LOGIN[Eileen’s POV]My knees hit the stone before I understood I was falling, the cold biting straight through my skirts hard enough to bruise, and the room went white at the edges, then gray, then nothing at all for one long second where I couldn’t remember which way was up. I bit down on the inside of my cheek without meaning to, that was the only thing that dragged me back, that small ugly sting, and I came up out of it gasping on my hands and knees like I’d been held underwater.Get up. Get up before someone sees.“Eileen.” Wren’s knees hit the floor next to mine, hard, her hands grabbing for my shoulders and missing twice before they caught. “Eileen, look at me. You went down like your legs just stopped existing.”“I’m fine.” My voice came out wrong, thin, nothing like fine. My stomach rolled once, hard, and I swallowed against it. “Give me a second.”“You’ve had a hundred seconds this week. You’ve had six days of seconds.” She hauled me up by the arm, not gentle about it, shoving me
[Kade’s POV]The war room stank of him before I even got the door open, sour sweat gone stale under three-day-old wine, something rawer underneath it that made the wolf in my own chest sit up and take notice. Alaric hadn’t shaved. Hadn’t washed. His hair was matted flat on one side like he’d been lying on the floor instead of sleeping in a bed, and when he looked up at me his eyes weren’t fully human anymore, amber bleeding through the brown, the way it only ever happened when a man was one bad thought from losing the leash entirely.“You look like shit,” I said.“Get out, Kade.”“No.” I kicked the busted chair leg out of my path, the second piece of furniture I’d seen him wreck this week, and didn’t sit down this time. “Six days. You smell like the inside of a grave and you haven’t been in the same room as your wife once.”“I don’t need a lecture from you.”“Somebody’s giving you one anyway.” I planted both hands flat on his desk, close enough that he had to look at me instead of pas
[Eileen’s POV]Six days, and his scent still hadn’t left this room. It clung to the pillow I refused to throw out, to the chair he’d sat in the one night he stayed, and every time it caught me off guard I wanted to tear the whole bed apart with my bare hands just to make it stop.I wasn’t spending these days scratching marks into wood and waiting politely to be forgiven. I’d counted the guard rotations three times over by now, knew exactly which one drank before his shift and which one owed money he couldn’t cover, and I’d already decided which of those two facts I was going to use first. My hands hadn’t stopped moving in an hour, folding and refolding the same scrap of paper I meant to pass to whichever guard finally cracked, working the plan over and over until the edges of it stopped feeling like desperation and started feeling like something I could actually execute.“You’re new,” I said to the younger one through the crack in the door, low enough the others down the hall wouldn’t
[Selena’s POV]Alaric pulled back before I did. I felt his hand tense in mine a half second before he actually moved, some late, useless flicker of conscience winning out over four sleepless nights, and he stood so fast the chair scraped hard against the floor.“I can’t do this.” He wouldn’t look at me, staring instead at the map like it might tell him where he’d gone wrong. “I’m sorry, Selena. That was…”He didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need him to. I gathered my reports, kept my face arranged into something that could pass for hurt if anyone asked, and walked out before he could see how little that rejection had actually cost me.I’d learned a long time ago that the men who apologized fastest were usually the ones closest to breaking. My father used to say it about soldiers right before they deserted, that the guilt always arrived first and the actual leaving came right behind it, day or two at most. Alaric’s guilt had arrived exactly on schedule. I intended to be standing th
[Alaric’s POV]I ran drills with the border patrol for six hours the day after I locked my own wife in the east wing, longer than any man under me lasted, and when one of my captains finally asked if I wanted a break I told him no in the same flat voice I hadn’t used with anyone since before the wedding.It fit better than I expected it to. Like a coat I’d never actually stopped wearing, just draped something warmer over for three weeks and called it change.I stopped taking meals in the hall. Ate standing up in the war room instead, or not at all, and when a servant asked twice whether Luna would be joining the council again I answered both times with the same two words and didn’t explain further. Not yet. The guards outside the east wing reported to me directly now, twice daily, nothing more than confirmation she hadn’t left, which was exactly as much as I’d told myself I needed to know.By the third night without real sleep, I’d started missing details I never used to miss. Read t
[Eileen’s POV]He found me in the east sitting room an hour before dusk, the fire long since burned down to embers, the room gone cold enough that I’d pulled a blanket around my shoulders without noticing I’d done it. The window had been left cracked since morning, and the draft coming through it smelled like rain that hadn’t fallen yet, sharp and metallic against the back of my throat. I knew before he said a single word that whatever happened in that study after he sent me away had settled into something colder than the man who’d put his fist through his own desk.I’d spent that hour rehearsing what I’d say when he finally came. None of it survived the look on his face when he actually did.“Sit down.”“I’d rather stand.”“Sit down, Eileen.”I sat, because the version of him standing in that doorway wasn’t asking twice. He didn’t come further into the room, kept the whole width of it between us like proximity itself was a risk he wasn’t willing to take again, but even from there his







