MasukHello Readers, And the game started...
Selene's POV:I saw Maya go down.From across the clearing I saw it and I felt it the way you felt things that involved people you had decided mattered to you and Maya had been deciding to matter to me for longer than she knew. The claw marks. Both sides. The specific terrible precision of someone who understood anatomy and had used that understanding as a weapon.She shifted and put herself between Aldric and Lyra.Still standing.Still holding her position with everything she had left which was not much and was somehow enough.I was already moving.Gregory was beside me and Blake was coming in from the right and Alex from the left and the four of us converged on the same point with the specific quality of people who had been fighting separately and had just become one thing.Aldric turned and saw us.And hesitated.I had been waiting for that hesitation for thirty years."It is over, Aldric," I said.He looked at me.The flat expression was still there but underneath it something ha
Maya's POV:The fight had found its rhythm.That was the thing about extended combat. After the initial chaos of contact and positioning settled into something more structured you could read it like a pattern. Who was where. Who was winning. Where the pressure was coming from and where it was thinning. I had been reading it for the last twelve minutes and the pattern was shifting in our favor.Gregory and Aldric were the center of it.The two of them had moved through the forest like the fight was personal because it was personal and had always been personal and everyone else was operating around the edges of that central fact. Gregory was stronger. Aldric was faster and knew the terrain and those two advantages had been keeping him alive longer than he deserved.The betas were handling the outer ring.Blake and Alex were working together in the way that newly bonded wolves worked together which was with a coordination that looked practiced but was not practiced. It was instinctual. T
Blake'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
Blake’s POV:Alex does not answer me.Not a word.He just stands there, eyes distant, jaw tight, breathing still uneven from the closeness we just shared. It feels like I reached him, brushed something raw and real, and then watched it slip through my fingers like smoke.“Alex,” I try once more, sof
Lyra’s POV:Three past.Not morning. Not night.That strange hour when the world feels suspended between breathing and breaking.I stare at the faint glow of the clock from the edge of my vision, my eyes burning from staying open too long. Sleep never came. Pain made sure of that. Every time I close
Alex’s POV:Blake’s footsteps fade down the corridor long before the echo inside my chest does. I stand where he left me, unmoving, staring at the closed door as if it might open again and undo everything I just said. The air in the room feels heavy, suffocating, like even the walls are disappointe
Blake’s POV:By the time the sun starts leaning west, the academy feels like it’s holding its breath.Everything looks normal from the outside; classes, drills, patrol rotations, but beneath that calm, there’s a countdown ticking loudly in my head.Midnight.Alex’s birthday.Now, it's 9:30 pm.I kee







