BLOODLINE

He felt her before he saw her.Not the smell.That came later.Pine and ozone and something that made his wolf go from dormant to deafening in a single inhale.Before that, there was pressure.A finger pressed to a bruise.At 4:31 PM, she'd still been three miles outside the town line.And he'd stopped mid-sentence in a meeting with his Beta and said:"We're done."No one argued.They never did.But this time the silence had a different texture.Careful.Watchful.And Kael had felt his Beta's eyes on the back of his neck as he walked out of the room without explanation.He didn't offer one.---He knew what it was.His mother had described it once:Like gravity reversing.Like the world deciding it has a new center.What she hadn't mentioned was the threat underneath.The way his instincts would scream *mine* while his mind catalogued all the ways this woman could be used against him.A mate was a vulnerability.The oldest one.Every enemy he'd made in fifteen years of leading this pac

The note was written in his father's hand.Kael stood in Selena's empty room.She'd gone out.Some errand that would end with her learning too much too fast.He stared at the paper that had been slipped under her door.The words were precise.Unhurried.No signature.It didn't need one.*Stop asking.**For his sake.*His father had been dead for twelve years.---He found the scent in the hallway.Old paper.Cedar.Something beneath it, faint but unmistakable.The particular musk of someone who spent too much time in the archives.Breathing the dust of records no one was meant to read.*Elias.*Not his father.His uncle.The family archivist.The one who had never forgiven Kael's mother for being human.Who had watched from the edge of the fire and said nothing.His wolf stirred.Not anger.Something older and more precise.The instinct to protect what was his.Even from his own blood.Especially from his own blood.---He tracked the scent to the east wing of the old house.The part n

I brought the knife.Not a large one.A folding blade, three inches, legal in forty states.I told myself it was for the walk through the forest.For the dark.For any creature that might mistake me for prey.I didn't believe me.I brought it because some part of me — the part that still filed things under *evidence* and *rational risk assessment* — knew I was walking toward something more dangerous than wolves.---The house found me before I found it.I'd been walking for ten minutes.Following a path that wasn't marked.Trusting the pull in my chest like a compass I couldn't see.The forest thickened.Then opened.And there it was.Three stories of dark wood and older stone.Windows lit against the black trees like something from a story I'd been told before I had words to understand it.The door was open.Not wide.A crack.An invitation.A test.I touched the knife in my pocket.Stepped inside.---The hallway smelled of him.Not the pine and lightning of the forest.Something de

I do not sleep.The knife is under my pillow, the new note is on the bedside table, and the questions are a hive in my skull. *Ask him about the woman in 1893. Ask him why she burned.* I stare at the ceiling until the gray light of dawn creeps through the curtains, and then I make my decision. If Kael will not tell me what I am, I will find the truth myself.The Blackwood house is quiet when I arrive, the morning mist still clinging to the eaves like breath. I do not go to the front door. I go to the side entrance, the one that leads to the east wing, and find it unlocked—or rather, the lock has been forced recently, the wood splintered around the bolt as if someone has been using this passage regularly. Elias. The archivist who moves through dust and history.The east wing smells of cedar and old paper, the same scent I caught on his clothes, but underneath it, faint and fading, is Kael’s scent—pine and ozone and the metallic promise of storms. I follow it like a thread through a lab

The door splintered inward, and Kael filled the frame—gold eyes, clawed hands, the wolf barely sheathed in human skin. He scanned the room in one sweep, a predator assessing threat, and when his gaze landed on me, the gold flared, then banked to something like fear.I was on the floor.I didn't remember falling. One moment I'd been standing at the window, watching the moon, and the next the world had tilted, my knees hitting the carpet with a force that jarred my teeth. The pain wasn't in my body. It was in my blood—a burning, stretching sensation, as if my veins had been threaded with hot wire."Selena." He crossed the room in two strides, dropping to his knees beside me. His hands hovered over my shoulders, afraid to touch. "What—""I saw him," I said. My voice sounded distant, underwater. "In the glass. Marcus. He was looking back at me, but his eyes were wrong. They were—" I stopped, the image fracturing, escaping like smoke. "Something's happening to me. The air tastes like coppe