MasukKieranFor half a second I just looked at her.Then my brow went up. "Did you practice that while I was out?"She glared at me, and she pulled her shoulders back and made her face do offended, but it didn't sit right on her. The glare was a beat too late and a shade too clean, put on over something she didn't want me looking at too closely.I had the sense not to say so.I almost let the corner of my mouth move. Then I shifted my weight wrong, and the wound pulled under my ribs sharp enough that my breath caught, my hand fisted in the blanket and dragged it tight across my waist.She was closer before she'd decided to be. Her eyes went to the bandage first, not my face, tracking the edge of it for fresh blood.She was furious with me. Her body still chose the wound before the argument, and I didn't know what to do with that except feel it make refusing her harder. I let out a breath through my teeth."Who were you holding the pass against?" she asked.I looked away from her. Not becau
KieranI didn't answer her right away.I looked at her hand instead. It was resting near the edge of the bed, close enough that I could have reached it without stretching, and that small fact bothered me more than the wound pulling under my ribs. She'd stayed the night in a hard chair. She'd stood in that hall and heard the man laugh from the doorway. And now she was standing here asking me for the truth, and I couldn't hide behind the pain without knowing exactly what hiding would make me in her eyes."You should rest," I said. "This can wait until—"She didn't move. She just looked at me, level, and let me hear how thin it sounded.My jaw tightened, and the pain pulled hard enough that I had to breathe around it before I could speak again. She caught that too. Her anger flickered into worry for a second, the way it kept doing, but she didn't soften enough to hand me the exit."Garron," I said.Her expression shifted, because it was the first real thing I'd given her, and even his n
KieranI came back slow, and it wasn't gentle.The pain reached me first, a deep drag under my ribs that pulled with every breath. The bitter smell of silver still hung off the bandages. My wolf was awake under my skin, restless and angry and weaker than it had any right to be, scratching at the inside of me for a fight it couldn't find. The lamps were turned low, and for a moment I didn't know if I was in my own bed or still out on the ridge with the smoke in my eyes.Then I turned my head.Meredith was asleep in the chair beside me.Not gracefully. Not arranged the way a soft bedside wife arranges herself for the picture of it. Her neck was bent at an angle that was going to hurt her when she woke, her hair had come loose from whatever she'd done with it hours ago, and one hand was tucked up near the edge of the mattress, fingers half-curled, like she'd fallen asleep reaching for me and hadn't quite made it. There was still a faint smear of dried blood near her sleeve.My blood.Tha
AlarickThe report came in broken, half a sentence at a time, and I sat in the back of the car with the wine going warm and forgotten in my hand.Silverthorn's north ridge. Fire. Gunfire on the ridge road. The pack had sealed its outer routes inside the hour and nobody on the outside knew the shape of it yet.I should have thought about what it meant. Bloodmoon and Silverthorn and the coalition, the borders, what an attack on the Rogue Alpha's ground did to the balance of every territory around it. That was the Alpha's thought, and it should have come first.It didn't come at all."Was she seen?" I said.A pause on the line. "No, Alpha.""Was she hurt?""We don't—" Another pause. "No one's saying. Not because she's clear. Because no one knows yet."That was the part that got its fingers into me. Not she's hurt. Not she's safe. Just nobody knew, and I was three territories away with a glass of wine in my hand.I called her.It rang. Once, twice, the sound of it going out into a room I
MeredithI was already moving, and there was a roar in my ears, and all I could see was his face.I don't remember deciding to cross the floor. One second I was at the table with Kieran's blood drying on my hand, and the next I was halfway across the hall with my whole body aimed at the man in the doorway. His words were still in me, lodged somewhere they wouldn't come loose. Should've stayed dead at the pass. Kieran was bleeding behind me and this man was laughing about it, and my wolf had gone somewhere past thinking, somewhere I couldn't reach to call her back from.Sera caught me, but not easily.My nails cut the air close enough to his face that he jerked his head back before he laughed at me. A guard got hold of my wrist and twisted it facing it down while Sera locked an arm hard around my waist and took my feet right off the floor, and still I strained against both of them, reaching, and for one long breath the whole receiving hall got to stand there and watch their Luna try
MeredithI was crossing the hall before I could even think.They had him up between two wolves, his weight hung off their shoulders, the blood gone dark and stiff on his clothes and smoke worked into his hair. His head hung so low that even now, this close, some last desperate part of me tried to make him into someone else. Then the firelight caught the scar by his left eye, and everything in me dropped through the floor.I was almost at him before I'd decided to move.A healer's aide stepped into my path with his hands up. "Luna, we need space here, you can't—""Move."It came out of me low and flat and cold, nothing like my own voice, and the boy went white and stepped aside without another word.People turned. I felt them turn but honestly? I didn't care who saw it.Elara reached us, and she saw him properly then.Whatever had been in her face went out of it all at once. The warmth, the dry amusement, all of it just emptied, and what was left underneath was so still and so cold th
MeredithThe car stopped inside Silverthorn’s courtyard, and I stepped out into silence.Guards lined the walls, and pack members stood scattered throughout the space, all watching. No one moved forward to welcome me, or said anything at all. They just watched, silent and uncertain, like they were
MeredithKieran’s words hung in the air like a sentence already passed.We leave for Silverthorn at dawn.The arrangement wasn’t just ink and blood and arguments anymore. I was actually going to leave with him. The reality of it settled over the room like weight pressing down on everyone standing t
Meredith Kieran Croft. The name wouldn’t stop repeating in my head. Stories came with it, the kind whispered across territories when people thought no one important was listening. The Rogue Alpha. The leader of Silverthorn who’d been accused of betraying the coalition. The man other packs avoi
MeredithSix days had passed since I agreed to the arrangement, and I still didn't know the Alpha's name.I'd spent those days imagining every possible kind of man my father could have hidden from me. Old and desperate for an heir. Cruel and looking for someone he could control. Politically dangero







