LOGINTITAN’S POVShe was still at the table when I walked in.I honestly expected her to run or do something at least. But nothing happened.Instead she was sitting at the same spot where I last saw her. The hall was quiet, which was kinda weird to be honest.Every head turned.I stood in the doorway and let them look.I was aware of everything happening around me. I had come back looking like a man who had been through something and survived it.I mean as I should.Good.I wanted them to see that.Thinking is back.I wanted every person in this hall to know that I had ridden into the territory of an enemy and come back standing, and that the woman sitting in my chair was just an imposter.I walked into the hall.The pack members on the benches separated the moment they saw me.Some of them hadn’t seen me in weeks.I could tell some people recognized me. While some didn't immediately finish processing what they were staring at.I stopped at the foot of the dais, looking up at her in my
TITAN’S POVThe sound came from the floor above me.I looked at Alan.He was already moving toward the armoury door, his hand on the handle, his ear was already against the wood.“Guards,” he said quietly. “At least three.”“Direction?”“East wing.” He pulled back from the door. “The blue room.” Bianca.I didn’t think so. I simply moved, pushing past Alan and through the door, my sword cleared its scabbard before I was fully in the corridor.The passage was empty but not quiet. The sounds from above were louder now, boots on stone, a voice giving sharp instructions that echoed down through the ceiling.Alan was right behind me.We took the stairs fast.The upper corridor came into view.Three guards, exactly as Alan had said.Two were positioned outside the blue room door, which was still closed. The third was moving toward the staircase, which meant he was going to see us in approximately four seconds.I didn’t give him four seconds.I covered the distance and hit him before he had
INDIRA’S POVThe evening meal was always served at seven.It had been that way since before Titan’s father died, a tradition so embedded in the rhythm of Wilder Pack that even my restructuring of the guard rotation and the council schedule hadn’t touched it.Some things you didn’t change.I sat at the head of the long table in the great hall, in Titan’s chair, which I had taken to occupying at meals with a deliberateness that was entirely intentional.Symbols mattered.Where you sat mattered.Who stood and who sat in your presence mattered.These were lessons I had learned early, growing up in a house where I was always slightly outside the warmth. Always present but never quite included. Always the daughter from the first marriage, the one who existed in the margins of a family that had reorganised itself around people who weren’t me.I had watched and I had learned and I had filed everything away with the patience of someone who understood that timing was everything.My time had ar
ALAN’S POVThe moment the throne room door closed behind me, I exhaled.The real plan.I turned it over in my mind as I walked the corridor, my footsteps were very steady, Wouldn't wanna be caught.She was going to poison him.I knew it would be something slow, probably something introduced into his food or his wine over several days.She had been planning it for a long time.Sneaky bitch.The particular detail with which she described it told me that. The dosage. The timing. The specific symptoms that would present and in what order. The healer she had already compromised who would sign whatever document needed signing.This was not improvisation.This was architecture.And I stood there and listened to every word.She had almost believed me.Almost.That almost was important.Indira was exceptional at reading people. It was her sharpest skill, sharper even than her patience or her planning. She read people the way other people read maps.I could tell she was sensing something wa
INDIRA’S POVThe cottage was small.Two rooms, a fire, a window that looked out over flat grassland stretching east toward the tree line. Nobody for miles in any direction except the woman I had paid to be here and the child she had been keeping for me.His name was Caden.I had named him myself because there had been no one else to do it. I had carried him alone and delivered him in this same cottage with no one present but the woman and a midwife I had brought from three territories over, someone with no connection to Wilder Pack and no reason to speak.I had done a great many things alone.I was used to it.The woman, Maret, handed him to me when I arrived. He was awake, which surprised me slightly. It was past midnight and he should have been asleep, but he was awake and looking at the ceiling with the intense, serious concentration of someone working through a complex problem.He looked like Titan.That had always been the part I hadn’t entirely prepared for.I sat down near the
TITAN’S POVAlan said her name.One name.And the corridor went so quiet I could hear the torches burning on the wall.I turned back slowly.“Say that again,” I said.Alan looked at me. His eyes were steady in that particular way eyes got when a person had already made peace with whatever came next.“She has your son,” he said. “Has had him since before she took the pack. That was the leverage. That was always the leverage.” He paused. “I didn’t know what it was until she told me this morning. She told me because she wanted me to understand why I was going to keep helping her.” He looked at the floor briefly. “She was right that I would understand. She was wrong about what I would do with it.”Nobody spoke.Viktor was very still beside me.Kari had her hand pressed flat against the wall like she needed something solid.I heard my own breathing.A son.I had a son.I ran back through everything. Every month of Indira’s time here, every conversation, every careful deflection when I had







