LOGINšŖ·ISORAšŖ·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
It came from the north treeline, from the same direction Adrian had walked, and the size of it stopped the breath in my chest for a full second. Bigger than anything I had seen, bigger than any wolf or lycan in any account I had ever heard, moving through the space at the edge of the treeline with the specific, deliberate weight of something that was not running because it did not need to run, its presence was enough, the size of it was enough, and the red eyes of it were catching the red moonlight in a way that made them look like fire in dark.I recognized it. This was the lycan from the forest, the one I had followed Adrian to hunt. The one he had killed. Or thought he had killed. But here it was, alive and whole and running straight toward me.My hands moved on their own. I nocked an arrow, pulled back the string, and aimed at the beast's chest. My arms were shaking, but I held steady.The beast slowed down as it got closer. Its massive paws moved slower, its head lowered, and it
šŖ·ISORAšŖ·The first wave hit before the full dark came.Wolves coming in from the eastern treeline in ones and twos, fast and feral in the way wolves are feral when something has driven them past the point of pack instinct into something more animal, more desperate. I heard the first one before I saw it, the sound of something moving through undergrowth at speed, and I had the arrow pulled and aimed before the shape of it cleared the tree line.I fired.The shot landed and the wolf went down and I had the next arrow nocked before the sound of the first one hitting ground had finished. Beside me the two guards were moving, I could hear them, the specific sounds of wolves fighting at close range, the impact of bodies, the sounds that do not have clean descriptions but that you learn to read for information about how the fight is going. I kept my eyes forward. My post was my post.We fought for what felt like an hour and was probably twenty minutes, the waves irregular, coming from diffe
Killian's growl ripped through my chest."She's not yours." The words came out in a register I did not produce often, cold and lethal and absolutely without ambiguity, and Azrian heard all of that and the smile that followed was the worst one he had."The bond doesn't lie, dear brother." He was still moving, still the slow lateral drift that was not closing distance and was not stopping. "And you brought her to me."The cold that moved through me was not fear. I do not do fear. But I know the feeling of a calculation failing in real time, of a variable I had not fully accounted for landing with its full weight, and this was that.Isora was at a post in a village a hundred feet south of where I was standing."I can feel her presence," Azrian continued, and his voice had the specific quality of someone reporting a fact they find pleasurable. "The bond will bring her to me. And I get to claim her, and you'll remainā"I moved with full force, controlled by nothing but the anger that had b
šŗADRIANšŗ"You're staring like you've seen a ghost."The smile had not moved from his face since he spoke the first words, the same smile it had always been, wide enough to read as warm from a distance, empty enough to understand correctly up close. He tilted his head to the side, the specific gesture I had watched him make ten thousand times before the night I stopped counting. "Disappointed?""What made you come back," I said. I did not move from where I was standing. Not a step toward him, not a step back. The ground under my feet was the ground I had chosen and I was staying on it."Is this how you welcome your twin brother?" He arched one brow, and something in the arch of it hit something in my chest that I shut down before it could identify itself. "Twenty years, Adrian. Are you still holding grudges?"He chuckled.It echoed through the trees, moved through the canopy and came back altered, and the sound of it reached into a place in my chest that I had sealed off a long time
šŗADRIANšŗThe moment my feet touched the soil of Winterfell I felt him.A full, immediate, specific pull that arrived the instant contact was made with the ground and did not diminish as I moved further into the forest. it intensified, focused, the kind of pull that only exists between two things that were made from the same source and have been in proximity before and cannot pretend otherwise.It was a trap.Exactly what I had suspected. Exactly what Garrick's fear had been pointing at.Exactly what Killian had been growling about.Damon said he would give me Azrian, and he did. Just not the way I was expecting. Not handed over in chains or locked in a cage. No, Damon was too clever for that.Fucking treacherous Damon.Winterfell had not been taken by a wizard.I knew that before I had walked twenty feet into the ruins, before I had pointed out the claw marks to the formation, before I had said any of the words out loud. I had known it the moment I crossed the boundary and felt the
šŗADRIANšŗSeeing 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
šŗADRIANšŗI walked out from the bathroom ten minutes after I entered.Esme was sprawled across my bed in red lingerie that left nothing to the imagination.Red rope bra. G-string. Sheer robe that might as well have not existed.I walked past her without a word, heading st
šŖ·ISORAšŖ·I waited thirty more minutes before making my move.My mind kept circling back to what I'd heard Beta Garrick say earlier.Medicine...full moon. Adrian is sick?What kind of sickness required medicine and had something to do with the full moon?I filed it awa
šŗADRIANšŗIt wasn't that I wanted to protect Isora from Damon.I didn't care, actually.Damon used females as sex slaves, everyone knew that. His pack was notorious for it. And if he wanted to proposition one of my servants, that was his problem, not mine.Except it wasn't me







