INICIAR SESIÓN🐺ADRIAN🐺The specific tiredness that moved through me at that sentence was not physical.I felt my mood darken. The last thing I wanted to think about was Esmeralda and her scheming parents and a contract I had never agreed to. My father had made arrangements for me without my consent, had promised me to a woman I did not want, had bound me to a family that only cared about power and status.They thought because we'd been best friends since childhood they could strengthen the family bond by…"Don't ruin what's left of my mood," I said. "Get me out of this room.""You're not healed," he said."Garrick.""The wounds aren't fully closed and the wolfsbane residue is still—""Then I'll heal in my own quarters," I said. "Get me out of this room."He looked at me for a long moment with the expression of a man performing a rapid internal calculation about which argument was worth having and which ones were not, and he arrived at his conclusion the way he usually arrived at it when I used th
🐺ADRIAN🐺She actually shot me.I had known she would, I had counted on her obeying the instruction, had told her not to hesitate and aim for the left chest and fight whatever pull she felt, and she had done all of it with the clean, precise execution of someone who had been training for exactly this kind of moment for years. Three shots. One motion flowing into the next, the specific economy of movement that comes from genuine skill rather than performance. I had watched her through Killian's eyes and seen her pull the arrow and release it and pull the next one before the first had landed, and I had felt all three hit and gone down with the weight of them.What I had not accounted for was the wolfsbane.Feisty little flower.She had coated the arrows. Of course she had. She had come into this pack to kill me and she had maintained the operational details of that objective through everything that had happened between arrival and Winterfell, had kept the wolfsbane on her person throug
⚡GARRICK⚡I knew before the guards finished their report.I knew the moment I counted them coming through the gate and came up one short, and not just any one… the one that mattered, the one whose absence changed everything about what the next days were going to look like for this pack. Ten guards returning without their Alpha, and one servant unaccounted for, and the head guard standing in my study telling me what had happened in Winterfell with the careful, measured delivery of a man who understood that the information he was carrying was significant and was trying not to drop it.I let him finish.I thanked him and dismissed him and waited until the door closed before I sat down behind the desk and pressed both hands flat against the surface and breathed through the specific, cold weight of being the only person in Shadow Pack who understood the full picture of what Adrian walking into Winterfell actually meant.I had grown up with them.Both of them… Adrian and Azrian, the twins,
🪷ISORA🪷I ran out of Asher's room. I pushed the door open so hard it banged against the wall, and I did not stop to close it. I ran out of the guard's wing, my bare feet slapping against the cold stone floor, my breath coming in short sharp gasps that hurt my chest even though the pain was gone.The familiar air of Shadow Pack hit my lungs when I pushed through the outer door. That particular smell, pine and woodsmoke and something older underneath it, the specific combination that existed nowhere else in any territory I had passed through. I had grown to hate that smell. Seven days ago I would have said I hated it with everything I had.Right now It made me desperate.Servants and guards kept looking at me as I ran past them. I saw their faces turn, saw their eyes widen, saw their mouths open to say something I did not stay close enough to hear. But I ignored it. I ran past head maid Margot and Greta without even caring that I was still in my hunt suit from seven days ago. The blac
🪷ISORA🪷The guards left.I watched them go, watched the formation move south down the road we had come in on, and not one of them looked back, and I stood at the edge of the front yard and let them go because arguing with ten wolves who had already decided their Alpha was indestructible was not a conversation I had the energy or the time for.Kira was telling me something different.Not in words—she had not given me words since the one she gave me at the critical moment, the one I had not listened to. She was telling me in the way she told me things that existed below language, in the specific quality of the silence she was keeping, in the weight of the absence she had become inside me since the moon disappeared and the dark came and I woke up on the ground with my hand on my chest and the pain sitting in my sternum like something lodged there.I should be feeling something else right now.I should be happy. I should be celebrating. I had finally killed the monster that killed my pa
🪷ISORA🪷I was lying in a bed.The sheets were soft underneath my fingers, softer than anything I had ever felt before. White sheets, clean and crisp, smelling like lavender and something else, something I could not name. My eyes opened slowly, blinking against the light that streamed through a window I did not recognize.I touched my left chest, pressing my palm against the spot where the pain had been. The pain was gone. There was nothing there but smooth skin and the steady beat of my heart. No ache, no burn, no memory of the arrow that had not been meant for me.What happened to it? Where was I?I sat up and looked around the room. It was large, larger than any room I had ever been in, with high ceilings and dark wood furniture and a fireplace that crackled with flames. The walls were lined with bookshelves, hundreds of books, thousands maybe, their spines gleaming in the firelight.And there was Adrian.He was sitting in a chair against the wall, facing the bed, and the first se
🪷ISORA🪷I was walking out of the forest, my legs moving on autopilot while my mind raced a thousand miles per hour.What actually happened back there?I did not know.I could not make sense of any of it.One moment it was morning, bright and clear. The next, it was nig
🐺ADRIAN🐺Seeing that dead wolf was not normal.The moment my fingers touched its cold fur, the curse tore through me like a wildfire.Pain.Blinding, excruciating pain that started in my chest and spread outward until every nerve ending in my body was screaming.Killian
🪷ISORA🪷I finished making the cookies and juice exactly as ordered—perfectly golden cookies arranged on a silver tray, fresh orange juice in a crystal pitcher. My hands moved mechanically, but my mind was somewhere else entirely.It was like he read my thoughts.How did h
🪷 ISORA 🪷I struggled for air, my hands clawing desperately at his wrist, but Adrian's grip was iron.Unyielding. Merciless.Black spots danced at the edges of my vision. My lungs screamed. My body thrashed uselessly, my feet kicking at nothing but air.But what made it wo







