LOGINETHANI’d led wolves into war. I’d buried men I called brothers. I’d taken a bullet meant for someone else and gotten up the next morning like it was nothing.None of it prepared me for watching Freya come apart in front of a crib that shouldn’t have been empty.I couldn’t do anything, and that was the worst part. All I wanted was to shift and tear through every mile between this house and wherever Dahlia had taken our son. I wanted to do it right now, but the suppression field was still humming through the walls like a swarm of bees, and my wolf was locked somewhere deep inside me, screaming underneath my skin and not able to get out.So I did the only thing I could. I held my wife closely, comforting her and hating myself for not being enough.Reese finally broke through the door twenty minutes later. He came thundering with six of the guards behind him, and every one of their faces was grim. Somebody in his group had figured out the suppression field’s source—a small black box hid
FREYAGemma took it. She didn’t flinch or even argue. She just let me say everything I wanted to, and somehow that was even worse. When I finally ran out of breath, she said quietly, “You’re right to be angry with me. Be angry for as long as you need to. But look at the window first.”I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to keep yelling at her. But something about the way she said it made me turn almost immediately.The window was broken from the inside. That part I noticed now. The glass had been pushed outward, not in. Someone had left this way on purpose. The curtain was stirring in the air, and the wind was pushing the smell of pine and cold stone into the room.And on the windowsill, sitting there all alone, was a feather.It was black, long, and glossy, almost blue where the light hit it. It was way too big for a crow. I stepped closer, and Ethan came with me, his shoulder brushing mine.“That’s not from around here,” he said.“No,” Gemma said. “It’s not.”She walked over to the
FREYA Jonah was gone. I kept staring at his crib but my brain just wouldn’t accept it. The mattress was right there. The little yellow blanket with the stitched moons was right there, bunched up at one end where he always kicked it. But Jonah wasn’t. I put my hand on the sheet. It was warm. That was the part that broke me. It was still warm, like he’d been lying there a second ago, breathing, with his tiny fists next to his face the way he always slept. Like if I’d walked in one minute earlier, I could have caught him. “No,” I said. “No, no, no.” There was no sign of a fight. No window pried open with a crowbar, no dragging, no muddy footprints either. Nothing has been kicked over. Whoever took him had come and gone so fast and so quietly that even a mother’s instincts hadn’t caught it in time. I’d been downstairs, worrying about the wrong thing. I’d been in a car, arguing about who got to make the decisions while my baby was upstairs being stolen. I didn’t remember screa
ETHAN “Behind me, Freya. Please.” I heard her breathe in like she was going to argue. Then she closed her fingers around the blade. I thought maybe, just maybe, she’d listen this once. She didn’t. Of course, she didn’t. Upstairs, something crashed. It was glass. A lot of it broke into pieces, the sound rolling down the stairs. Freya moved right past me. I noticed immediately when I felt the air shift where she’d been. “Freya!” I lunged and grabbed nothing. “That’s the nursery,” she said, already at the foot of the stairs. Her voice was flat and terrifyingly calm. “Jonah will be in the there.” “We’ll go together.” “Then hurry.” We took the steps two at a time. I couldn’t see them, so I counted, and I still nearly tripped near the top. The hallway was darker than the living room. I could hear things I couldn’t name. A creak. A scrape. A low, sliding sound, like something was being pulled across the floor. My normal human hearing was so much weaker than I was used to,
ETHANThere was nothing but total darkness. Then a low hum in the walls that felt electronic.I knew what it was before my brain could even say the word. Suppression field.My wolf slammed itself hard against the inside of my ribs as if he’d smelled danger. And then he found nothing. We couldn’t shift. We had no strength or claws. All we had were two human hands, and they were scrambling around in the dark for Freya.“Freya!”“I’m here.” Her voice came from my left. Then her fingers found my sleeve and held on. She was breathing fast, but she wasn’t panicking yet.“Mom?”“I’m fine,” Gemma said from somewhere near the door. She sounded far from fine. “My cane’s gone. I dropped it.”“Stay where you are.”“Where else would I go, Ethan? I’m an old woman standing in the dark.”Even now she was cracking jokes. I almost laughed. I really did. It came up in my chest and died there.Freya’s hand slid off my sleeve. “The babies,” she said.“Freya, wait—”She was already moving. I heard her bare
GEMMA“I told her to give me time. I told her I’d figure out a safe way.” I closed my eyes for a second. “Then two days later Gwyneth called the council together, and Dahlia was standing in front of everyone with her bags already packed. She was accused of stealing some important medicine. It was a lie, and everyone in that room knew it, and nobody said a word. Me included.”“I used to tell myself I was protecting you,” I said to Ethan. “That if I stayed quiet, you’d be safe. That’s what I told myself for years. And the more time went by, the harder it was to say the truth out loud, until it felt like I’d buried it too deep to ever dig up.”“So you let it stay buried,” Ethan said.“Yes.”He nodded once, slowly, like he was still trying to process everything. Then he looked at the ground. My heart broke even more.Freya wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Okay,” she said. Her voice shook, but she pushed through it. “That’s awful, Gemma. It really is. But we can be angry later. R
FREYA "You're seriously not going to show up, are you?" I muttered, staring at the empty seat across from me. The chair had been empty for over an hour. The candle between us had burned down by at least half, and the waiter, bless his heart, had stopped asking if I wanted to order. I picked up my
FREYAThe meeting was set for the following morning.Orin had booked a private room at the Lodge, which was the closest thing our pack had to a proper meeting venue. It was all exposed timber and stone hearths and the permanent smell of pine resin and old smoke. It wasn't the glass-and-steel corpor
FREYA I sat in my car outside the main house and stared at the cut on my hand until the bleeding slowed. Then I started the engine and drove. There was a moment, somewhere between the main area and the edge of the pack territory, where the anger finally hit me. Real anger, not the composed, co
ETHANShe was staring at me like I'd dropped out of the sky, which wasn't that far from the truth.I'd been running a patrol route through the back edge of the territory, nothing unusual, just burning off that restless energy that came with settling into a new place. I'd been in this city for less







