LOGINRoland.I reacted before conscious thought even registered the threat. I grabbed Aurora by the waist and hauled her firmly behind my back, putting my own body between my mate and the woman kneeling on the floral rug.Marguerite raised both her empty hands in a frantic gesture of surrender. Tears spilled over her eyelashes and tracked through the dirt on her pale face.“Roland, wait,” Marguerite pleaded, her voice trembling as she fought to draw a breath into her lungs. “Please listen to me before I lose the ability to speak.”“Get away from Arthur,” I ordered, extending my claws and keeping my stance wide to block her path to Aurora.Arthur did not move away from his wife. He tightened his grip on Marguerite’s fingers, refusing to break physical contact. His bandaged shoulder shifted as he braced himself against the armchair. He had spent sixteen years grieving an empty grave and he stared at her face as if she might vanish into thin air if he blinked.“I am not letting her go again,”
Aurora.I stood between the two people I had loved longest in this world and felt the floorboards drop away beneath my boots. Arthur's face was white to the lips, the blood draining from his features until he looked more like a ghost than a man. He backed up until his uninjured shoulder hit the doorframe, shaking his head in a frantic, rhythmic motion that denied everything his own eyes were telling him.“Marguerite died in my arms,” Arthur repeated, his voice cracking on the final syllable as he stared at the gray cloak she wore. “I sat on the edge of that hospital mattress and held her body for three hours, Aurora. I felt the last pulse fade beneath my fingers. I felt the warmth leave her skin. I dug the grave in the freezing rain with my own two hands because I refused to let strangers bury my wife. I know what death feels like and she is dead.”Marguerite did not argue with him or step forward to force an embrace he was not ready to accept. She kept her hands laced together in fr
Aurora's POV I threw myself between them before Roland could sink his claws into Kai's throat. I slammed my palms against my mate's chest and shoved backward with every ounce of leverage I possessed, shouting that Lila's reading was wrong. The sudden violence froze the sitting room into a tense tableau of bared teeth and drawn breaths. Roland stopped his forward momentum, his muscles coiling like steel springs beneath my hands, but kept his forearm pinned across Kai's windpipe. The Alpha instinct to eliminate a threat warred with his own shock and the low, dangerous growl vibrating in his chest rattled the picture frames on the walls.Kai did not fight back. He stood rigid against the wooden doorframe, his face draining of color, with his hands resting open at his sides to show he held no weapons.“I came here to warn you about a Conclave convoy heading toward the estate gates,” Kai managed to say, his voice strained and gravelly under the pressure against his throat. “I would neve
The Unknown's POVI stopped under the bare branches of the oak tree and forced my breathing into a slow, deliberate rhythm. The night air held a sharp chill, but my heartbeat remained steady against my ribs as I listened to the low hum of voices bleeding through the lit windows of the Blackwood house. Thirty years of sitting at the third chair of the Hollow Throne had taught me the value of unyielding patience. I survived decades of political warfare by waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Tonight, that patience yielded an impossible reward.The Moonborn child inside the estate had ripped her mind wide open.Her psychic reach swept over the grounds like a searchlight, catching the stray fears and scattered plans of every guard stationed on the grass. I felt a fleeting, rare sense of awe settle in my chest. The Throne had not witnessed a telepathic gift of this magnitude in a century. Genevieve spent years trying to breed this exact mutation in the registry, yet Arthur Hayes had
Roland.I had never known a single night to stretch out as long and agonizing as this one.The Conclave wardens hauled Garrick from the damp earth and found a faint, thready pulse beneath the black veins spiderwebbing across his neck. They carried his paralyzed body toward the infirmary under heavy armed guard. The neurotoxin had not killed him, but it had stripped his vocal cords and locked his muscles, leaving him alive and unable to speak a single word. The elders swarmed the courtyard and demanded an immediate explanation for the sniper attack, but I ignored every single one of them.I grabbed Aurora by the hand, motioned for Marguerite to follow us and steered them both out of the chaotic firelight. We pushed through the panicked crowd of enforcers and retreated into the estate, navigating the winding corridors until we reached my mother’s private sitting room.I shut the door and turned the deadbolt, sliding the brass chain into place. Then I pulled the velvet drapes closed ove
Aurora.I did not see the woman step out of the tree line at first. My attention remained fixed on the silver dart protruding from Garrick's neck and the dark blood pooling on the damp earth beneath his collapsing body. Then the entire circle of Blackwood elders went dead silent. The shouting ceased in an instant, replacing the chaotic panic of the trial with a breathless, collective tension that raised the hair on my arms.I turned away from the dying Conclave leader and searched the edge of the clearing. A figure in a gray cloak stepped past the ancient standing stones and lowered a silver crossbow toward the soil. The stranger reached up with a steady hand and pushed back her heavy woolen hood.The face beneath the fabric was older than the woman I remembered from the faded photographs scattered across Arthur's desk. Deep lines framed her eyes and a stark streak of white cut through her dark hair, but the brilliant gold shining in her irises remained unmistakable. My mother had







