ログインSeraphina's POV"I know. That's the problem."On the eighth morning Morwen put a rock in front of me, a flat grey stone the size of my fist, and told me to pick it up."With the wolf," she said. "Let her come up into your hands but not past your elbows. Keep her there."I reached for the coal in my chest and pulled and the silver light came up through my fingers and I grabbed the rock and the rock crumbled into powder in my palm because the wolf had come up through my whole body and my hands were too strong and I'd crushed it without trying.Morwen looked at the dust in my hand. "Again."She put another rock in front of me. I crushed that one too. And the next one. And the next. By the time the sun was high there was a pile of grey dust at my feet and my hands were shaking and Morwen was leaning against a tree with her arms crossed watching me fail."I can't control it," I said. "She comes all the way up or not at all.""Because you're opening the door and stepping back. You need to o
Seraphina's POVI didn't speak for three days after Morwen told me the truth.I sat on the ground outside the ruined lean-to with my back against a tree and my hands in my lap and I didn't eat and I didn't sleep and I didn't move except to breathe.Morwen rebuilt her shelter around me, dragging branches and canvas from the wreckage and putting together a new lean-to ten feet from the old one. She didn't try to talk to me and she didn't ask if I was alright. She just worked.On the second day she set a cup of water next to me and said "drink" and walked away. I drank it because my body was thirsty even if the rest of me was somewhere else, somewhere deep and dark and quiet where the words were still echoing.You were never the other woman. Your sister was.On the third morning Morwen crouched in front of me and looked at my face with those bright steady eyes and said "you can sit here until you rot or you can stand up and learn how to use what's inside you. The wolf isn't going back to
Seraphina's POV I didn't sit. I stood there with my hands at my sides and the light still flickering on my knuckles and the dirt from my son's grave still under my fingernails and I said "tell me."She told me and every word landed like a punch to my gut."Three years ago a woman came to me in the middle of the night. Young, beautiful, golden-haired, desperate. She said her sister's mate bond had just formed with an Alpha at a gathering and she needed it blocked before the Alpha could identify the source."She paused and looked at me. "She wanted the bond severed, the wolf put to sleep, and the Alpha's memory wiped clean so she could step into the gap and take the bond for herself."Her eyes held mine. "The Alpha was Dax Vaelorin of Blackthorn. The sister was you.""That's not possible. I never had a mate bond. My wolf never woke up. I never felt—""You didn't feel it because I killed it before it could finish forming. The bond was maybe ten seconds old when your sister came to me. S
Seraphina's POVI sat there in the dark and held him and I didn't cry because the crying was gone, burned out of me along with everything else, and what was left in its place had no name yet.Not anger and not grief and not the hollow ache I'd carried since Blackthorn but all of those things pressed together into a single hard point in the center of my chest that pulsed with each heartbeat and felt like it could burn through stone.I buried him at dawn, digging the hole with my bare hands behind the barn where the grass was soft and the morning light came through the trees and made long shadows on the ground.The dirt was loose and dry and it gave way easily and I dug until the hole was deep enough and laid him in it and covered him with the soft fabric Maren had bought at the market months ago, the fabric she'd left folded on my bed before I even knew what it was for.I filled the hole and pressed the dirt flat with my palms and sat there with my hands on the ground and told him I wa
Seraphina's POVI squeezed harder and his windpipe collapsed under my thumbs with a soft crunch that I felt all the way up my arms. His legs kicked under me, heels dragging lines in the dirt, and his back arched and his hands stopped pulling at my wrists and started clawing at the air and his face went from red to purple to a dark color that didn't have a name.His eyes bulged and the whites turned red where the blood vessels burst and his mouth was open and nothing was coming out anymore, not a sound, not a breath, and I held on and watched the life drain out of him the way water drains out of a cracked cup, slow and steady and then all at once.His body jerked once under me and then it stopped and the flat empty eyes that had watched me bleed in a barn went flat and empty for the last time.I held on for ten more seconds. I counted them. Then I let go and his head dropped sideways into the dirt and I stood up and my hands were shaking and the silver light on my fingers was brighter
Seraphina's POVThe growl filled my chest and pushed outward like a fist opening inside my ribs.I was still holding him. My son. My boy who hadn't taken a single breath and whose skin was cooling against my chest and whose tiny fingers were curled into fists that would never open.I was holding him and the growl was getting louder and the silver light on my hands was getting brighter and the pain in my body was changing, not fading but reshaping, turning from the dull broken ache of loss into a thing sharper and hotter and harder.My skin burned. Not the way the beam had burned my palms or the way the fire had burned the air in my lungs but from the inside, like every vein in my body had filled with molten silver and it was pushing out through my pores. The light on my hands spread up my arms and across my chest and I could see it glowing through the fabric of my dress, silver-white and pulsing with my heartbeat.I laid him down and I don't know how I did it. My arms didn't want to l
Seraphina's POV "Come." I pressed my thumb under the head and stroked fast. "Come on me. I want to feel it."He came with a groan he buried in my neck, his cock pulsing in my hands while hot spurts of his release landed on my inner thighs and my stomach and the ruined papers beneath me. His hips j
Seraphina's POV I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him between my legs. "Don't you dare stop."He didn't kiss me again. Instead he pushed my thighs apart with both hands and looked down at where my dress had ridden up, at the thin fabric of my underthings darkened with wetness, and the so
Seraphina's POVI woke up to the sound of his heartbeat under my ear and for a few perfect seconds I forgot where I was.Then the candle guttered out on the bedside table and the chamber went dark, and reality hit me like cold water. I was in the hidden chamber. I'd stayed the whole night. The thin
Seraphina's POVAlpha Vaelorin.My sister’s husband was holding me in his arms, and I couldn’t move or breathe or do anything except stare at his face inches from mine while those sparks kept racing across my skin everywhere his arms pressed against me.His eyes were locked on mine, wide and confus







