LOGINRhiannon's PovSilver mist where I'd been standing. His strike passed through it — I felt the displaced air of it moving through me like cold water and then gone.I pulled myself back together behind him.He was already turning. Tracking the movement without sight, with something older and more patient than sight. I was moving when he turned — every strike placed where it needed to be, nothing wasted, claws finding the gap between armor plates across his back.Deep.He made no sound. One step forward was all he gave — just one — and I understood from the way he took it that very few opponents had ever earned that much.Underneath the fight, at the edge of my awareness, the bond hummed with Darius holding position at the bottom of the stairs. Steady. Trusting. A warmth that had nothing to do with the cold corridor and everything to do with two people who had found their way back to each other. It settled something in me that the fight itself couldn't reach."You're fighting like three
Rhiannon's POVThe first floor of the fortress smelled like centuries of violence that had long since stopped surprising anyone.We moved in single file through a corridor narrow enough that our shoulders brushed both walls. Real torchlight — flame, not magic — threw shadows that jumped in patterns designed to make the eye expect shapes that weren't there.I kept my eyes on what was real.Stone floor. Smooth. Ancient. Worn clean by centuries of foot traffic with nothing left to catch a boot on.Nyx led. Then Sera. Then Marcus. Then me. Darius at the rear, watching everything we'd passed.We moved in total silence. First intersection — Nyx checked both directions, signaled left. Second corridor. Third. The fortress was a maze of deliberate complexity, original monastery architecture buried under two centuries of paranoid renovation. Walls built inside walls. Passages blocked and rerouted. A building reshaped by something with unlimited time and unlimited suspicion.We had the original
The tunnel forced single file.Sera went first, her small violet light preceding her like a held breath. Then Marcus. Then Nyx. Then me.Darius came last, pulling the stone mostly closed behind us.The mountain sealed around us.I'd expected the pressure to ease once we were inside, away from the open slope. It didn't. If anything it intensified — concentrated now, channeled through the narrow passage, old magic soaked into the rock itself over two centuries of Malachar's occupation above.It pressed at my depleted reserves differently than it had outside. Outside it had been diffuse. Atmospheric. A general wrongness.In here it was specific. Probing. Like it was looking for something to push against and finding my burned-out reserves and pressing there. Not aggressively. But persistently.My wolf didn't like it.It moved inside me in tight circles. Pacing. The way it did when something was wrong and I wasn't letting it respond. I felt its frustration as a physical thing — tension acr
Rhiannon's POVThe mountain was alive.Not literally. But close enough.Every step up the eastern slope felt like walking into something aware. The air thickened as we climbed — not with cold, though it was cold, breath misting and fingers numbing inside gloves — but with pressure. Like the mountain itself was exhaling against us. Ancient wards layered over centuries pressing outward, pushing back, saying leave in a language that bypassed thought and went straight to instinct.I pushed through it. Kept moving.The killing wards were higher. At the fortress walls. At the main entrance where Malachar's magic was concentrated and maintained and fed.Down here it was just persuasion. Just the mountain making its preferences known.I ignored its preferences.Nyx led us in a wide arc across the slope. The route she'd memorized from the Archives documents kept us below the ward boundary — barely. I could feel the edge of it above us. A line in the air where discomfort would become something
The forest pressed close around us. That wrongness in the air. That sense of being watched.Twenty-five days of carrying this weight. Of loving him and hating him and needing him and resenting that need. Of understanding why he'd done what he'd done and still feeling the scar of it.Twenty-five days of telling myself forgiveness was weakness.And now we were forty miles from a vampire fortress. Possibly hours from death. Moving toward an impossible mission to rescue the child we'd made together.The child we'd raised apart because he'd been too afraid to trust me with the truth.The child who called for me.Who also called for his papa.Who deserved parents who were whole. Who weren't carrying five years of open wounds into a fight that needed everything they had."If I don't forgive you," I said quietly, "I'll carry it into that fortress. And it'll slow me down. Make me hesitate. Keep me from trusting you when trusting you might be the only thing that saves Soren."Darius said nothin
Rhiannon's POVWe left at midnight.No ceremony. No speeches. No tearful goodbyes from the pack.Just five people slipping into darkness, moving north toward the Carpathians.Thorne watched us leave from the packhouse steps. Arms crossed. Expression unreadable. He'd spent the entire final day arguing against the mission, cataloguing every way it could go wrong.Then spent that same evening sharpening our weapons personally.That was Thorne.Cade said nothing. Just gripped my shoulder once, briefly, before stepping back."Bring him home," he said."I will."Marcus led us out. Then Sera. Then Nyx. Then me.Darius fell into step beside me as Crescent Moon disappeared behind the tree line.Neither of us spoke.The first hour was silence.We moved fast. Forest floor soft underfoot. No moon yet — it would rise later, around three in the morning, giving us a window of true darkness to approach the mountain unseen.I focused on breathing. On moving quietly. On saving energy for what waited at
The Female Bloodletter's POVThe smoke form was legend. Myth. A theoretical transformation that maybe three Chimeras in recorded history had achieved, and all of them had been ancient when they'd done it. Centuries old. Masters of their power.The Phantom was thirty at most. She shouldn't have acce
Rhiannon's POVThe first week, I didn't sleep.Every time I closed my eyes, panic seized me. What if Soren stopped breathing? What if something went wrong?I checked him constantly—pressed my hand to his tiny chest, watched his face in lamplight for any sign of distress."You need to rest," Nyx sai
Rhiannon's POVThe first false labor hit at dawn.I woke to pain—sharp and breathtaking—radiating from my lower back around to my belly. My entire abdomen contracted, hard as stone.I gasped, clutching the sheets."Nyx!" My voice came out strangled.She appeared instantly, already awake and alert.
Rhiannon's POVThe rogues found me on a morning when the mist hung thick between the trees.I was hunting—practicing the stalking techniques Nyx had been teaching me. Panther form, moving silent through the underbrush, tracking a rabbit.Then the wind shifted.Wolf. Multiple wolves. And their scent







