MasukROWAN'S POVThe document stayed pressed against my chest the entire ride back, and I didn't open it once.It wasn't mine to open. My mother had addressed it clearly, and whatever was inside belonged to Mira before it belonged to anyone else, including me. I didn't know what my mother had written, and I found that I wasn't ready to know anyway. There was something that felt almost sacred about that ignorance, and I held onto it the way I held the sealed paper — carefully, because pressure alone might break something.Tobias rode beside me and said nothing the entire journey back, because he knew better than to ask.~~~I found Mira in the training yard when I arrived, working with one of the senior warriors, and the first thing I noticed was how different she moved now. Her wolf was fully present in the way her body responded — sharper, more certain, more settled in herself than the woman who had arrived here months ago barely standing. She noticed me the moment I crossed into the ya
Rowan's POVIf there was a place in the world that was more deserted than a fucking desert, it would be this place. There were no pack markings on any of the posts lining the road, no flags, no territorial symbols of any kind, and the whole place had the feeling of somewhere that had been built to be overlooked rather than found. Small, plain, unremarkable in every direction I looked.The settlement...Tobias stayed back with the horses without me having to say anything because he read the situation the way he always does and found a spot near the tree line where he could watch the road without being obvious about it. I walked through the settlement on my own, counting the doors as I passed them, keeping my pace steady and my face neutral the way I'd trained myself to do in situations where I didn't yet know what I was walking into.Third on the left.I knocked once and the door opened before I even finished the motion, which meant she'd been standing right behind it, waiting.Dara
Rowan's POVI read the message three times.The first time I thought I misunderstood it. The second time I felt something cold settle in my chest. The third time I put the radio down and just stood there for a second, staring at nothing.Mira was watching me. I could feel her through the bond, that quiet little pull she does when she's trying to figure me out without asking outright. She wasn't getting anything from my face though. I made sure of that. I wasn't ready to talk about it yet, mostly because I didn't know what I would even say. I didn't fully understand it myself.I found Tobias outside near the east post and told him I needed horses arranged for first light. Just two. No guard detail, no extra riders.He looked at me for a second. "Just the two of you?""Yes."He nodded and that was it. He didn't push, didn't ask where I was going or why I didn't want backup. That's the thing about Tobias. He reads a room better than most people and he knows when a question would be one t
TOBIAS'S POVHer name was Dara Cade, though that wasn't the name she'd been born with. Her real name was LenaShe'd been on the southern border for four years using her mother's maiden name, which was a clean choice because her mother's maiden name appeared in no Royalfang official document and connected to nothing that anyone running a standard search would think to look for. It was the kind of disappearance that only works if you understand exactly how people look for things, and Dara had grown up in the same house as Rowan, which meant she understood that better than most.I'd known her exact location for three of those four years.I'd found it the way I found most things, through the network of people and information lines I'd been maintaining for fifteen years, and when the location came to me I'd sat with it for a day and then filed it in the category of things I knew that weren't mine to act on, and I'd left it there and I'd been leaving it there every time it came up in my ow
ROWAN'S POVI took it out of my coat the next morning.Mira was sitting across from me at the small table by the window with her tea and her hand resting on her stomach the way it always rested there now, and I put the seal on the table between us and looked at it for a moment before I said anything.It was small. Smaller than people imagine when they hear the word seal, smaller than something that carries this much weight probably should be. Silver, worn smooth in the places where a hand would hold it repeatedly over years of use, with the Royalfang crest worked into the face alongside a secondary mark that belonged to my mother's family line rather than to the crown.Mira looked at it and then looked at me."It's my mother's," I said.She waited."She wore it until the day she died," I said. "It was on her hand at the funeral and I took it off myself and put it in the family vault, and I remember doing it because I remember most things about that day in the specific way you remember
MIRA'S POVThe negotiation took four hours.I know because I watched the light in the war room change from the flat grey of early morning into something warmer and more certain, and by the time Seraphine was escorted to the guest room on the second floor the windows were doing the thing they do in mid-morning when the sun has cleared the eastern wall and the stone holds it differently than it does at dawn.The guest room was under guard, which Tobias had arranged with the specific phrasing of protective custody rather than detention, and the distinction mattered in ways that would become clearer over the next sixty days when the dismantling happened and the paperwork needed to reflect the nature of the arrangement. Seraphine had accepted the room and the guard and the phrasing without objecting to any of it, which told me she understood that this was the shape of what she'd agreed to and was prepared to live inside it.Cassius had been sent word through the back channels Tobias knew b
Finn’s POVI stopped outside Mira’s door before leaving, the heavy wood of the portal a barrier between my world of power and the woman who refused to submit.The guards straightened immediately when they saw me, the sharp click of their heels hitting the stone floor echoing through the narrow corr
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
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
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.







