Masuk🪷ISORA🪷My eyes opened slowly, reluctantly, like my body had made a separate decision from my mind about whether it was ready to rejoin the world and my mind had been overruled.The first thing I registered was the softness. I was lying on my stomach, my cheek pressed into something that felt nothing like the floor of a hot cell, nothing like the hard surfaces I had grown accustomed to sleeping on since I joined Shadow Pack as a low-ranking servant. This was a bed, and not just any bed, the kind of bed that existed in a category so far removed from anything I had ever laid on that my brain took several seconds to process it as real. Every part of my body that wasn't actively in pain felt like it was being held rather than supported, like the mattress had made a decision about me and the decision was to keep me exactly where I was.The room was dark when my eyes adjusted enough to take it in. That particular dark aesthetic, all deep colors and heavy furniture and the specific quality
🐺ADRIAN🐺Garrick was waiting outside my quarters. He straightened when I came through the door, fell into step beside me when I moved, and I felt rather than saw the way he calibrated himself to whatever he read off me, the slight adjustment in his own tension, the shift from routine-reporting posture to something more careful, more attuned."Alpha." He kept his voice even. "My spies report that Damon has been going from one pack to another, looking for allies against the wizard. And from everything I have gathered, we have a spy embedded in the pack."“Tell me something I don’t already know, Garrick,” I cut him off sharply. My voice carried the full chill of my mood. I was still angry, or better phrased, Killian was still angry, and until I satisfied that rage he would not rest. The wolf inside me pushed and clawed at the edges of my restraint, feeding the cold fury that kept my steps measured and my face like stone.Garrick didn’t flinch, but he adjusted
🐺ADRIAN🐺Isora laid in my bed, her broken body stretched across the sheets.I had not moved from the spot I had taken near the window since the healer arrived, and I was not going to examine why. I stood with my arms crossed and my jaw set and I watched the old woman work, and I told myself I was here because this was my room and I had no obligation to leave it, and I told myself that was the entirety of the reason.The healer's name was Maren. She was old in the way that certain wolves get old, not frail, not diminished, but compacted, like everything unnecessary had been burned away by decades until only the essential parts remained. She had been the pack healer since before I became Alpha, since before my father's time, and she had survived the transition between those two eras because she was useful and because she understood, without ever being told, that usefulness was the only currency that mattered in Shadow Pack. She worked without speaking. H
ASHERI am going to kill him myself.The plan is gone, whatever careful, constructed thing Isora and I had built together over months of patience and strategy and waiting for the right moment, I am throwing all of it out, I am ditching every part of it, because none of it accounts for this. None of it accounts for what I watched happen yesterday, none of it accounts for the twenty-eight hours I have spent in this pack knowing exactly where she is and exactly what that cell does to a wolf and being completely, humiliatingly unable to get to her. The plan was Isora's idea, shaped by Isora's anger, built around Isora's need to be the one who ends Adrian with her own hands, and I have respected that because I respect her and because the plan was good and because I am, above everything else, a patient man.My patience died somewhere around hour six.How dare he?That thought has been running on a loop since the moment the lash came down the first time, since the moment I stood in that cro
🐺ADRIAN🐺"Fuck."The word came out low, guttural, came out with the kind of edge that wasn't anger so much as the sound of a man who has been sitting in chains since before the sun came up and has run entirely out of patience for his own body. The chains held me in place in the chair the way they always did.I had been awake since early morning. Long before the sun came up, I had been awake and I had been sitting in the aftermath of something I didn't have a clean explanation for, and the absence of a clean explanation was not something I was accustomed to sitting with.The scent had done it.It had come out of nowhere, or not out of nowhere, out of wherever it had been sitting just below the threshold of my awareness before it wasn't anymore, before it broke through every wall I had up and filled my nostrils with something so foreign and so absolute that my body responded before my mind could weigh in on the matter. After that, I had been beyond weak, weak in a way that had no prec
🪷 ISORA🪷Heat! Heat!! heat!!! That is all I can feel again. Heat and pain and hatred swirling together until I cannot separate them. How long have I been in here? The question loops in my head but there is no answer.Asher. I need Asher. The name slips out in a broken whisper that barely makes it past my dry lips. Where is he? I cannot move. I cannot breathe anymore. My chest feels tight and every inhale burns my throat worse than the last. I cannot open my eyes. All I feel is the pain from this excruciating heat and from the injury on my back. The wounds throb with my heartbeat. Fresh blood keeps coming. I feel it trickle down my sides and pool under me. I feel so weak. There is no blood left in me. I need water. My throat is burned raw and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. Every swallow feels like swallowing glass.I cannot even locate my mum’s memory in my mind anymore. I try to call it back but it stays gone. It is all heat and pain now. No soft voice. No gentle hands. J
I followed the guards out of the sitting room and down the hallway toward my small room.Esme was right behind me, her presence like a shadow I could not shake.Adrian went to the sitting room, probably to wait for the results of the search.Probably already convinced I was guilty.The guards enter
🪷ISORA🪷The following morning, I did my usual routine.Wake up early. Clean the Alpha's quarters. Prepare his bath. Lay out his clothes. Make sure everything was perfect so he had no reason to call me back or punish me.I was getting faster at it too. More efficient
🐺ADRIAN🐺What was I even thinking, sniffing her like that?I scoffed, moving back to sit behind my desk.The image of myself leaning in close to Isora's neck, breathing in her non-existent scent like some desperate animal, was not one I wanted to dwell on.But I needed
🪷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







