LOGIN~Amber’s POV~Death was…Fucking amazing.And since I have spent a lot of time from the very beginning asking and referring to people, capital P, the theoretical audience I have apparently always believed was listening, I have decided that they do, in fact, exist. So this question is posed to them specifically, and I have already accepted that I won’t be getting an answer.Anyway.That is not what was expected, right?I should be sad. I should be wallowing in the fact that I was, well… dead but how could I, when every day felt exactly like this?“FIRE IN THE HOLE!”The shout came a half-second before impact, and I didn’t even have time to brace before something solid and round slammed straight into my chest, throwing me clean off my feet. I hit the water hard, sank, and came up sputtering, and for one full, suspended second, everything went silent.Then I pushed myself up, grinning, water streaming off me, and threw both arms into the air.“I’m okay!”Cheers erupted around me, famil
~Axel’s POV~Twenty-one days.Nothing else registered to me except that number, because it was the exact number of days since I lost her. Since everything stopped meaning anything to me at all, no matter how much I had wished for death, wished I could make it happen myself just to follow her wherever it was she had gone, I knew she would never forgive me for leaving Asher, even though I had been all but useless to him and everyone else. The same people who kept coming, one after another, all through the past days, though I couldn’t have told hi baby a single word any of them had said to me either.I wanted the pain to end.I needed it to.Why couldn’t it just end?Why did I have to be here without her?Why—“Axel, can I come in?”Cleopatra’s voice cut through the rest of the thought before I even knew what the completed sentence would have been, and I didn’t answer. Just like I hadn’t answered any of the times before this. She stepped in anyway, the way she always did.I felt her ey
~Axel’s POV~“Amber!”I lunged for the space where she had been standing, hands closing on nothing, on air, on the last fading traces of gray where a whole person had just existed a heartbeat ago. My chest seized, panic tearing through me faster than I could process it, faster than thought.“Amber, where are you? Amber!”Nothing answered.I turned, spinning through the dark, searching every direction at once, screaming her name into a void that gave nothing back, no scent to follow, no thread of the bond to grab onto, nothing except the crushing, absolute silence where her voice had been seconds before.She couldn’t just be gone. She had been right here. She had—I didn't get a chance to finish that thought because light exploded outward from the exact spot she had vanished from.It didn’t fill the space gently. It detonated, ripping through every inch like something furious, something that had been waiting far too long for permission to fight back, and I felt it happen inside me a
~Axel’s POV~Noise.That was the only word big enough to hold what was happening inside my own skull, not thought, not memory, just noise, layered on top of noise, voices and screaming and something that might have been my own voice screaming back at all of it, none of it distinguishable from the rest. My father’s laughter. Kyran’s grief. The sound of bone breaking, over and over, a rhythm with no end to it. It came from everywhere at once, inside and outside both, until the two stopped being separate things entirely.I clapped my hands, paws, claws, whatever I was now over my ears, some animal instinct trying to block out a sound that wasn’t coming from outside me at all, and it did nothing.Then, underneath all of it, so faint I almost missed it entirely, something cut through.A voice. Not screaming. Not layered, not ancient, not wrong in any of the ways everything else in my head had gone wrong.Familiar.“Well, that doesn’t look like much fun.”I froze, some part of me strainin
~Amber’s POV~I froze.Every part of me went rigid, rooted to the stone beneath my paws, because nothing in me had been built to process what I was looking at.I had seen him like this before. That was the part that should have made this easier, should have given me some kind of footing to stand on but it didn’t, because whatever I had seen before was nothing compared to what was tearing through the earth toward us now.He was bigger. Not by a little. The previous version of him I had witnessed had already terrified me, but this was something else entirely, something that made my earlier fear look almost laughable in hindsight. He towered over every single being in that courtyard combined, shoulders alone wider than most of the warriors were tall, muscle stacked on muscle beneath fur gone completely black, thick and matted and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with color. His claws alone looked long enough to gut a grown man in a single swipe, curved and glistening even in th
~Amber’s POV~Silence answered me first.Absolute, total silence, the entire courtyard holding its breath at once, every Alpha, every warrior, every set of eyes locked on the two of us like the air itself had gone still enough to hear a heartbeat drop. It stretched long enough to feel like its own kind of statement, proof of exactly how heavy those three words had landed.Then Ian’s laughter cut straight through it.“You challenge me to the Last Howl? I am not going to fight a woman.”“It wasn’t a request.”Roxanne burst free the second the words left my mouth, and I didn’t waste a single second closing the distance. I slammed into him full force, driving him straight into the ground, claws already sinking toward his throat.He shifted just as fast, throwing me off him with brute strength, and I hit the ground rolling, landing clean on all four paws without losing a fraction of momentum. In the same split second I was moving again, claws raking straight across his muzzle, and blood s
~Axel’s POV~ Clicking.“Axel, I don’t—”Harder clicking.“It all just happened. I don’t know what—”My fingers ran through the keys of the laptop with even harder intensity, trying to drown out the rest of his words like I had been doing for the past five minutes, but this time my hand went right
~Amber’s POV~“I need you to suppress my wolf.”Never in my life had I thought there would be a time when those exact words would leave my lips, nor did I think that they would be the first words I would say to the man I hadn’t seen for three years.Surprise flashed across his face before it gave w
~Amber’s POV~‘Mate.’Roxanne’s voice filled with that same purr slammed into me with such deafening impact that it completely overwhelmed the understanding of what was happening to me, the knowledge she’d just sent flooding into my head seconds ago.I blinked, trying to push myself up to see the p
~Amber’s POV~It is expected that I begin with something intriguing, right?Something absolutely gripping that captures attention from the very first line.Preferably something entertaining.Well it is unfortunate that I would have to disappoint, because there was nothing entertaining about the gas







