LOGINBlake's POV:Alex's face was in my hands.The forest was loud around us and the fight was real and present and none of it was what existed in this specific circle of space between the rock face and the cave entrance where I was kneeling in front of Alex Thorne with his face in my hands and everything else receding to the edges.He was looking at me.His eyes were the problem. Not the color or the expression but the softness at the edges of them that should not have been there. Alex's eyes were never soft at the edges. They were sharp and dark and carrying the specific focused intelligence that had been the first thing I noticed about him years ago and had never stopped noticing.The softness was the wolfsbane.Moving through him slowly and steadily and doing the specific work of something that had been designed to take down an Alpha and was succeeding at a measured pace."Blake," he said."I know," I said."You do not have to."I looked at him."Alex Thorne," I said quietly. "I have b
Selene's POV:Gregory moved the moment Aldric's hand closed around my wrist.Not with the measured controlled movement he used in formal contexts. With the specific quality of someone who had been watching something he was not going to watch anymore and had made the decision without deliberation.His hand came down on Aldric's wrist and broke the grip on mine and I stepped back and Gregory stepped in and the space between him and Aldric became the kind of space that had no room for anything except what was happening in it.Aldric looked at Gregory's hand on his wrist.Then he looked at Gregory's face.Something shifted in his expression. The first real shift I had seen. Not fear. Something adjacent to it that he was covering with the flat expression but the covering was imperfect."Thirty years," Gregory said quietly. "You have been in our lives for thirty years. Killing. Interfering. Planting people. Running your plan." He held Aldric's wrist. "It ends tonight."Aldric pulled his wri
Selene's POV:I knew the voice before I saw the face.That was the thing about voices that belonged to specific memories. They did not age the way faces did. They arrived exactly as they had been preserved, sharp and immediate and carrying everything they had carried the first time you heard them, and this one carried twenty years of things I had spent considerable effort not thinking about.I stepped out of the cave first.The forest was dim in the evening light and he was standing ten meters away with the easy posture of someone who had been waiting and had known the waiting would end exactly this way. He looked older than the last time I had seen him and the same age simultaneously in the way that certain people existed outside the normal progression of time because they had never allowed the world to fully touch them.He was not large. That had always been the thing people got wrong about him when they tried to imagine the rogue alpha based on his reputation. Average height. Lean.
Lyra's POV:The border of rogue alpha territory looked like any other stretch of forest at first.Old trees. Dense undergrowth. The particular quality of late afternoon light coming through a canopy that had not been maintained or managed and had grown according to its own logic for however many years this territory had been held outside the formal pack structure.Then you felt it.Not with your eyes. With the part of you that was wolf and had instincts older than any Academy training. A specific quality to the air here that was different from Silver territory and different from Thorne territory and different from any neutral forest I had run through. Something in it that said claimed and said warning and said turn back in a frequency that bypassed conscious thought and went directly to the base of the spine.Selene felt it. I could see it in the slight change in her posture.Gregory's jaw had set.I kept walking.Maya stopped.She turned to face us and her hand went into the pocket o
Lyra's POV:Nobody asked Maya anything.That was the agreement that nobody stated out loud but everyone in the room honored. Selene looked at the map. Gregory looked at the tracker. I looked at Maya and Maya looked at the floor and the silence that followed her revelation was not the cold kind. It was the kind that came when a room full of people had received something significant and had decided that the receiving was enough for now.There would be time for the rest.Blake and Alex were in rogue alpha territory with an unknown substance in Alex's system and the afternoon was moving toward evening and that was the only thing with a deadline on it.Everything else could wait.We split to prepare.Selene and Gregory went to coordinate with the pack representatives who had been at the competition and were now redirected to something considerably more serious than a competition. I watched them move through the administrative block corridor side by side, not touching but close enough that
Lyra's POV:The arena was still loud when I left it.Not the good kind of loud. The kind that came after something had gone wrong in a public space and nobody had enough information to know how wrong and everyone was filling the gap with noise. Pack representatives on their phones. Academy staff moving with the specific urgency of people who had been given instructions and were following them while also being frightened. Students in clusters talking over each other.I moved through all of it toward one destination.Blake's mother.I had felt him through the mind link and the mind link had told me everything his words had not said directly. The specific quality of Blake Silver when he was frightened was something I had known since we were children and it was rare enough that encountering it was its own alarm system.I am honestly terrified.Blake did not say that.Blake did not say that to anyone.I walked faster.Someone had given Selene a room in the administrative block during the c
Maya’s POV:I am still smiling when the word leaves my mouth.“But we are restricted to use the forest and all that, right?”Lyra is sitting cross legged on the bed, looking way too confident. She waves her hand like it is nothing.“No worries. We can walk and have fun.”I tilt my head. “Just walk?
Blake’s POV:The hallway grows quiet one door at a time.Liam leaves first, stretching his arms over his head. “See you tomorrow, Silver,” he says with a tired grin.Leo bumps my shoulder lightly. “Sleep before sunrise for once.”“I will try,” I reply.Maya and Lyra walk together toward their wing.
Maya’s POV:My legs are still shaking when we start climbing down.“I cannot believe I kissed someone on top of a tree,” I whisper to myself.Lyra hears me and laughs softly. “You did great up there.”“I almost died.”“You did not.”“I almost did.”She smiles and moves down first. “Come slowly. I a
Lyra’s POV:Tonight feels different.When I close the door of my dorm room, I lean against it and let out a long breath. My cheeks hurt from smiling so much. I did not even notice I was smiling that often until now. My chest feels warm, light. Like something heavy that used to sit there quietly has







