LOGINTHE ENDING HAPPINESS CASSIAN'S POVThe northern delegation arrives in the afternoon.There are seven of them. Pack leaders and advisors, traveling together, which in itself is a thing that would not have happened four months ago. The northern territories have been in contest for decades, border disputes, resource arguments, the long-running grievances of packs who have been circling each other so long they've forgotten the original reasons and are fighting purely from habit.They sit on one side of the long table in the eastern meeting room.Eira sits across from them.I am here.But I am not leading this.I decided that three weeks ago when we mapped out the delegation schedule together and she looked at the northern meeting and said nothing, just looked, and I watched her decide something privately before moving to the next item on the list. I decided it then. Confirmed it this morning when I told her I would be present and she looked at me with the particular expression she
WHAT WE ARE NOWEIRA'S POVThree months later, the palace feels different.I noticed it in small ways first.The way the staff move through the corridors, not the careful, eyes-down efficiency of people navigating a space that belongs to someone else, but the looser, more present movement of people who have decided the space belongs to them too. The way conversations happen in rooms that used to be silent. The way the great hall, which always felt like a held breath, feels like an exhale now.The way people look at me when I walk through it.Not the sideways look. Not the calculating, categorizing look of people trying to determine what I am and what I represent and whether I am a threat or a resource or something to be managed. Just people looking at their Queen. Some of them still learning what that means. Some of them already decided.I am still learning what it means myself.Some mornings I wake up before Cassian and I lie in the grey pre-dawn quiet and I take inventory the
CHOSENEIRA'S POVThe hall eventually empties.It takes a long time. There are pack leaders to receive and elders to speak with and the specific social architecture of a gathering like this that requires presence and attention and the patient management of relationships, some of which are new and need to be built and some of which are old and need to be rebuilt and some of which are damaged in ways that are going to take years and honesty and work.I do all of it.I do it differently than I used to.When the evening finally thins and the torches have burned lower and the last of the formal conversations have been concluded and the hall has been left to the servants and the quiet, I find myself standing at the tall window at the far end.The night outside is clear.The moon is full.Cassian finds me there.I hear him coming. I have always heard him coming, something in the way he occupies space, the specific quality of attention he generates in a room, the way the air knows he
FORMALITY CASSIAN'S POVShe walks toward me and I forget every word I prepared.I prepared words. I spent the better part of the morning on them, the formal declarations, the ceremonial language, the specific phrasing that pack law requires for a confirmation of this kind. I know them. I could say them in my sleep. I have been saying formal words in formal halls my entire life and I have never once forgotten them in the moment.I have forgotten all of them.Not because of the dress, though the dress isNot because of that.Because of the way she is walking.I have been watching Eira move through this palace for months. I know the way she carries herself. I know the specific quality of her posture and the particular management of her expression and the careful way she occupies spaces that she was never entirely sure she was allowed to occupy.She is not moving like that.She is moving like someone who has come home to something that was always hers and is simply walking throu
CHOSENEIRA'S POVThey told me to wear white.The palace attendants came to the room in the early afternoon, three of them, carrying things in their arms with the careful reverence of people transporting objects that matter. They laid everything out on the table by the window without speaking and then stood back and looked at me with expressions that were trying very hard to be neutral and not quite managing it.The dress is white.Not the white of absence or surrender or the blank page before anything has been written on it. The white of the Moonblood. Of my wolf, standing silver in a clearing full of wolves who thought they knew what I was. The white of something that has always been there and is only now being allowed to be seen.I stood in front of it for a long time.One of the attendants — young, dark-haired, the one who always moves slightly faster than the others, cleared her throat softly and said, "There's no rush, my lady."My lady.She said it like she meant it.L
WHEN SHE WAKESCassian POVI sit back in the chair and I listen to the silence and I watch Eira breathe.She wakes just before dawn.I know the moment before she opens her eyes because her breathing changes. Deepens. The particular shift from the deep involuntary rhythm of genuine unconsciousness to the lighter rhythm of someone who is coming back to themselves. I've been listening to her breathe for six hours and I know the difference.I sit forward.Her eyes open.Slowly. Then more, as the light registers and she makes sense of it. The ceiling first. Then the room. Then Kael, still asleep across her feet, his hair disordered and one arm dangling off the edge of the mattress in the specific boneless abandon of deep sleep.Her face does something complicated and private at the sight of him.Her hand moves, slowly, and comes to rest on his ankle.The lightest touch.Just to feel him there.Then she turns her head and she sees me.We look at each other.Neither of us speaks.
THE REFUSALEIRA'S POVThe dress arrives at dawn.I stare at the silk gown laid across my bed like it's a serpent. Deep emerald green. Expensive. Beautiful.Exactly the kind of thing an Omega servant would never wear."Compliments of the Luna," the servant girl says nervously. "She insists you wear
SHATTERED HEART EIRA'S POVI can't breathe.The words Lysandra just said keep echoing in my head, over and over, until they're all I can hear.I'm pregnant. With your pup.You'll be nothing again. Just another servant in my palace.My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking.I'm still st
CHAPTER 75: THE REVEALINGEIRA'S POVThe blanket slips through my fingers and hits the floor with a muffled thud.My wolf has been clawing at my insides all morning, restless and agitated in a way that makes my skin prickle. I've tried to ignore her, tried to bury myself in mindless counting, but
THE LUNA'S GAMBIT LYSANDRA'S POVI stare at my reflection in the ornate mirror of the guest room, the guest room, like I'm some common visitor in my own palace, and feel rage bubbling beneath my carefully composed surface.Three days.Three days since Cassian humiliated me in front of the entire







