CHAPTER 5

I jerked my chin from his grip, heat and fury radiating from my chest. “Give me my phone, Damian.”

“No.”

The single word was a wall I slammed into. Wolves were everywhere.

Somewhere behind them, my mother cried my name, but the sound drowned beneath boots and the snap of orders as a black-column of Gammas marched up the drive in lockstep.

A silver-bannered standard rose above them. The Council’s crest.

My blood went cold.

“Aria Valery!” the lead Gamma barked in a high voice. “By order of the Lycan Council, you’re to be taken into custody under Article Forty-Seven, Bloodline Containment.”

Damian didn’t turn his head, but power rolled off him in a silent shockwave. “You brought a containment writ into my city without notice.” Not a question. An accusation.

The Gamma captain shifted his weight. “Chairman Storm. The order is valid and immediate. Step aside.”

He didn’t move. “Show me the writ.”

The captain hesitated, then lifted a sealed scroll. Damian’s hand rose, and the parchment slid through the air as if the night obeyed him. He cracked the wax with his thumb. Lines of tight script and the Council’s sigils came into view; when his gaze reached the invocation line, something cold sharpened his eyes.

“Article Forty-Seven hasn’t been invoked in a century,” he said softly. “You risk a war every time you touch it.”

“Sir,” the captain said, still formal, “the Council believes the subject to be a blood heir.”

All the sound in my body vanished, like the world had sucked in its breath. Ethan’s warning from the trees replayed in a voice I hated: You’re a blood heir. And if the Council’s right, you’re the last.

Damian didn’t glance at me, but his fingers that were still holding my phone hostage, tightened. “Belief,” he said. “Not proof. Under Article Six of the Chairman’s Mandate, I claim protective custody until a closed hearing is convened.”

“Article Six is superseded by Forty-Seven,” the Gamma countered, jaw tight. “Bloodlines suspected of arcane inheritance fall to the Sanctum’s jurisdiction.”

Arcane inheritance. The words scraped inside me like claws.

Damian took a long step forward, placing himself fully between me and the Gammas. “No Sanctum handler touches her,” he said. “Not while I am alive.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd. Ethan broke from a knot of wolves near the fence, eyes narrowed.

“Since when do you play bodyguard, Chairman?” he asked, voice too loud, too smooth. “She’s my mate—”

“Ex-mate,” I snapped, before I could stop myself.

Ethan’s mouth thinned. The Gamma captain’s gaze cut to him, then back to Damian. “We have our orders. Stand aside.”

“No.” Damian’s power crawled over the ground like black lightning, unseen but felt. Heads bowed, backs straightened, the air itself bristling.

“You want her? You go through me. You want to invoke Forty-Seven, you do it under my eye in the Council chamber, not in a yard, not with a mob watching, not with wolves who’ll take your overreach and set packs on fire.”

The captain’s hand flexed near the hilt of his blade. For a moment, the world hung on the edge of something sharp and stupid.

Then a scream tore the night.

My mother.

I spun. Two Gammas had slipped behind the line and were forcing her away from the porch, hands tight on her arms. “Don’t touch her!” I lunged, and the world blew white. Pain, bright and blinding, searing across my forearm like a brand pressed to bone.

I gasped, stumbling. A sigil had flared to life beneath my skin, a red geometry of lines I didn’t recognize, burning from wrist to elbow. The wolves around us recoiled. Someone whispered, “Goddess save us,” like a prayer and a curse.

The Gamma captain swore, low. “Tag flared early,” he muttered to his second.

A tag. They’d marked me. When? How? The memory uncoiled like a snake, a brush against my wrist as I fought through the crowd to reach my mother earlier, a stranger’s apology I hadn’t questioned. Cold flooded me, then a red wash of fury.

Damian was moving before I could think. He caught my arm with a grip that was iron and heat, his Chairman’s ring blazing against my marked skin. The sigil shrieked brighter; the echo ran up my spine like a knife. He didn’t let go. His ring dragged across the glowing lines and the burn shifted. Friction, then pressure, then a snap like a wire cut.

The light guttered. The brand dimmed to a dull ember.

Damian exhaled, roughly. “Sanctum glyph,” he said, eyes on the fading geometry. “Crude work. Dangerous.” He lifted his head to the captain. “You lit a blood-call in a civilian zone.”

“Necessary precaution,” the captain said, but a bead of sweat broke at his temple. He’d seen what Damian did, how his ring had severed the call like a blade. “Chairman, please. We’re past debate. We have to move her.”

Damian’s gaze slid to me at last. Not a question this time, not a command, but something worse: a decision he’d already made.

“We’re going to the Council House now,” he said, and when I opened my mouth, he added, “With me.”

“My father.....” my voice cracked. “They’re moving him. My mother.....”

“I’ve already deployed medics to your mother,” he said without looking away. “Your father is being taken to the lower cells. If we delay, the Sanctum will close its doors and your access with it.”

I hated that he was right. I hated that he knew he was right and that he used it like leverage. But the echo of that burning sigil had left my hands shaking, and the thought of more of those symbols lighting under my skin made bile rise in my throat.

Damian lifted his hand. Three men peeled from shadow, his, not the pack’s; they moved like predators, silent and sure. “Form on Valery,” he ordered. “Vehicle one.”

Ethan stepped in, a snarl in his voice. “You can’t take her—”

Damian didn’t even blink. “Touch her and I’ll break your hand.”

For a heartbeat, old reflex flared in me at the fight in Ethan’s eyes: history, memory, a thousand soft things we’d buried under his betrayal. Then I saw the calculation there too, the way he measured power like coin, the way his gaze slid to where the sigil had dimmed on my arm and then snapped away, afraid.

“Move,” Damian said.

I did.

The SUV idled at the curb, black glass in the night. Inside, the leather smelled like smoke and cedar, like him. Damian slid in after me, the door thudding shut, shutting out the yard and the whispers and Ethan’s stare like a coffin lid. The vehicle surged forward. Two more followed, a small convoy opening the street like a knife.

I stared at the faint red after-image seared into my arm. “What did they try to do to me?”

“Call you,” Damian said. No gentleness. Just precision. “The Sanctum has a blood-call network, marks that resonate when they’re triggered. They can tug you like a fish on a line.”

A shiver ran through me. “And you cut it with your ring.”

His mouth curved with no humor. “The Chairman’s seal disrupts low-grade constructs. It won’t work twice if they adapt.” His eyes slid to me, husky smoke, unblinking. “You have to assume every hand in that hall will try to control you first and save you second.”

“Save me,” I echoed, the words thin. “You mean dissect me.”

Silence.

City lights blurred past. The convoy hummed. My pulse beat against my tongue. “Ethan said ‘blood heir’ like it was a death sentence. What does it mean?”

Damian leaned back, a study in leashed violence. When he spoke, his voice had the weight of things older than the road under us. “When Lycans were young and stupid, we made oaths with older creatures. Your kind, blood heirs, were born with the ability to awaken those promises. To bind and unbind what should’ve stayed sleeping. The Council thinks blood heirs died out because the stories say they did.”

“And you don’t.”

His eyes didn’t leave mine. “I never believed in extinct things. Only in hidden ones.”

“You knew.” Anger crept through the fear like heat through cold water. “You knew before tonight. Before the bar. You knew what I might be.”

He didn’t flinch. “I knew the Council had you flagged. I didn’t know if they were right.” A pause. “Until I saw the glyph take.”

A tremor ran through my hands. “So what am I to you, Damian? A problem to solve? A chess piece?”

His gaze dropped to my mouth, then lower to where the line of my skirt had ridden up in the scramble and his hands had left heat on my hips earlier. Hunger flashed there, undeniable, hot, then vanished behind something colder.

“You’re a storm the Council doesn’t know how to survive,” he said softly. “And you’re mine.”

I sucked a breath in, half fury, half something I didn’t want to name.

The SUV glided to a stop. The Council House rose like a cathedral ahead, black stone and silver banners, wolves in armor lining the steps. The air here tasted like iron and old rules. Damian’s hand brushed the small of my back as we climbed out, possession masquerading as guidance. I wanted to shrug him off. I didn’t.

Gammas formed a corridor. The captain from my yard waited at the top, helmet tucked under his arm, expression pinched like he’d rather be anywhere but here. “Chairman,” he said. “The Council’s convened. The Sanctum observer is already inside.”

Damian’s jaw ticked. “They move fast when they smell blood.”

We passed into shadow and marble and the low thrum of power. The Council chamber doors, twelve feet tall, banded in iron, loomed ahead. I felt the echo of the earlier brand like a phantom burn and curled my fingers into my palms until the half-moons of my nails bit skin.

“Whatever they say,” Damian said, pitched for me alone, “don’t rise to it.”

“So I should stand here and look grateful?”

“You should stand here and live.”

He didn’t wait for my answer. He pushed the doors.

Light and faces and silence like a blade.

Councillors sat in their crescent, robes dark, crests silver. The gallery beyond them throbbed with the quiet of too many bodies holding breath. At the chamber’s center, chains dangled from a post sunk into the stone, cold and ugly.

My father wasn’t there.

Fear punched me hard enough that my knees went soft. “Where is he?” The words broke free before I could swallow them. “Where’s my father?”