Mag-log in"Look at her. You expect me to claim that?!" Cassian Voss said it loud enough for the whole hall to hear before he rejected the mate bond that had just snapped into place in front of two hundred wolves, in front of my own parents. My mother laughed along with the room. My father apologized to him for "the mix-up." Nineteen years of being the daughter my family explained away. This was just the loudest version of it yet. I left that night with nothing but the bond-mark burning on my wrist, and a stranger from a pack that owed me nothing, who asked what I wanted instead of what I looked like. I didn't know yet that the mark wouldn't stop burning. That the treaty holding two packs together was never anchored to my sister, the daughter they actually wanted. It was anchored to me. Now a war neither of them saw coming is tearing through pack lands built on lies, and the same body they called too much to love is the only thing strong enough to survive what's coming for all of us. Cassian wants to undo what he said. Kian never needed to. My parents finally want me back too. Funny how fast that happened. This time, I decide who kneels, and who I let go.
view moreThe horn didn’t stop at three blasts.It kept going, frantic, and by the time I reached the wall the torchlight on the ridge had split into two distinct lines … Ironwood’s riders holding formation on the eastern approach, and something faster, lower, less organized closing in from the tree line behind them.“They’re not together,” Dorian shouted, already moving. “Ironwood’s riders just noticed the second line too … look, they’re breaking formation!”“Ashen King’s men,” Maren said, grim, sword already in hand. “They’ve been waiting for exactly this. Two forces converging on the same gate, everyone’s attention split. Doesn’t matter whose side anyone’s on once they’re inside the wall.”“Ivy, with me,” Maren snapped. “You too, Petra. Kian, east flank, now.”I caught Kian’s eyes for one second before he peeled off toward his position, and whatever he saw in my face made him double back the two steps it took to reach me, gripping my shoulders once, hard.“Whatever happens out there,”
Nobody slept.Maren had the pack reinforcing the gate by lantern light within ten minutes of the dispatch’s arrival, voices low and fast, the particular controlled urgency of people who’d done this before and hated that they had to again. I stood in the middle of it feeling, for the first time since I’d arrived, like the danger genuinely was me … not something happening near me, but the whole reason for it.“Stop that,” Petra said, catching my expression as she hauled a crate of arrows past me toward the wall. “Whatever’s happening in your head right now, stop it. This isn’t your fault for existing. It’s Malachi Voss’s fault for believing your sister over his own son’s evidence.”“You don’t know that he did.”“I know he issued an arrest summons in twelve hours instead of waiting for his son to reach him with the truth. That’s a choice he made. Not you.” She kept moving, but the words stayed with me longer than she probably intended them to.Maren found me a little later, checking
Twelve hours.That was all we had before Selene stood in front of Malachi Voss and made whatever case she’d built against me, and I spent the walk from the gate to Thorneheart’s main hall doing the math on exactly how much damage a well-timed lie could do to someone who’d already lost everything once.“We use the time we have,” Maren said, reading the tension in my shoulders without needing me to explain it. “Sit. All of you. We’re not solving this standing in a doorway.”We sat in Thorneheart’s main hall … Maren at the head of the table, Dorian by the door, Kian’s chair pulled close enough beside mine that his knee stayed pressed against mine the entire time, a small, steady anchor while the rest of the conversation threatened to pull the floor out from under me.“Show her the footnote first,” Maren said. “Then we deal with the sister.”Cassian laid the ledger page on the table. I read the footnote twice before the words settled into something I could actually absorb … a name, n
They came at dusk … not a war party, not yet, just three riders under a parley flag, and I recognized the lead rider’s bearing before I could make out his face.Cassian.My stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with fondness and everything to do with old, unhealed panic. Kian was at my side before I’d fully registered moving toward the gate myself, his arm settling around my shoulders, solid and unhurried, nothing performative in it … just where he stood now, as a matter of course.“Alpha Voss,” Maren said, cool, meeting them with Dorian at her shoulder. “You’re a long way from home for a parley flag.”“I’m here about the border breach.” His eyes found me over her shoulder before he finished the sentence, then moved, inevitably, to Kian’s arm around me, and something in his face did something complicated and fast that he smoothed over almost before I caught it. “And about her.”“She’s under Thorneheart’s protection,” Maren said. “If you’ve come to accuse a guest of my p
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