Evangeline's POVThe door slammed open with a crack that courses through the narrow room. I flinched, my heart leaping into my throat, my breath caught mid-silence. For a moment, the shadows themselves seemed to bend into shape, and then I saw her. Nathalie. She stood framed in the doorway, her presence a storm that pushed the air from the room. Cold light spilled in from the hall, carving sharp lines across her face, dangerous, carved in the kind of angles that warned you not to look too long. “Get up,” she said. Her voice was crisp, carrying the authority of someone who had never once been disobeyed. “We’re leaving.” My body tensed. The bed beneath me was no comfort; it felt like sand collapsing under waves. My throat tightened, words scraping out of me before I even thought them. “Why?” She paused, her steps faltering for the briefest heartbeat. Then she turned her head just enough to fix her eyes on me. The weight of her glare was almost physical. “I bet you know,” she sai
Damien's POV The world hadn’t stopped spinning, though it should have as nurses trickled against my ears but none of it mattered. None of it filled the void where her presence should have been. Evangeline was gone and the truth of it sat on my chest, pressing, crushing, relentless. For a moment, I felt the weight of it drag me down. My lungs refused to obey, my fists trembled against my sides, and the world narrowed until all I could hear was the echo of her voice in memory. Weak. Barely a whisper. Damien… I had sworn to her. Sworn to protect her. Sworn she would never be alone again. Yet here I was, standing in a hospital stripped of her scent, stripped of her warmth. I wanted to tear the walls down brick by brick. To rip the floor apart with my bare hands until I unearthed whoever had dared to touch her. But Edward’s voice cut through the haze. “Damien.” I turned my head slowly, my jaw so tight it ached. He stood at my side, his dark eyes steady but grim. There was tension co
Damien's POVDamien's POV The smell of antiseptic hit me the second I walked through the sliding glass doors. I had barely set foot into the hospital lobby when the silence around me changed. Nurses froze mid-step. A doctor looked up from his clipboard and paled. The tension rolled outward like ripples in water, and I didn’t need Edward’s soft curse at my side to know why. My presence wasn’t subtle. It never had been but I wasn’t here to be subtle. I was here for her, my Evangeline. Her name pulsed like blood in my veins, every syllable sharp enough to carve through my spine We had fought hard, me and Edward, with the dawn clawing at our heels. I hadn’t slept. My mind had replayed it endlessly: her body slack in my arms, the blood soaking my shirt, her lashes trembling before they stilled. The memory of her slipping from me haunted every inhale, every exhale, every damn heartbeat. She was now alive. She had to be. That thought kept me upright, kept me sane. But the momen
Evangeline's POV I was sitting upright, propped against the wall because lying down made me feel too much and for a heartbeat I thought it was the scarred man again, or Elara. Then someone walked in, she was tall, her presence commanding without her having to say a word. Her hair, a rich shade of dark chestnut, fell in waves that brushed her shoulders. Her eyes — sharp were Briar’s eyes, only colder. Where Briar had been all chaos and fire, Nathalie was something steadier. Her clothing was simple yet precise dark fabric that stuck close, stitched with lines that hinted at both elegance and utility. No jewels, no ornamentation, but she didn’t need them. Power stitched to her. For a long moment, she just looked at me and I looked back, unable to move, my breath caught between fear and defiance. Nathalie. She looked very different from what I used to know her as in high school. “So,” she said finally, her voice calm, smooth, almost melodic. “Evangeline” The words weren’t cr
Two days laterEvangeline's POV "You can't reveal to her yet that she's a wolf hunter."I heard a carried on hushed argument between the scarred man and the young woman. I’d been half-asleep, fighting another restless night, when their voices drifted close enough to catch. “You shouldn’t speak it here,” the woman hissed. “If she hears—” “She needs to know sooner or later,” the man replied, voice low but hard. “Secrets rot faster than flesh. Nathalie won’t tolerate delay.” That name. Nathalie. It struck me with a faint spark of recognition, though at first I couldn’t place it. My mind scrambled for fragments, pulling threads through fog until it caught on the one truth that twisted my stomach into knots.Briar had a sister and she had a name. Nathalie.The syllables alone filled me with a creeping dread, because if Briar was darkness, then what did that make her blood? The footsteps faded, their argument dragging away down the corridor but the word lingered in my mind.Few mom
Evangeline's POV The first thing I noticed when I woke up again was silence. My chest rose and fell, uneven, straining against something that felt too still, too wrong.The second thing was the smell. Gone was the antiseptic sting of disinfectant and alcohol swabs.When my eyes opened, the world that greeted me wasn’t white walls. My breath caught in my chest as I blinked hard, trying to piece the strangeness together. This wasn’t the hospital. My fingers twitched against coarse fabric. The sheets beneath me were scratchy, smelling faintly of mildew. The bed sagged unevenly. I tried to sit up, but the weight of my body resisted, my muscles still trembling from weakness. Panic swelled slowly, a creeping tide that I fought to push back. I told myself it was a dream. That I was hallucinating from the drugs, or my mind was spinning illusions in recovery. But then I heard footsteps. They were steady, echoing faintly down a corridor I couldn’t see. The sound grew closer, and closer