Mag-log inMichael POV“I demand my turn.”My voice cracked on the first word and steadied on the second. I stood in the third row with my father's fingers digging into my sleeve and every Alpha in the kingdom staring at me, and I had never in my life been so frightened.“Michael,” Weston breathed. “Sit down.”“No, Father.”“You will destroy us.”“Yes,” I said. “Probably.”I pulled free. I walked down the steps into the well of the hall with the sound of my own boots in my ears. Raven stood at the center, small and straight in a gray gown that was not hers, with Julian beside
“Clarissa.”The name left me before I could stop it. It echoed under the vault of the hall, and every Alpha in the tiers turned to look at the woman in chains.Clarissa lifted her head. The bruise on her cheek had gone the color of a plum. Her lip was split. But her eyes found mine across the marble, and they were clear.“Raven,” she said, very softly. “Don't.”“Silence,” Aldric said gently. “The witness will speak when she is questioned.”“What have you done to her?”“She resisted arrest. The guards were rougher than I would have wished.” His voice was full of regret. “I have ordered an inquiry.”Julian's hand closed hard around mine. I could feel the heat of him through my sleeve, the gold coiled tight just under his skin, and I knew without looking that he was holding himself on a leash made of pure will.“Princess Clarissa,” said the Master of the Rolls. He was a thin man with a dry, tired voice, and he did not look at her. “Do you confirm the confession given at dawn?”She said n
Julian's POV“Stop moving, Highness,” Raven said. “You'll smudge it.”“You are covered in me. I can still smell him.”“I'm covered in you from the shoulders down. Hold still.”I held still. It was the hardest thing I had done all morning, and I had been awake for twenty minutes.She was sitting on the edge of the washstand with her hair half pinned and her hands in my collar, and I stood between her knees with my forehead against hers. The sun had cleared the east tower. In two hours I would walk into the Hall of Judgment and face the man who had taught me to ride.All I could think about was the faint, sour, intolerable ghost of another man's breath along the side of her throat.“Julian.”“I know. I know.” My voice came out rough. “It is a thing the wolf does. It's instinct. It means nothing.”“It means something.”“It means he is a fool.” My hands found her waist. “He is a fool, and I am a jealous idiot, and the wolf wants to roll you in my shirts until you smell like nothing else.”
Michael's POV“You left her,” Emilia had said.I could still hear it. Not shouted. Said quietly, from the pillows, with Rowan asleep on her chest and the sky just starting to gray. She had watched me pull on my coat, and she had not asked where I was going.“I'll be back before noon.”“You said you'd stay.”“Emilia...”“I know where you're going, Michael.” She turned her face to the window. “Go. Just don't tell me it's for me.”I rode four hours through the dark with those words in my ears and the palace road unrolling under my horse. Every mile, I told myself the same thing. I
“Sit down before you fall down.”“I am perfectly steady.”“You're gray, Julian.”“A fine color. Very regal.”I pushed him onto the edge of the bed with both hands on his chest, and he went, because his legs gave out about a second after he stopped arguing. The door behind us had been locked from the outside for three hours. Two guards stood in the corridor. Neither would meet my eyes when they brought the tray.It was a good room. That was the insult of it. Tall windows, a hearth, silk curtains in the royal blue, a bed wide enough to sleep four. Aldric had put us in the prince's own suite, because a cage that looks like home is the kind
Michael's POV“You have until moonset,” Alpha Weston said. “Then the whole pack goes in front of the Council with one story. Yours.”“That is not what I asked for, Father.”“It is what you will get.”I stood at the end of the long table in the Whitefang council hall with my palms pressed to the wood. Beta Callahan sat across from me, stone-faced. My mother sat at the far end in her black shawl, very straight, not looking at anyone. The windows behind my father had already gone dark purple with evening.Raven's three terms lay in the middle of the table where Callahan had set them down that morning, in neat brown ink.One. Michael confesses aloud,







