Se connecter🐺ADRIAN🐺I was not someone that ate much. I barely ate, maybe once in five days, ever since the servant in my quarters had poisoned me years ago. That was the reason why no one was allowed to cook in my kitchen, why I had my meals brought in from the pack kitchen already prepared and tasted by someone else before they ever reached my table.But everything about Isora was different, and Killian would never allow me to say no to anything she offered. He had been pacing inside my head since she walked through the door with that tray, and he did not shut up until I took the first bite.And her food really tasted good. The meat was tender, the sauce was rich, and the rice was cooked perfectly. It reminded me of meals I had eaten as a child, before everything went wrong."I know she'll taste better," he said in my head, and I put the fork down for a half second and considered what was available to me in terms of making my own wolf stop talking, and came up empty.He was impossible sometim
🪷ISORA🪷Two minutes.That was how long I stood in that room with those three words sitting in the air between us before my brain finished deciding what to do with them. Two minutes of my face doing something I was not fully in control of, of the bond pulling in a direction I was not going to acknowledge."What do you mean sleep with you?" I said, and I heard the frown in my own voice before I felt it on my face.Now he was really acting weird. Was the Alpha suddenly a pervert? My mind had gone straight to the dirtiest possible place, and I could feel heat creeping up my neck just thinking about it."What do you think I meant by that?" His voice was low and even and he held my jaw and tilted my face up toward his. "You tell me, Isora."He was too tall. That was the specific, infuriating reality of standing this close to Adrian, that I had to tilt my head back to hold his eyes and tilting my head back felt like a concession that I had not agreed to make.Kira leaned into his fingers b
🪷ISORA🪷Asher had been watching me all day.Not the obvious kind of watching, not the kind that announces itself, the careful kind, the kind that happens in the gaps between other things, a glance across the guard's section while he was supposedly focused on something else, eyes finding me and moving away before they had stayed long enough to be called staring. I had caught him doing it four times before midday and I had not let him see me catching it, had kept my own eyes moving the way you keep your eyes moving when you are cataloguing something you do not want the other person to know you are cataloguing.I was watching him back.I sat in the guard's section and I watched Asher go about his duties with the easy, practiced manner he brought to everything.His shoulders carried something today that they had not carried yesterday.Why was my best friend lying to me? For how long had he been lying? What was he hiding?The question had been multiplying since the dream, branching into
🐺ADRIAN🐺"Adrian…you can't possibly be thinking about what Damon said."Garrick used my name which told me before he said anything else that whatever was coming next was something he had decided required the full weight of the personal rather than the professional. He used it rarely enough that when he did, I noticed.He hasn't called me by my name in years."Now you fancy my name on your lips," I said, and I heard the amusement in my own voice, low and dry, the specific tone I use when I want to redirect a conversation without appearing to redirect it.Garrick turned and looked at me the way he looks at me when he is approximately one second away from strangling me. His jaw was tight. His hand had gone into his hair—the sandy brown of it already roughed up from the last time he had done it, which had been about four minutes ago. He was pacing, which Garrick rarely did, which told me the meeting with Damon had landed harder on him than he was going to say directly."This is not funn
🗡️ASHER🗡️The moment I saw Garrick standing in the tree line with his eyes on me, I knew Isora had been caught.The plan had failed.I did not move immediately. Moving immediately would have been the wrong call, and wrong calls in moments like this are what get people killed, and I have not survived everything I have survived by letting urgency override calculation. I stood where I was. I kept my breathing even and my weight balanced and I let my eyes stay on Garrick from the cover of the tree, and I thought about what I needed to think about, which was not the failed plan and not Isora and not the various ways tonight had gone sideways.It was the scent.When I kissed her in the storage building I caught it… faint, sitting underneath everything else. Her scent. Coming through. Not fully, not yet, but moving in that direction with the particular momentum of something that had been suppressed past its duration and was no longer willing to stay suppressed. My stomach dropped when I ca
🐺ADRIAN🐺"You look at her like that again," I said, and my voice came out the way my voice came out low and completely leveled, "it will be the last time you step foot in my territory. Not because you'll be banned." I looked at him directly after Isora left. "Because you'll be dead. I'll kill you myself."Damon had the specific quality of a man who knew the difference between a threat and a statement of intent. He had known me long enough to know which one he had just received. His hands came up, palms out, the gesture of someone who has recalculated their position in real time and found it wanting."Chill, Adrian. I get it." He leaned back in his chair, the performance of ease that he wore the way other men wore armor. "She's beautiful. I'm only human." He reached forward and took one of the cookies from the tray, bit into it, and closed his eyes with an expression designed specifically to be irritating. "Hmm." He made the sound again, slower. "If she made these, I bet she's sweete
🪷ISORA🪷Esme was standing there with her arms crossed, glaring at me like I had personally offended her.She was a bit taller than me, and she used that height to look down at me with obvious disdain."Where are you going?" she demanded."To the Alpha's study," I re
🪷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
The thought sent a spike of panic through my chest so sharp I gasped.The urge to go back was primal and overwhelming.The bond fired up inside me, pulling and pulling and pulling.It hurt. It hurt so badly I thought I was going to die.It felt like I was going to shift even though I knew I could n







