LOGINHi Lovey Souls, Something big is upcoming. Just a spoiler. Wink winkkkkkk...
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
Blake's POV:The growls were close enough now that I could feel them in my chest before I heard them with my ears.Too close.I looked at Alex against the tree trunk and made the calculation in under two seconds. He was not going to regain consciousness fast enough to move himself and I was not going to leave him and the approaching wolves were not going to stop because I asked them politely.I semi shifted.Not the full change. The halfway version that gave me the strength and the enhanced senses without committing fully to four legs. Harder to maintain. More expensive on the body. Useful for exactly this kind of situation where I needed to carry something and also run.I got Alex over my shoulder.He was completely limp and the dead weight of an unconscious person was different from the cooperative weight of someone who was helping with the process and I adjusted and moved.I ran.The forest received us.What forest this was I genuinely did not know. The tunnel had been long and the
Alex’s POV:Night makes the academy honest.The noise fades. The smiles disappear. What stays is truth. And danger.I stood near the outer boundary where Aaran’s territory marker sat. A stone half-buried in the earth. Old symbols carved deep into it. Mark of claim. Mark of warning.I should not be
Blake's POV:The hall was quiet in a way that pressed against my ears. Mom was not here because she wanted not to attend like earlier.Not empty quiet. Heavy quiet.The kind that came from too many wolves standing still, breathing the same air, sharing the same memory. Torches burned along the ston
Blake's POV:Sunday felt slower.The Silver Mansion woke without urgency. No bells. No calls. Just light through the windows and the soft sound of movement far below. I stayed in bed longer than usual, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house breathe.When I finally got up, the smell reached
Blake’s POV:Friday morning came quiet. Too quiet for a place like this academy where noise never really sleeps. I opened my eyes slowly and stared at the ceiling of my dorm. White. Plain. Nothing special. My body felt better than the last few days. Not perfect, but good enough. My back still pulle







