LOGINKieranI read it twice and felt the afternoon go out of me.The mud, the race, all of it drained off and left the cold thing underneath. Bloodmoon had gone through the coalition. They'd put it on the record. And I stood there reading the same polite sentence over while something tightened in my chest and stayed tight.Meredith was still close, watching my face instead of the notice. She'd already worked out from my expression that this wasn't Bloodmoon whining down a phone line again."Lay it out," I told Silas."They haven't accused us of anything."He kept his voice level. "That's the clever part. They've just asked, in writing, through the liaison, for assurance that she's safe, that no one's coercing her and that she can speak. If we sit on it, they say the silence is the answer. If we come back swinging, they say a clear conscience wouldn't need to swing." He shrugged. "Either way they've handed us a question we can't put down cleanly.""Then we don't swing." I folded the phone s
MeredithSera turned back around to face me, and I made myself sit still in the saddle and not look away from her, even though something in me wanted to.Kieran stayed where he was beside his own horse. He didn't step in, and I knew by now that the not-stepping-in was deliberate.The stable boy had found a strap to fuss with. It didn't need fussing with. He worked at it like his life depended on the buckle.I waited. Sera said nothing, and the silence stretched out long enough that I started to feel it crawl up the back of my neck, and I had to fight the urge to fill it for her.Then she looked at me, dead on, with something cold and flat in her eyes that I felt in my chest before I understood it."You want all of us to believe you can't be handled," she said. "That you walked in here and nobody puts a hand on you. But you gave Alarick five years to handle you. Five. So forgive me if I don't bow to the new version overnight."My grip tightened on the reins, and the gelding tossed his
KieranThe rain line had been a mistake. I knew it the second it left my mouth.I'd only said it to break whatever she was building behind that stare. She'd been winding up to come at me, and I'd reached for the first thing that wasn't the call, and what came out was the weather. Now she was looking at me like I'd grown a second head, and I couldn't take it back.She'd had Alarick handled. I knew that. She didn't need me in there.But I wasn't going to stand in a doorway and listen to him call her weak. Not from him. Not from the man who'd spent years making her exactly that and then acting surprised to find her bent. He still knew where every old wound on her sat. He could press them without lifting a finger, over a phone, three packs away, and I'd had to listen to him do it.So I'd stepped in. And honestly? I'd say it again if he gave me the chance."Being right," Meredith was saying, "doesn't give you the right to walk into a fight I was already winning."We were back to this.Sh
Meredith Ring. Ring. The phone buzzed against the table, and his name sat on the screen, lighting up and going dark and lighting up again. Alarick. I didn't pick it up right away. My hand hovered over it. The name did what the name always did. It put me back in the hall in the dress. It put me back in the five years I'd spent waiting, in the promises I'd taken at face value, in the version of him I'd loved before I learned what he chose when it mattered. Something shifted by the door. Just the brush of a sleeve against the frame, and I knew it was Kieran without looking. He'd stayed out in the corridor like he said he would, leaning there where he could hear me but not loom over the table. I didn't mind that he was there. That was the part I'd have to think about later, because some piece of me settled with him at that door, and I didn't have time for what that meant. I took a breath and pressed the green. "Meredith??" His voice came through, and it landed lower in me than I
KieranI read it twice off Sera's phone.A direct welfare call with Meredith. No Alpha present. No Silverthorn authority in the room. Her on the line, alone."No."It was out before the room had finished breathing. My wolf had the answer before my head did, because all I could see was Alarick's voice in her ear and no one standing between them. The pressure came up off my skin before I caught it. The lamp on the desk buzzed in its base. Sera didn't flinch, but she went quiet for a second, which was her version of flinching."Refuse it and we look guilty," she said slowly. "Deny the call and Packline writes it as proof. Silverthorn Won't Let Her Speak. They don't even have to lie. They just print that you said no."I knew she was right.That was the worst part. Bloodmoon had found the one shape where keeping her safe looked exactly like keeping her caged, and there was no clean way to stand in it.My screen pinged.I looked. A trade office. The same neutral house whose man had stood
AlarickThe story was everywhere by mid-morning.I had it open on my screen and I kept refreshing it. Every time I did, the count climbed. The neutral markets had it. The trade boards had it. The packs that leaned Bloodmoon were already repeating it like they'd seen it themselves.I'd wanted this.That was what I kept telling myself, and it kept not being true. The spreading didn't touch the part that mattered. She was marked. Kieran's mark. And every wolf with a phone knew it now.I read the same two lines again.Alpha Kieran Croft removed her from the hall.He'd carried her. I hadn't known that until I read it like a stranger, off a bulletin.I clenched my fist, only stopping when I felt a sharp building pain from my nails biting into my palm.He'd had his hands on her, taken her out in front of his pack, and somewhere in the days after that she'd let him put his teeth in her throat.I made myself stop reading as I looked up to catch the person still talking in front of me.A servan
MeredithI stood in front of the mirror and looked at the mark on my neck.Three days had passed since Kieran gave it to me.The bite had healed, but not enough to disappear. When I turned my head, it caught clearly above my collar, and the sight of it made my fingers curl around the edge of the dr
AlarickThe office was too quiet.There were reports on my desk, messages waiting for approval, and a half-finished request from the household staff asking who should take over the Luna duties Meredith used to manage. I read the line twice, then threw the paper aside.It was irritation. That was al
Meredith The room stayed silent after I said it. Kieran didn’t move. That annoyed me more than a flat refusal would have. He only stood there, watching me like one wrong step from him could break something neither of us knew how to fix. My hand tightened around the edge of my robe. “You don’t ha
Meredith I lay on the bed and watched the daylight go. I tried to rest. The moon wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t pain, not at first. It was a low, restless pressure under my skin, like my wolf kept reaching for something she could not reach. Yara’s medicine steadied my body. I could feel that much wor







