เข้าสู่ระบบ~Leviathan's POV~The confirmation came in a cream envelope, which told me exactly who had sent it."Engagement celebration, the ninth," Caleb read from the card, flat as a ledger. "Alpha Leviathan Greymark to stand at the head table and offer the blessing of the pack.""The blessing.""It's traditional.""I know what it is." I took the card and set it face down on my desk.I would stand in front of three hundred people and bless my son's marriage to a woman whose hand I'd held in a car four nights ago. I'd say the words. My voice wouldn't shake. It was the one skill I'd never lacked, and for the first time in my life I hated it.The black dress kept coming back. The way it had sat on her shoulders the first night. The way she had looked at me across a crowded room like she already knew something I hadn't admitted yet.I had typed those five words at midnight because the thought of her in anything else made the rest of the week feel longer than it should. Wear the black dress again. I
~CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE-The Black Dres~~Evangeline’s POV~Seven dresses lay across the sofa in the front salon, and I hadn't picked a single one."Ivory," my mother said, touching the first sleeve like it was a relic. "Champagne. This one's blush, but Madame Roux thinks it washes you out.""It does," said Madame Roux, a tiny woman with pins in her mouth and a tape measure draped around her neck like a stole. She had dressed three generations of Lunas and survived all of them.It was Monday. Kieran had left for Harrowfield on Saturday, as announced, and had sent me exactly one text since the garden: Call you when I land. He hadn't. I'd noticed that I didn't mind, and then noticed that noticing was becoming a habit.The engagement celebration was in nine days. Three hundred guests, the full Council, every Alpha family north of the river. My mother had a clipboard now. She'd had it since breakfast, and the seating chart alone had cost her two nights' sleep."The Hargroves are at table two,
~LEVIATHAN'S POV~By six in the morning I had run eleven miles, signed four documents, and thought about her hand sixty-one times.I only know the number because I started counting. That's how I deal with things I can't fix. I count them, file them, and move on to the next one. It had worked for years.It was not working now.I ran the north ridge before dawn, on four legs, hard enough that my lungs burned and the cold felt like a slap. Zevrik ran at the front, which is where he likes to be. Frost cracked under our paws. I picked the steepest line I could find and took it without slowing, the way you punish a body that has misbehaved.It didn't help. Halfway up, I caught myself remembering how her fingers had felt closing slowly around mine, cold at first, then not. I nearly missed my footing.'Slow,' Zevrik said.No.'You'll break a leg.'Then I'll heal it.He didn't argue. He just ran faster, and I understood he was laughing at me.The river moment kept pushing in anyway. The way sh
~Leviathan’s POV~I told myself I was only taking the long way home.That's what I told Caleb when I left the Council hall early, and it's what I told Zevrik the whole drive. Neither of them believed it. The long way ran past the Nightmoor estate, added twenty minutes, and had no reason to exist.'You're lying,' Zevrik said.I'm driving.'Slowly.'It's the speed limit.He snorted, which a wolf can do inside a man's head. I kept my eyes on the road. A little after ten, I came around the bend below the estate wall and a pair of headlights swung out of the main gate toward me, far too fast. Kieran's car. It went past in a blur, his face a pale smear behind the glass, and was gone toward the city.I didn't turn around. I didn't know what had happened. I knew a man had left his fiancée's house like it was on fire, and I made myself hold that at exactly that size and no bigger.Then I saw the second car.Her gray sedan sat in a gravel lay-by on the public road, a quarter mile past the gate,
~Evangeline’s POV~Kieran started being nice to me again on Tuesday, and I knew exactly what that meant.He showed up at the house with a bag from Marlow's, the diner where we'd had our first date. Fries, a vanilla milkshake, the whole thing. He set it on the sunroom table like a peace offering and said he'd cleared his evening so we could pick the final seating chart together."You cleared your evening?""For you.""That's sweet."I smiled and opened the bag. Since the dinner with Lila, I'd been noticing things I couldn't quite explain. Little shifts in people's moods. Tension before someone spoke. Discomfort hidden beneath a smile. Right then Kieran's mood pressed against my skin like a hand.I didn't know why he was tense. I just knew he was.He was watching me. Not the way a fiancé watches. The way you watch a pot you think is about to boil.We went through the seating chart for an hour. He asked what I thought about the Hargroves near the band, and I almost laughed, remembering t
Kieran's POVYesterday, she didn't bother to call when I was out.That was how I knew something had changed and it was not through a rumor or a photograph.I was at Vesper with Leo and a few others, in the corner booth we always take, and somewhere around eleven I checked my screen out of habit. Nothing. I checked again at midnight. Nothing. By one I'd turned it face-down on the table like it had done something to me.For three months Evangeline had called every time I went out. Never anything dramatic. Are you okay, did you eat, text me when you're home. I used to roll my eyes. I thought of it as a leash, and I'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing your own watch.Then it went slack, and I noticed."You're tapping again," Damon said.He sat across from me, nursing the same whiskey he'd been nursing for an hour. Damon Reid had a way of looking at you like he was reading a menu in a language he spoke fluently."I'm not tapping.""Your thumb."I stopped. Leo was telling a stor







