LOGINAria's POVThe silence stretched so long that I could hear my own breathing, every face in the room was turned toward me. Every pair of eyes waited not for the truth, but for my explanation. My gaze remained fixed on the tablet resting on the table, my own voice still echoing inside my head."If Dam
Aria’s POVThe silence after Kade’s mother spoke didn’t break immediately. It settled instead, thick and suffocating, like the room itself had decided it was finished listening to me.My hands were still hovering over the table when the voice note began to play and at first, it sounded like static,
Aria’s POVThe air in the sitting room felt wrong the moment I stepped inside, it wasn’t just the silence, it was the kind of silence that carried weight, like everyone inside had already agreed on a version of events I hadn’t even been told yet. My hand was still on the door handle when I noticed
The door opened before I realized I had stopped moving entirely.Thorne stepped aside without speaking. “She’s here,” he said quietly.I looked up to see Aria standing in the doorway.Real. Present. Unaware of what had already been decided in the room she was about to step into and for the first tim
Damon’s POVThe first sign that something was wrong was the silence that settled over the Packhouse, the kind that felt deliberate rather than natural, as though the building itself was holding its breath. Thorne entered my office without his usual confidence, placing a sealed file on my desk but re
Aria's POVThe waiting was worse than the test itself and I had imagined the bloodline spell would somehow give me answers immediately, that the healers would wave glowing hands over a crystal and tell me whether the child growing inside me belonged to Damon or Kade.Instead, I had spent nearly an h
Aria’s POVFor the first time in days, the Packhouse felt quiet. I won’t say it was peaceful because peace never lasted long around the Rowans, but it was quieter. The corridors were no longer filled with healers rushing back and forth, and no one was watching me like I might collapse if I breathed
Aria’s POVRecovery felt unnatural, not painful or exhausting, just… wrong.By the next morning, I was already walking without assistance. Maeve kept checking my pulse every hour like she expected me to collapse at any second, but every time she examined me, her frown only deepened.“You should stil
Aria’s POV“He killed me.” The words echoed inside my skull long after Lex said them.I stared at him, my breathing uneven as my mind tried to make sense of what I had just heard. Damon stood several feet away from us, rigid and terrifyingly still, but it was the silence that frightened me most. If
Damon stepped out from the trees.Of course he did.He didn’t look surprised to see Lex. If anything, he looked like he had expected this exact moment. His expression was carved from something cold and controlled, but his eyes were sharper than usual, locked entirely on Lex like he was already calcu







