LOGINAnnalyn POVI didn't scream at Lola Nena, I walked out of the room, past Calix who read my expression and fell into step behind me without asking a single question, and I went to the kitchen.The kitchen was the most ordinary room in the mansion. Garlic smell and old wood and the specific quiet of a room that existed for practical purposes rather than impressive ones. I went to the sink, turned the cold water on, and held my wrists under it the way I had done at home since I was a teenager whenever everything became too large to hold at once.The water ran. My wrists went cold. And for one suspended moment the smell of the room was close enough to my mother's kitchen that I gripped the edge of the sink and just breathed.Calix stood in the doorway.He said nothing. He did not fill the silence with reassurance or questions or the particular kind of anxious helpfulness that made silence feel more crowded than sound. He simply stood there and let the quiet exist and let me exist in it, w
Annalyn POVCalix found me in the corridor outside my room before I had made it ten steps from the door.His grip on my arm was firm without being rough, the kind that communicated urgency rather than force. He pulled me into the alcove near the window and kept his voice low."Rodrigo said something before I left his room," he said. "I need you to hear it.""Tell me.""He said Lola Nena spent thirty years building something in hiding. Not an object. Someone." He held my gaze. "He said to ask her who has been living with her for the last twenty years. When I went to her room to do exactly that, I heard two voices inside. One was hers. The other was young, female, and carrying wolf blood old enough that I could hear it in the air from the corridor."I stood with that for three seconds, running it against everything Lola Nena had told me and everything she had carefully not told me."Someone young," I said. "With old blood.""Yes.""And Rodrigo knew about her.""He brought her up himself
Calix POVI didn't trust the timing. Matteo was in the kitchen when I found him the morning after Lola Nena arrived, pouring coffee and looking like a man who had processed a great deal in a short amount of time and had arrived somewhere functional. I pulled him into the corridor and closed the kitchen door."Her arrival was too precise," I said.He looked at me. "She's Annalyn's grandmother.""She's Annalyn's grandmother who appeared six days before the release window opens." I kept my voice level. "Which means she knew the window was opening. Which means she has been tracking this situation from wherever she was hiding with more information than any of us had access to." I paused to let that settle. "She didn't come because she found out. She came because she already knew and she chose this specific moment to arrive."Matteo drank his coffee. He was quiet in the way he was quiet when he was actually thinking rather than just waiting for a pause to speak into, which was one of the th
Annalyn POVMatteo tried to give Lola Nena tea first. Then food. Then a chair. Then a proper bed in the east wing that he said was comfortable and well-aired.She refused all four without looking at him."Sit," she said to me, already lowering herself to the floor of my room with the ease of someone whose body had never forgotten how to be close to the ground. Cross-legged, shawl settling around her, hands resting on her knees. She moved the way old trees look — like age had made her more fixed rather than less.Matteo looked at me from the doorway. I nodded once and he closed the door.I sat across from her on the floor.She studied the space around me the way a painter studies a canvas she made years ago and then let go of. Recognition and loss in the same expression. She placed both palms flat on the floor between us, fingers spread."I am going to speak to her directly," she said. "You will feel her come forward. Do not fight it. Let her move toward the front of your mind but keep
Annalyn POVI didn't wait for anyone to organize an escort.I walked and the three of them fell into place around me the way they always did now, wordlessly, without assigned positions that anyone had ever discussed. Lucas to my left, Calix to my right, Matteo half a step behind. I noticed it the way I noticed it every time, that particular thing that happened when the four of us moved toward something together, and I filed it away because this was not the moment to say anything about it.The garden was dark and the path to the north wall took ten minutes at a normal pace. I moved faster than normal.The scent grew stronger as we closed the distance. Rain on stone, cedar smoke, and underneath both of those something warm and deep and layered in a way that had no reference point in anything I had encountered before. My wolf had stopped walking inside me entirely. She was running, pulling forward the way she pulled when the twelve knelt in the forest on that first night, except that had
Annalyn POVI made the call to keep Rodrigo under watch rather than locked up before Lucas could argue otherwise."He'll close down in a cell," I said. "I need him talking."Lucas looked at me for a long moment. "He's dangerous.""I know. Put two guards on him, not one. Give him access to the garden because that's where he's comfortable and comfortable people talk more." I held his gaze. "Trust me on this."He did, which still surprised me sometimes.I went to find Dalisay.She was sitting upright in bed with a cup of tea, looking considerably more present than she had since collapsing in the cellar. The color had returned to her face and her eyes were sharp. She watched me come in and close the door and sit in the chair across from her."My grandmother," I said. "Is she alive?"Dalisay wrapped both hands around her cup and said nothing for thirty full seconds. I counted them."The woman who made your pendant," she said finally. "The one your mother called Lola Nena. You believed she







