INICIAR SESIÓN“Cloak up, all of you. We go careful, off the main ways, and we do not let one living soul see this face between here and the low town. We finish it tonight. I am done waiting on it.”Kaelen turned to Dain and jerked his chin at the body. “Get rid of that. The head too. Bury it, burn it, I don’t care which, only put it somewhere the thaw won’t hand back.”“Or,” I said.They all looked at me.“Why throw away a respected man’s head,” I said, “while there’s a use still left in it?” I kept my eyes on Kaelen. “This new hollower will run hotter than the last. Younger. Prouder. He may take one look at an Alpha with a stolen pup and decide his conscience, or his King, is worth more to him than your coin. So you take the choice off him before he has it.” I nodded down at the head on the floor. “You set the head of the only other hollower in the north on his table. You say nothing at all. And you let him understand, all on his own, what disobedience costs in this trade now. His silence will fee
SelenaFor a while Kaelen only stood there with the sword hanging off his fist and the head at his feet, breathing like a man who had run a long way, not yet certain what he’d done.Then it reached him. I watched it land. The blade came down out of his hand and hit the boards, and his eyes went wide and young.“Kaelen” Dain had gone grey, pressed back to the wall, staring at the head. “Kaelen, that’s the fucking hollower. That is the Mother’s own prophet. There’s one of him in all the north, and you’ve taken his head off in an inn over a serving-girl’s story.”“Shut your mouth.”“The King will...”“I said shut it!” Kaelen rounded on him, and his aura came off him ugly and hot. “Set your heart straight, Dain, or I will set it straight for you and leave two heads on this floor tonight. Do you hear me.”Dain shut it.Then Kaelen came apart. That is what powerful men do when the ground goes out from under them, they come apart loud and break everything they can reach. He put his fist thro
SelenaOf course he is human. Poor Kaelen. This is not your Mael.You should have seen his face. I almost felt for him, kneeling there with the ram’s blood crusting on his chest and his whole life’s hope curdling in the air in front of him, staring at a baby he’d dragged across a continent to butcher and being told it was worth exactly nothing. Almost. I have a great deal of practice at almost.“Stop this!” His voice came out cracked. “Whatever this is. If this is a joke, old man, some trick, you stop it now.”“A joke?” Ilvane turned his blind face on him, and he was angry, the real trembling fury of a spiritual man made a fool of in his own rite. “Do the gods look like clowns to you, Alpha? Does the Mother of the long dark juggle for your pleasure? My nose has not had a moment’s peace since you walked in reeking of human flesh. I left my house and my quiet to come to you, and you made me kneel over a mewling human infant and chant her sacred words at it, and when she asks me why her
The blood of the ram was going cold on my chest.They had opened its throat over me the hour before, Ilvane murmuring the old words while the dark of it ran down my shoulders and dried there in the lamp-heat, and now it sat on my skin in a stiffening crust. I knelt where he’d put me, stripped to a hide wrap at the waist, and I shook. Not from cold. I have never once shaken from cold. It was the other thing, the wanting, so big in me now that my hands would not hold still on my own thighs.This was it. After all of it. The lesser son. The spare my father looked past. All of it ended here, on a mat in a freezing room, with the most dangerous child born in three ages laid out small between the candles.I looked at the child.Something was wrong with him. I had thought it in the village, the night the air shoved my own mouth off his brow, and I’d thought it again on the road, little things, the eyes too round, the hands too soft, the whole face sitting a hair off the one I’d carried out o
KaelenI got back to the inn past the deepest hour. The door was barred from the inside, and when I knocked there was no answer.I knocked again. Nothing. The old cold suspicion came up in me at once, because that is what she has made of me these last weeks, a man who hears a silence and reaches straight for betrayal. I put my shoulder to the wood and listened. No child. No breath. No sound of anyone moving. My blood went to ice. Gone. She was gone, the boy with her, and I’d known better than to trust a woman the King knew by name, a woman the soldier had known, a woman every man I crossed seemed to hold some claim on but me.“Selena.” I said it to the dark of the stair. Then louder, past caring who woke. “Selena.”“Relax, my Alpha.”Her voice came from below me, at the foot of the stair. I turned and there she was, climbing up out of the dark with snow on her cloak and the child a sleeping weight in her arms, calm as a holy day, one brow lifting at the state of me.“I took him out fo
LioraStiles made me a place by his fire and I sat in it and hated every warm minute of it.He didn't push me to talk. He never does. He put dried meat in my hands that I didn't eat and a blanket round my shoulders that I didn't need, and he let me sit there with the anger going cold in my chest. Across the camp, on the far side of the dark, the King sat alone.Riven hadn't come near me since the ford. He hadn't sent anyone, either. He'd set his men to the horses and the watch and then taken the worst post for himself, the cold edge of the camp with his back to the black trees and his face turned north, toward my son, and he sat out there in the wind with no fire of his own.I told myself I didn't care where he sat.But the anger wouldn't hold. It kept slipping, and every time it slipped the thing under it was uglier, because the thing under it was true.I'd called him a monster for burning Frostbane. Frostbane. I made myself say the real name of the place in my own head. The square w
KaelenThe jagged tracks of the carriage wheels were permanently gouged into the mud.I stood at the edge of the pack square, staring down at the deep ruts left behind by those demonic horses. The freezing wind bit at my face, but I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel my fingers. All I could feel was
‘Mine.’The single word slammed into my chest like a physical blow.When Kaelen rejected me, just moments ago, the severing of our bond felt like a rusted blade dragging through my soul, leaving me hollowed out and dying. Typical werewolf reprisal to a severed bond. But this? This was a supernova.
My knees gave out on the second step.The guards didn't care. They didn't stop dragging me.My bare feet slapped against the freezing stone of the grand staircase, my toes leaving small, pathetic smears of blood where I dragged. The rough fabric of the hospital gown rode up my thighs, exposing the
LioraEight months pregnant!I chuckled, tracing the tight, swollen curve of my belly. I raised my chin and looked at myself in the rearview mirror, a massive smile spreading across my cheeks. I was finally giving an heir to my mate. I was finally going to be a true Luna for the Alpha. Kaelen was







