LOGIN*MIRA'S POV*On the third day, Elara finally said I could get out of bed.She said it with conditions attached though. The baby was fine and my body was healing, but I needed to move slowly, avoid stress, and not push myself into anything my body wasn't ready for. She listed these things while checking my pulse, with her fingers light on my wrist and her eyes on the small clock she kept in her coat pocket.I said yes to all of it and meant none of it.I sat on the edge of the bed after she left and took stock. My ribs were sore on the left side where I had hit the rocks, and my hands had healed cleanly with no scarring from the claws, which Elara said was normal for partial shifts. My legs were steady when I stood, though not strong.Good enough.Rowan had visited every day. He came in the mornings, sometimes for twenty minutes and sometimes longer. He brought books the second day — a history of the Royalfang territory and something lighter about pack traditions that I suspected Elar
MIRA'S POVMy hands would not stop shaking.But this wasn't from cold, although I was cold — soaked through, the night air finding every gap in my torn dress.It wasn't from fear either, though the fear had been real enough while it was happening.My hands were shaking because the space between what had just occurred and what could have occurred was so narrow I could not stop measuring it from every angle.Rowan could have gone over the cliff without getting his arms around me.Finn could have held on longer in the river. Rowan could have been half a second slower coming out of the water and I would have been dragged into the trees before the guards reached the bank.Any single thing might hand happened different and this would have ended differently.Elara was still beside me with her hand on my arm, running her quick healer's check — pulse, temperature, asking me to follow her finger with my eyes. I answered her questions while watching Rowan cross the rocks toward us, and the shaki
ROWAN'S POVI have ended fights before.I have put down challengers, settled border disputes with force, handled threats to the crown in ways that required my wolf and not my judgment.I know what it feels like to fight with control — to use exactly what the situation requires and no more, to stay present and deliberate even when the wolf is pushing forward.This was not that.When I came out of the water and saw Finn's hands on Mira — his weight bearing down on her, her claws already raked across his face, his hands moving to pin her again despite the wounds, I snapped and my wolf took over so completely that I have no clear memory of the distance between the river's edge and the moment of impact.There was water and rocks and the cold and then there was Finn beneath me and I was already moving.We went down hard on the rocks and I felt his claws find my shoulder immediately and I did not care.The pains I felt was information. It told me where his hands were, which told me how to mo
MIRA'S POVOne moment I was against Rowan's chest with his arms locked around me, and the next there was nothing under my feet — just air, and the sound of rock crumbling, and the wall of the castle rushing upward past us as we fell.I felt him twist. A deliberate movement, not a flail — he turned his body in the air so that his back was angled down and mine was up.He was positioning himself to take the impact. Even falling, he was thinking about that.We hit the water.The cold was absolute. It knocked every thought out of my head for a full second — just cold, and noise, and the violent shock of the current.Rowan's arms were still around me when we went under and then the water tore us apart and I was spinning, no up or down, just movement and cold and pressure.I fought toward the light.When I broke the surface, I gasped — a full, ragged sound — and tried to orient myself. The river was fast. The current had already pulled me downstream from where we'd hit. The cliff wall was on
ROWAN'S POVMira came through the gate behind me.I had told her to stay inside. She had looked at me with an expression that made clear she had heard the instruction and was making her own decision about it, and then she had followed me anyway.I had a half-second to decide whether to stop her and chose not to. Locking her inside while Finn stood at my wall was not something I was willing to do.So she was behind me, and Finn saw her the moment we came through the gate.I watched his face when he saw her. The hollowed-out desperation I had read from forty feet away changed into something more focused and more dangerous.Not hope — something past hope, into the territory where a man has simplified everything down to one remaining objective.He looked at me. "Send her over. She walks to me, I take my men and we leave. No bloodshed."My wolf came forward so fast I had to actively hold it back. Every instinct I had was telling me to close the distance between us and end this immediately.
TOBIAS'S POVI heard the alarm from inside the castle and I was moving before I had all the information.East wall breach. Multiple figures. Nature of threat unconfirmed.I came out through the east gate at a run and saw my guards in a wide semi-circle, weapons out, facing a group of roughly twelve men who had stopped about forty feet from the wall.They hadn't pushed forward yet, which meant they hadn't come here to win a quick fight. They'd come to make a point.Then I saw who was at the front and I stopped moving.Finn.He looked terrible. He was’t injured in any fresh way — nothing I could point to and say that wound happened today.He looked terrible the way people look when they have stopped sleeping, stopped eating, stopped doing the maintenance work of being alive because none of it seemed worth the effort.His clothes were torn and stained. His eyes were moving too fast, checking everything at once, and there was something in them that I had seen before in men who had made a
Mira’s POVThe silence was almost louder than the screaming. It was a heavy, terrible pressure that seemed to weigh down on my eyelids and ears.Outside, the world was still ending, but inside the room, it felt like the air had been sucked out by a vacuum, leaving a hollow lightness in its wake. I
Tobias’s POVThe air out here tasted like pine needles and impending violence. I stayed low, my stomach pressed against the damp earth, watching the chaos unfold through the thick veil of the tree line.From this vantage point, the Nightshadow Pack territory looked like a disturbed hornet’s nest.T
The pain is sharp, sudden, and terrifying, blooming low in my stomach like a tight knot twisting hard enough to tear.I gasp despite myself, my body reacting with a violent flinch before my mind can even catch up to what is happening.My hand flies to my abdomen, fingers splaying wide, as I bend sl
Mira’s POVThe door didn't just open; it practically flew off the hinges. I didn't even have to look up to know the healer had arrived, mostly because the sound of her heavy breathing and the frantic clatter of her medical bag preceded her by a mile.She looked like she’d run a marathon just to get







