LOGINTOBIAS'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
ROWAN'S POVI laid it all out on the table.Everything we had, in the order we'd built it, starting from the mediator and the fourteen year old territorial report that Isla had pulled from Finn's locked files and working forward through the supply corridor and Cassius and the communications blackout and the compromised guards and the twenty years of infrastructure sitting underneath all of it like a foundation nobody had thought to look at because the building above it looked stable.Seraphine sat across from me and listened.Mira was beside me with her hands folded on the table and her wolf present in her eyes and her attention on Seraphine's face rather than on what I was saying, because Mira had already heard everything I was saying and what she was doing now was reading the responses, which was the more useful job at this stage and she'd taken it without being asked.Tobias was at the door. Isla was standing to the left of the room, away from the table, positioned where she could
ROWAN'S POVTobias's voice was in my ear the whole way up.Third floor, east corridor, he said, and I came through the north gate already running with thirty warriors behind me and my wolf fully surfaced and the bond between me and Mira pulling like something physical, like an actual rope attached somewhere in the center of my chest and getting shorter with every step I took toward the building.I took the stairs three at a time.The warriors behind me kept pace and I heard them and didn't look back because looking back would have cost me half a second and half a second felt like something I didn't have to spend. The bond was strong and present and Mira was alive, I knew she was alive because I could feel her through it, but alive and safe are two different things and I wouldn't know the second one until I was in the same room.Third floor. East corridor. I came around the corner and stopped.Mira was standing in the middle of the corridor.Completely unharmed. Upright and steady with
MIRA'S POVSeraphine sat across from me and said, "I don't want the kingdom."She said it clearly, the way you say something you've already decided you're done being ambiguous about, and I looked at her face and I believed her, which was the strangest part of the whole conversation because I'd spent the last twenty minutes in a room with this woman being very aware of what she was capable of and belief wasn't where I expected to land.But that's the thing about dangerous people. The most dangerous ones are never after the obvious thing. The obvious thing is too easy to see coming and too easy to defend against, and Seraphine had not gotten to where she was by being easy to defend against."Then what do you want," I said."A bloodline acknowledgment," she said.I waited for her to keep going because those two words on their own weren't enough and she knew they weren't enough, and she was the kind of person who structured her sentences to make you ask the follow-up question, which I was
Mira’s POV I woke up to the sound of low, unfamiliar, and professional voices vibrating through the heavy door. It wasn't the usual light banter or bored silence of the guards who had grown used to my silent presence. These new voices were hard, professional, and entirely new to me. I could hear
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
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







