INICIAR SESIÓNMinaThey circled, heads low, measuring. The silver wolf's tail lashed behind him. The brindled one's chest vibrated like a bellows and the growl of it rattled my bones."Silver's got it." The man behind me, close to my ear, easy about it. "Lean, rangy, quick. You can see it in the way he moves. Brindle's lumbering. Been eating too well."The silver wolf feinted. The brindled one flinched and bared his teeth at him, and the silver wolf came down sharp on the stone, claws scraping sparks, and struck. His foreclaw caught the brindled one's shoulder and opened a red track through brown fur as easily as tearing parchment.The brindled wolf shrieked and drove his skull into the silver's chest. The silver wolf's paws scrabbled on the floor and his back legs folded under him. The brindled one lunged and got his teeth into his throat."He's got him," someone screamed behind me. "Kill him!""Wait," the man said. "Not yet."The silver wolf got the brindled one's jaw in his mouth and forced it o
MinaI looked back up at him and made myself smile. Made myself be normal. The girl who does not care that her mother is dead."This is good, at least." I lifted my cup, and then, mostly to myself, "Wonder if she's doing the sweetbread tonight.""You sound like your mother."I flinched. He did not seem to notice."The kitchens kept a pot of it in the stores, year in and year out," he said. "At your mother's insistence. She said it turned bitter if it didn't sit at least a season between harvest and oven."I stared at him. How in hells did the old wolf know that."How d'you know something like that?"He shrugged and took another long drink of his ale."She said it was bitter anyway.""That she did." Vane was smiling into his mug. "She said you could not get a decent sweetbread this far north to save your life.""Bitter as a witch's tit," I said, and stopped with a start. That had been Mother's line. I sat there with my mouth still open around it.How strange, to hear her voice come out
MinaI gave it another go. "An old house like that. One of the oldest in Ironmaw. And it ends with the girl."He glanced over, faintly surprised, like he had thought we were done with it. "What's your point?"I held up a hand. "No point. Seems a shame, is all.""Things thin out over generations." Vane turned his cup again. "Families end.""Sure." I made myself shrug. "There's not even cousins, though?"He raised his mug. "Cousins are nothing but trouble. Not worth the land it takes to bury them."I laughed, because it would have been rude not to."No," he said, once the laugh had gone out of it. "Nobody will come knocking on that girl's door when her father's in the ground. There's no one left to come."The hairs went up on the back of my neck.The most careful man on this council had just told me, plainly and without hesitating over it, that Kael's line ended with his daughter. That there was nobody else. Nobody anywhere.So who was Vidar Sarn?I gave him a loose shrug and a nod and
MinaI considered how to answer that. Then I shook my head and shrugged and let it go.I watched the hall instead. Kael was seated across the way with Taya beside him and a few of the other elders around them, talking, laughing now and then at something one of them said.Then I noticed one of the chiefs nod toward the high table. Toward Sera. Not in greeting. The way men nod when they are talking about someone and want the other man to know who they mean. His face was disgusted."Fucking idiots," I muttered, and took an angry swig of my ale.Vane heard it. He scoffed. "The elders?""Look at them." It came out with more heat in it than I meant. "It must be exhausting. Hating someone you can't get rid of."Vane looked over at them a while. Then he nodded. "Hmm.""You can't blame them," he said. "It is all very strange to everyone. A Southern Luna.""I can." I turned to look at him properly. "You're handling yourself well enough, at least. You don't hate her."He smiled at that. "I have
MinaThe hall was a circus. A sweaty, noisy, fucked up circus. Crowd every senior wolf in Ironmaw into one room, put a fire at both ends of it, and call it hospitality. I knew exactly whose idea that had been, and I hoped she was choking on it up there.I'd had a few drinks, which was just about enough to dull the edge of my loathing for the place.I had to wear a dress tonight, because apparently real ladies wore dresses to real ladies' dinners. That was what one of the senior servant women told me while she laced me into it this afternoon. I told her I'd rather stab my eyes out with a spoon, and she just smiled and patted my shoulder and kept right on lacing.Her eyes had been kind enough, but still. You get tired of people being kind to you after a while. Especially when they think you don't notice how much they feel sorry for you.Somebody near the hearth laughed like a door coming off its hinges. The smell in here was cooked meat and spilled ale and too many wolves in too little
Hey guys, I sincerely apologize to anyone who has unlocked a chapter only to find that it was accidentally posted in Spanish instead of English. This has happened because I’ve been working on translating different versions of my books, and unfortunately, some of the covers look identical. With everything I’ve been dealing with lately and the stress I’ve been under, I have occasionally ended up uploading the wrong version without realizing it. I know that being stressed isn’t an excuse, especially when you’ve spent your hard-earned money to unlock these chapters, and I’m truly sorry for the inconvenience and frustration this may have caused. Unfortunately, correcting these mistakes isn’t always as simple as editing the chapter myself. The platform doesn’t allow authors to make independent changes once a chapter is published, so I have to rely on my editor to make the necessary corrections. This can be even more difficult when the mistake happens over the weekend and my editor isn’t
LyraShe ignored me. She dropped to her knees, her hands sliding down to the waistband of my trousers. She shoved her fingers inside the fabric, gripping my hips tight. With one sharp pull, she dragged the pants and my underwear down to my ankles. I stepped out of them, kicking my boots off in the
Lyra"Tell the girl to step into the room," he said."Leave her out of this," I said. My voice came out as a pathetic, raspy whisper. I cleared my throat, trying to find some spine. "She didn't do anything. It was my idea to come in here.""Tell her to step into the room," he said, his eyes going d
LyraThe voice didn't belong to Nadia. It didn't belong to me. It came from the metallic object resting directly behind my hip.Nadia froze. She pulled her mouth away from me and yanked her fingers out of my body. She stood up quickly, wiping her wet mouth with the back of her hand, her chest heavi
SeraNight fell fast, and with it, the temperature plummeted. We had three fires going, but the heat didn't seem to travel more than six inches past the flames. I sat on a log by the middle fire, pulling the wagon fur around my shoulders, shivering so hard my teeth were literally clicking together.







