INICIAR SESIÓN🩸WARREN🩸 And I could see nothing else but three silver stars, standing together in the treeline of the eastern forest. No wolf gathered around them. No human shape casting a shadow beneath their glow. Only pure, blinding light suspended in the dark where nothing should have hung at all, three points burning cold and steady against a sky already thick with smoke and coming violence, unmoving, patient, as though the chaos already tearing through my own territory had nothing at all to do with whatever stood beneath them. There was no time left to make sense of it. The attack came from every direction at once. Wolves poured out from the treeline in a wave too dense to count, fur matted thick with mud and old blood, eyes catching torchlight and throwing it back sharp and starving. The first one reached me before I finished the thought of turning to meet it. I let it happen the way I always let it happen. Bone tore and reshaped itself in one violent lurch through skin that split and
🩸WARREN🩸 "She has arrived. Here. In Shadow Pack." The words had barely left Aldric's mouth before the pack mind-link tore open behind my own skull, a violence of sound that felt less like voices and more like a hundred blades scraping against the inside of my skull at once. *East. Eastern treeline—* *They're through the outer ward, they're—* *All warriors to the north wall, NOW—* *Move, move, MOVE—* *Not just scouts. This is a full—* *More. More than we counted. More than—* I had not even finished registering the exact color drained from my mother's face, or the way Garrick's jaw had locked hard enough that the muscle stood out sharp beneath his own skin, when the chair beneath me scraped back hard against stone, my body already moving before conscious thought caught up to explain the decision. Every Alpha still at the table went utterly silent, their eyes finally landing on something more urgent than pride or legacy or whether I measured against a dead man's shadow. My a
🩸WARREN🩸"From what your patrol told me himself, Alpha Modrid, before I sent his head back to Blackwood in place of an answer. Your son wanted to see whether I was truly my father's son." I let my eyes sweep the table one final time. "Isn't that the exact same question every single one of you came here tonight to answer for yourselves?"Silence answered me.Chairs shifted, wood creaking soft against stone as half the table found sudden interest in their own hands, their own goblets, anything that let them avoid holding my gaze a moment longer than necessary. Discomfort settled thick across the hall, heavy enough that I heard someone's breath catch and hold. Nobody wanted to be the one to break it first.Except Cassian and Thane, both fighting hard against laughter at the far end of the table, their shoulders shaking with the effort of holding it in, Thane's hand pressed flat over his own mouth. Nobody in this room had recognized either of them yet as anything beyond servants of Hous
💫RAYNE💫 It was almost completely dark by the time I finally found the moonleaf, the last of the daylight bleeding thin and gray through branches too thick to let much else through. I stared down at the small plant growing beneath a cluster of broad leaves, its silver veins catching what little light remained filtering down between the trees, thin threads glowing faint against deep green. Finally. I crouched low and carefully plucked several stems free from the ground, gathering them into the fold of my dress, my fingers already stiff and clumsy from hours spent searching. Lady Emery was going to be furious with me regardless. She had told me not to return until I found it, and night had already settled thick over this entire forest while I searched. I had no idea how long I had actually been out here, only that the trees around me looked nothing like they had when I first stepped inside them that morning. The trees had gone darker. The paths I remembered following had disappear
🩸WARREN🩸I stood at the edge of the rooftop, dressed in red already stained darker at the cuffs where I’d worn it too many days running without bothering to change it, and watched the first of the Alpha delegations roll through the front gate below.Carriages. Horses. Banners snapping stiff in the wind, each one carrying some crest I’d memorized decades ago without ever once caring what they meant.Not a single warrior among any of them.I counted again, certain I’d miscounted the first time, and found the same pattern repeating itself across every delegation crossing beneath my gate. A Beta. A manservant, sometimes two. No warriors. No war party trailing behind any Alpha bold enough to come here expecting a fight.They had come to talk. To measure. To decide, over wine and careful words, whether the son standing at the head of this pack deserved the same fear his father had earned through decades of proven strength rather than rumor alone.Cowards, all of them. The thought settled
💫RAYNE💫 I barely made it halfway to the dining hall before I realized I was smiling. I stopped myself immediately. Why was I smiling? I had just met a stranger. A handsome stranger, admittedly, but still a complete stranger, someone I would likely never cross paths with again once his Alpha's business at this Summit concluded. And yet the memory of those blue eyes followed me the entire way down the corridor, warm and bright in a way that reminded me of Alpha Warren's eyes without carrying a single trace of the coldness that made his own stare feel like it could strip skin straight from my bones. Mal. Just Mal. And to think, something warm and strange had fluttered low in my chest the entire time he studied me, some unfamiliar sensation I did not have a name for and did not fully trust myself to examine. I shook my head hard and tightened my grip around the basket of fruit until the woven handle bit into my palm. I had far more important things to think about than a stranger







