says it later. The crowns in this room believe the dragon royals. The territories not part of the kingdoms and the gossip about it will not. Word is already on the roads, a dragon took the lycan princess, and by tomorrow, every village will have decided not to trust dragons. If the delegation moves freely through this castle while the search runs, people thinking like Corven grows by the hour, and the alliance cracks exactly where our enemy struck it.” He turned to Gunnar, and he bowed his head as he said it. “I propose the dragon delegation withdraw to the guest wing under honor guard. Publicly, for their protection. Squall steps back from the visible search. The crowns know the t
AllissaThey convened the war council before midday because I would not wait, and I walked into it knowing the room wanted blood and had already chosen whose.The chamber held every banner of the alliance and every ruler still under our roof, arrayed down the long table in the order the steward’s seating charts had agonized over for a celebration. Now the same chairs held a tribunal. I had not slept, and it showed; grief sat on me like a second skin and I had stopped trying to hide it. I had fed Mira at first light with my hands shaking and my body going through the oldest motions it knew while my mind ran north along an empty sky, and then I had put on the queen the way other women put on armor, because my daughter needed the queen functional and the mother had already spent the night on the floor.The search had not paused to wait for us. Through the chamber’s high windows the sky still carried fliers, harpies and fairy seekers running their grids, and runners came to the doors on t
AllissaThe longest night of my life had no end that I could find. It simply went on, hour after hour, in the cold ruin of my daughter’s bedroom, until the dark outside her window began to gray and I understood that the world intended to have a morning whether my child was in it or not.We had not slept. There was no version of the night in which we slept.I had spent it moving, because moving was the only thing that kept me from coming apart. I checked the twins until Hessa gently took my hands off the cribs. I walked the corridor where the guards had fallen. I went back to Lyra’s room and stood in it and breathed her in, and somewhere past the third or fourth hour, the queen who had held the castle together all evening finally cracked down the middle, and what was left was just Lyra’s mother.“I have to go after her.” I was already moving toward the window, toward the cold sky that had swallowed her, as if I could simply climb out into it and follow. “Right now. Every hour we stand
DarrenI had locked the crowned heads of the known world in my ballroom overnight, and the room I walked back into was a diplomatic catastrophe wearing party clothes.Hundreds of dignitaries in wilted finery, sealed behind my guards since the fireworks. Kings detained like suspects. Alphas separated from their packs, envoys from their escorts, nobody fed properly, nobody told anything, every one of them watching every other one with the arithmetic of fear, and over it all the knowledge, spreading mouth to mouth since midnight, that the princess was gone and the thing that took her had wings.I stopped first at the healers’ hall, because four of my best lay in it and a king owes his fallen his face.They had been carried down from the nursery wing and arranged in clean beds
DarrenI hunted in the shape the Goddess gave me for war.My white lycan poured down the northern lawns with half a kingdom of fur behind me, hundreds of noses, the best trackers alive, and I ran at the front of them with my daughter’s scent thread caught in my teeth and my mind running a parallel hunt I could not call off.Ally, crumpled in the middle of that cold room, with her hands open around nothing.I had seen my mate take a knife meant for her heart. I had seen her stand in chains, stand in fire, stand over me bleeding and dare death itself to push past her. I had never seen her on the floor of our daughter’s bedroom with the sound gone from her and her hands shaped around a weight that was missing, and the image rode my back the whole search like a second ri
“You seem almost like a different person than the one we met in the cave.” I couldn’t help but notice the strength that was pouring out of Eira now. It was more than just finding her mate, right?“This is the real me. I was trained to act submissive and like a servant in front of others. Toril said
We popped out not far from the others, but we were in a strange tunnel that dripped with water. Darren’s hand rested on my hip as he guided me through.“Where is your mom?” Squall asked anxiously as we came around the tunnel bend. Dayanara was beside him, obviously controlling him from going after E
“Mom …” What could I say? I didn’t need to state the obvious, that I was pregnant, but this was the first time she had met Darren. She had left me with Alfred, thinking I would be taken care of there. I walked up to her, and Darren kept his arm around me as he accompanied me. After the trauma he had
Dayanara moved closer to me, and Lyle came with her, still keeping a steady hand on her. Dayanara was on high alert as she held her hand in a defensive position.Look at those eyes. There is no fear. Nothing. They know what we are and look how they stand there confidently. Dayanara’s voice entered







