Se connecterMiraElara's hands didn't stop moving.That was what I kept tracking — her hands, the way they worked with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that panic didn't get to interrupt the process. She pressed, adjusted, checked. The bleeding had slowed. Not stopped, but it had slowed, and she had said that like it was good news, so I was trying to treat it like good news.The baby's heartbeat showed on the monitor beside me, present and audible but uneven in a way that made Elara's jaw tighten every time she looked at it."You're doing well," she said, which I was almost certain was a lie, but I wasn't going to focus on that right now. Nope. Isla stood at the door with Kara's unit, all of them armed, none of them fully still. She had been watching the corridor in short, controlled intervals since we'd gotten here, and I had been watching her watch it."Finn challenged Rowan in the throne room," she said, without turning around.The words landed with more weigh
RowanThe throne room doors opened before my hands could even touch them.It appears that Finn had been waiting.He stood in the center of the room with twelve warriors fanned out behind him in a loose arc, the formation deliberate and rehearsed. The throne at his back wasn't lost on me — positioning himself in front of it was its own statement. In wolf tradition, to take this room was to take the kingdom. He knew I would know that.I stepped inside. My own warriors filed in behind me, and for a moment neither side moved.I let myself look at him. Really look. The years since his exile hadn't been gentle. Fresh scars layered over old ones, and his left eye had gone milky, clouded by some injury that hadn't healed cleanly. But his right eye — that one was sharp and burning with the kind of conviction that doesn't leave room for doubt or mercy.He spoke first."Alpha Rowan." His voice carried the formal cadence of Old Pack law, the kind used in blood declarations. "I invoke the right of
TOBIAS'S POVThe west wing was quieter than the rest of the castle, which was either good news or bad. I moved through it with four guards and my hand on my blade and my attention split between the immediate corridor and the picture I was assembling from everything I had seen since the first explosion.The secondary station was a room I had noted on my first full assessment of the castle years ago — small, practical, the kind of resource that gets overlooked in normal operations and becomes critical in abnormal ones. I pushed the door open and took in the room in one sweep.Mira was alive. She was sitting upright on the table with her hand pressed flat against her stomach and her face doing the thing it did when she was managing something she had not fully processed yet. Isla in the chair beside her, weapons visible, posture alert. Kara's unit at the door and the far wall. A young apprentice near the supply shelving with the wide, careful eyes of someone who had been frightened for h
ROWAN'S POVThe explosions had been timed perfectly.Each breach point was hit within seconds of the others, which required coordination across multiple teams who had no direct line of communication once they were in position. That level of timing required rehearsal. It required someone who had run this kind of operation before and knew how to synchronize without real-time contact.I had underestimated what Finn was capable of when he had nothing left to lose and months to plan.I was correcting that mistake now, corridor by corridor, with Tobias on my left and six of my best warriors forming a moving line as we pushed back through the east section toward the throne room approach. Finn's people had gotten further into the castle than I had allowed for in any of my planning, and fixing that was going to cost time and blood that I did not want to spend."Throne room corridor is holding," Tobias said beside me, reading from the runner who had just reached us and was already moving back.
MIRA'S POVI had felt the first cramp when the warrior grabbed my arm.I had told myself it was the adrenaline, the sudden movement, the reflexive clench of every muscle in my body responding to the threat. I had told myself it would pass. I had followed Isla through the servant passages and focused on putting one foot in front of the other and kept the information about what my body was doing in the category of things I would deal with when there was space to deal with them.There was space now, in the storage room, and the cramping had not passed. It had gotten worse.I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and tried to assess it without my fear doing the assessing for me. Sharp, not dull. Coming in intervals that were not consistent but were getting closer. My back ached in the specific way that was different from exertion and I knew the difference because Elara had told me what to watch for and I had listened carefully because I was not an idiot, even when I pretended the info
ISLA'S POVThe lock took forty seconds for me to pick. It was a good lock — better than the one on my cell at Finn's territory, better than most I had encountered in my life, which told me the person who designed Royalfang's secured quarters had actually thought about who might be put in them. But a good lock is still a lock and I had learned to pick them at fifteen from a rogue trader who visited our pack twice a year, and some skills do not leave you regardless of how long it has been since you used them.The door swung open onto an empty corridor.The explosions had done that much for me — every guard who had been stationed near my quarters had gone toward the breach points, which was correct prioritization on their part and convenient timing for mine. I stood in the doorway for a moment and listened to the castle and made a calculation.The calculation was simple. I was in a building under active assault by a man who had used me as a tool for four years and had no particular rea
Mira’s POVThe sound came just after nightfall, a heavy, suffocating blanket of darkness that usually brought nothing but despair. Tonight, however, the place felt kind of different.Three taps were heard from the door. An agonizingly long pause stretched my nerves to the breaking point.Two taps.
FinnIsla hesitated, her eyes searching mine for a reassurance I wasn’t sure I could give. “What if that wasn't enough? What if he brought in outside Seers? What if he demanded she be examined by neutral parties?”“It wasn't,” I said sharply, cutting her off before the doubt could take root.A heav
Rowan’s POVTobias closed the door behind him, the soft click echoing through my study. He waited until he had my full attention, setting aside the maps of the northern borders and the ledgers of the southern grain stores to focus completely on me. I respected that stillness; in a world of posturin
Finn’s POVThe messenger arrived just as the sun began to set out over the horizon, casting long shadows across the grounds of the pack house.I was in my study, the air thick with the scent of old paper and the faint, metallic tang of the ink I had been using to review territory reports. The borde







