FAZER LOGINElara’s POVThe Sovereign did not take the flower.He stood there, ten feet of ancient dark, staring down at a three-year-old girl holding out a white bloom, and for a long moment I thought the whole mountain had stopped breathing.Then he flinched.It was a small thing. A tightening around the eyes. But I saw it, because I had spent the last two years learning what fear looks like on a face that is trying not to show it.“No,” he said hoarsely. “No. You do not understand. I cannot…”“Why not?” Flame asked.“Because I am hungry.” His voice cracked down the middle. The lullaby was gone. What was left sounded like wind through a graveyard. “I have been hungry for a thousand years. Do you know what that is? To want, and want, and want, and have nothing in the world that does not run away from you?”Flame blinked up at him, her small hand still outstretched.“I’d run away from you too,” she said, very
Rico’s POVI had fought gods before. Or what passed for them in my four hundred years, ancient wolves and mad warlocks and the occasional cursed king.None of them had ever looked at me with such perfect, gentle pity.“King Valoran,” said the Winter Sovereign. His voice rolled across the chamber like warm milk over stone. “You have done well. Better than I hoped. I am sorry about your immortality. I am afraid that was a necessary toll.”I did not answer. I had my sword in both hands and my mate at my back, and a thousand things I wanted to say. I settled for the only one that mattered.“Let go of my daughter.”“I am not holding her.” He tilted his head. “She is holding herself. She is the most remarkable child I have ever seen. She has spent the last three days refusing to die out of sheer stubbornness.”Behind him, in the glittering column of ice, Flame’s small fingers were pressed flat against the inside of the gl
Kael’s POVAn hour to the dark of the moon.I paced the cracked floor of the Heart Chamber, my blades loose in my hands, listening to the distant roar of the war outside. Elara knelt before Flame’s column of ice, her palms flat against it, whispering something I couldn’t hear. Rico stood behind her with his sword drawn and blood still seeping from his palm. Aislin and Corwin had been unchained at last, and sat wrapped in cloaks on the stairs, silent, watching their daughter with the hunger of people who had waited twenty-three years to look at her.Dax stood at my side. He had not left it once.“You’re staring,” he said, not turning his head.“Am I?”“You’ve been staring at the doorway for ten minutes.”“Something’s coming.”His hand found mine. “Then we’ll meet it.”I almost smiled. A day ago I would have pulled away. A month ago I would have drawn a knife on anyone who tried to hold my hand in fr
Thorne’s POVThe Frostveil gates were a mouth.I had never seen anything like them. Two enormous pillars of black ice, each tall as a ten-story tower, leaned together at the mountain’s foot, and between them lay a gap wide enough for a thousand wolves to run abreast. Mist poured out of it in slow, curling waves. The ground at its threshold was dead and gray, littered with old bones.We had been camped at the border for two hours, and no one had spoken above a whisper.Behind me stood the Blackthorn pack, seven hundred wolves, silent in their battle-leathers. To my right, Dax’s Ironclaws, broad and grim, their iron-banded cloaks stirring in the wind. To my left, Riven’s Stormfang, lean and quick. Every alpha in the Western Reaches had answered the Queen’s call.All except one.“He isn’t coming,” said Garrick, at my elbow.I did not need to ask who. “He might.”“Veyron Duskfang tried to murder the Queen’s chi
Zoe’s POVI stood at the edge of the circle and could not move.I had walked into this mountain on my own two feet. I had carried Flame out of the Queen’s tent in my arms. I had listened to a cold voice tell me my father was alive and believed it. Every step of this nightmare was mine.Now the people I had hurt were bleeding in front of me, and I was holding a knife I had no idea how to use.“Zoe!”Mama. On the far side of the chamber, her hair white as bone, her right arm gone gray with frost. She was crouched beside old Korran, who knelt with both palms flat against the floor.“The chains,” Mama gasped. “Zoe, the sisters. They’re wearing chains. Cut them!”I looked at the eleven women, rigid in their circle, knives raised. At the thin silver cords curling down the back of each neck, glittering like spider silk.Cut them.I ran.A woman lunged at me, an expressionless face, white eyes, a
Elara’s POVI went down the stairs knowing it was a trap.That was the worst part. I was not fooled. Every instinct I had screamed that the voice below was wrong, too sweet, too bright, a stranger wearing my daughter’s laugh. And still my feet kept moving, because there was a one-in-a-thousand chance that it was her, and I could not afford to be wrong.Rico walked at my shoulder, bleeding from a cut on his palm that would not close. Dax and Kael came behind us with their blades out. Aislin and Corwin, still chained to the wall above, had told us what they could in a few ragged sentences: The Heart Chamber is the seal’s center. The circle on the floor is our blood. Do not step in it.The stairs ended.We stood in a vast round chamber lit with gold.It was beautiful. That was what I could not forgive. Warm light poured down from the ceiling in long slanting beams, as if the sun itself were buried here. Flowers grew between the
Elara drove until the sun was high and her eyes burned from crying.The mountain road twisted behind her like a bad memory she couldn’t shake. Every bump jolted her sore body, reminding her of how thoroughly she’d been used how thoroughly she’d let herself be used. Her pussy was tender, swollen, sti
Elara Voss had always been the quiet one.At twenty six, she lived alone in a small apartment above her botanicals shop in a sleepy human town two hours from the mountains. She was the woman who blushed at romantic movies, who kept her fantasies locked away, who apologized for taking up space. Curvy
Kai’s phone buzzed once more on the nightstand Thorne again,They’re circling the block. Two scouts. Ronan’s personal enforcers. They know she’s here.He silenced it, heart pounding with a mix of fury and possession. Elara lay asleep in his arms, body soft and warm, the faint curve of her lower bell
Kai returned at dusk, the sky bleeding orange and purple over Pine Ridge.Elara was upstairs in the loft, fresh from a shower that had done nothing to cool the constant low burn between her legs. Her body was a traitor sore in the most exquisite ways from the night before, pussy tender and swollen,







