LOGINCarl
Ashley stood in the doorway, pale and trembling, her clothes still torn from the chapel, dark circles bruising the skin beneath her eyes. For a long moment nobody moved, all of us frozen in the grey morning light, staring at the last person any of us expected to be waiting on the other side of that door."Ashley." Her name came out of me rough, disbelieving. "How did you even get here before us?""I ran," she said, her voice hoarse, cracked from exhaustion or cMelindaFor a moment I couldn't make my mind accept what my eyes were showing me. The silver-haired man, chained and bloodied, sitting inside that mill like he'd been dragged there rather than delivered there, when the last I'd seen of him, council guards had been hauling him away toward custody with his own laughter trailing behind him."That's not possible," I whispered. "He was taken into custody hours ago.""Apparently not for long," Rowan murmured beside me, his eyes narrowing at the scene through the gap in the branches."Or he was never actually contained at all," Kian said grimly. "Corinne could have intercepted the transfer. Council custody isn't as airtight as everyone likes to pretend, especially when the person arranging your extraction has spent thirty years anticipating exactly this scenario."Carl's jaw was tight beside me, his eyes fixed on the window, on Ashley's still form bound to the chair, on the careful, unhurried wa
MelindaAn hour. That was the only time I knew I needed to make a mark, something that would change the course of everything we had been fighting for ever since. I was never going to rest until I got to the bottom of this, with or without Carl or my brother’s help.I stared at the words until they blurred, until Carl's hand closed gently over mine and the phone disappeared from my grip into his pocket, some quiet decision made between us without either of us saying it aloud… that I couldn't keep looking at that countdown and still think clearly enough to survive it."Aldric," Carl said, turning sharply. "Anything?"Aldric held up a finger, phone pressed to his ear, murmuring low and urgent to whoever had answered. The rest of us stood in that ruined clearing, my daughter still held gently in the guard's arms though nobody seemed inclined to enforce the earlier hostage arrangement anymore, my son's frightened voice still occasionally drifting from
Melinda For a moment the words didn't fully land, the way bad news sometimes waits a beat before it finds the part of you that's supposed to feel it. "What do you mean she never left," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was its own small mercy, some old strategist muscle still holding the line even while everything underneath it buckled. "I mean exactly that," Seren said, and I could hear her moving now, footsteps quick against stone somewhere just inside the tower. "She told the council she was coming to find you. She walked out the same door we did. She never made it past the eastern gate." "Then where is she?" Nobody answered, and the silence itself was an answer, the kind that settles into your chest before your mind agrees to accept it. I stepped out from the tree line then, because whatever advantage I'd been holding by staying hidden had just become wort
CarlFor one full second nobody in that passage moved, and in that second my brain tried to make the resemblance mean something small and manageable… a cousin, a trick of the dim light, some distant relation Melinda had never mentioned because there was too much else to mention first.My brain wanted a small explanation. My gut had already stopped believing in small explanations somewhere around the second time this night had asked me to."Seren," Aldric said, and his voice had gone flat in a way that told me everything I needed to know before she confirmed it. "You were supposed to be an ocean away by now.""I was supposed to do a lot of things," she said. Her voice matched the one still faintly audible through the phone still pressed to my ear, and I realized with a lurch that she'd been standing close enough this whole time to hear both sides of a conversation I'd thought was private."I changed my mind about most of them tonight."
CarlRunning. It was one word, no punctuation, which was so unlike her that it told me more than a full paragraph would have. Melinda edits herself even in panic, even at two in the morning, even bleeding from something she hasn't mentioned yet. A single word meant she'd typed it with hands that weren't fully hers to command anymore.“What the hell is going on?” I mummured.The more I thought about it, the more bothered I became because I knew this was so not like her. Something was wrong, that much I knew and to make matters worse, I didn’t even know where to begin looking for her without alarming anyone else.I looked up, and the clearing had changed shape without my permission.Aldric wasn't posturing now. He'd dropped whatever performance he'd been running since sunrise, the studied patience, the vaguely paternal condescension, all of it gone the way weather clears…not gradually, but all at once, like something had simply been switche
The name Marcus had said stopped Melinda cold… I could feel it from across the clearing, which made no rational sense and was completely true regardless, the way certain things between mates operate outside the boundaries of what can be explained.She didn't text back, that was how I knew it was bad.Melinda, in a crisis, always texts back. It's one of the things I'd catalogued about her without meaning to, the way you catalogue things about people you love without ever deciding to… she goes quiet in person and communicates through her fingers, like the physical distance of a screen gives her enough room to process and respond at the same time. Silence on the phone from Melinda meant something had happened that was too large for that mechanism to handle.I kept my eyes on the man in the lead vehicle.He hadn't moved. None of them had. Four vehicles, seven people, and this strange, patient stillness that had settled over the clearing like weather,
Carl’s POV You’ve been staring at that report for ten minutes Carl." Damon, my Beta, stood across the room with his arms tightly crossed over his chest. His posture was rigid, his jaw set in a hard line that had become permanent over the last seven days. I had not slept properly in the past s
CHAPTER FOURMelinda’s POVI sat on the edge of my small bed, staring blankly down at the wrinkled white paper in my hands. Hours had passed since the council meeting, yet my mind still replayed every second over and over again like torture.Carl’s freezing disappointment. I squeezed my eyes shut,
Melinda’s POV“Dr. Thomas," I breathed relieved, rushing to him.“Please tell them what you told me just twenty minutes ago in your office."He stiffly turned away from me refusing to meet my eyes, Fear crawled into my chest like ice. Something was wrong, terribly wrong.Sweat glistened along his
Melinda’s POVI pushed the door open.Every single head in the room snapped towards me.My heart was pounding so hard against my ribs I felt like a trapped animal. The large office felt suffocating.The council elders sat around the long dark table near the fireplace. Their expressions shifted the







