LOGINI cried out as Lukas stretched me, my body opening to his with a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain. He filled me completely, my inner walls clenching around him as if trying to keep him inside forever. My head fell back against the pillow, copper hair spread beneath me as I moaned his name, my voice breaking on the syllable. I needed more… harder, faster, deeper… my body and mind consumed by a hunger I’d never experienced before.
“More,” I gasped,
I woke the way I had begun to wake each morning, with my palm flat against his chest and my body reporting for duty before my mind had agreed to it. One, two, three. The beat beneath my hand was slow and unbothered, the pulse of a man sleeping as a man ought to sleep, and something in me that had been clenched for weeks let go by a fraction.Grey-gold light lay across the stone floor. It had not yet reached the bed, but it was on its way, patient as most things in that palace were. His arm was heavy around my waist, his thigh pinned over mine, and I was warm in a way I had stopped expecting to be. Cosy was not a word the Alpha Queen was supposed to own. I decided to keep it anyway.Athena stretched somewhere at the back of my mind, a long, boneless copper stretch, and then she turned in a circle and settled again, huffing softly. She had stopped pacing. The relief of that was almost its own sensation.The door in my head was shut. I checked it, as I always did, a brief inspection of t
She did not wait for me to close the door. By the time the latch fell into place she was already crossing the room, bare feet quiet on the stone, one hand trailing through her hair, and I stood with my back against the wood and watched her go.We had run before dinner, as she had demanded, the two of us loping out through the northern gate and into the dark between the pines, Ares loose and joyous with an abandon I had not felt in months. Athena had pressed beside him, copper beside black, matching his stride for the first mile and outpacing him in the second, and I had felt the whole animal weight of him laugh. Now the wind still lingered in my skin. My legs ached with the clean honesty of a long chase, and my mate was walking away from me towards a bath, and I was entirely content to follow.The suite held the warmth of the day’s stone. A single lamp burned low beside the bed. Moonlight lay in thin silver panels across the floor, and the old claw marks scored i
Breakfast tasted of nothing. I buttered the toast anyway, because my hands could butter it while the rest of me stayed in the cold room beneath the east wing, watching a man’s head drop to his chest.The northern tower was bright at this hour. Sun lay across the table in long, indifferent bars. Lukas sat opposite me with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pot of strong tea at his hand, reading a report with the grave attention he gave to everything on paper. A scatter of dark cherries sat in a bowl between us. I had eaten none of them. I pushed one around the rim with a fingertip and thought about the obsidian wolf, and the condition, and my hands slick with red.Your hands will be stained with the blood of the King.The door in the back of my mind did not so much as creak. I had checked it twice since waking. It was shut, and it was quiet, and I did not trust the quiet at all.“You’re not eating,” Lukas said, without looking up.“I’m eating.”“You’re relocating.”I put the toast d
The room held its breath.Sam Redwood sat across the metal table, wrists cuffed to the chair arms, his jaw arranged into studied neutrality. Beneath the interrogation room’s single lamp, he looked younger than twenty-three. He also looked like a man who had calculated every possible outcome and found none he could bear.I watched Amelia’s aura extend before she asked a word.There was never any announcement with Amelia, no gesture to mark the effort. The pressure simply gathered. Weeks ago, in Lukas Volkov’s office, she had not known she possessed an aura. Now she handled it as she did the mind-link: instinctively, with the unnerving control of someone who understood a weapon the moment it reached her hand. Sam’s jaw tightened. His shoulders lowered by a fraction, his body conceding what his mind would not.“Tell us, Sam,” she said. “How did the Voice start?”His chin lifted. He said nothing.I watched the set of his shoulders and the deliberate measure of his breathing. He was contai
Two weeks, and I still woke with my hand pressed flat over his heart.It was not deliberate, as it had been in the medical wing, when I counted each beat with the concentration of someone who had learned not to trust silence. Somewhere in the dark hours between sleeping and waking, instinct took over. Each morning, I returned to consciousness with the proof of him beneath my palm and the relief of a woman no longer pretending she was unafraid.His arm encircled me. His chest rose and fell with the slow rhythm of genuine sleep, not the controlled stillness of a man guarding a healing body. He had abandoned caution ten days ago. Elara had objected with the bluntness of a healer whose patience with self-determination had run out.I lay still and listened to him breathe.“Good morning,” he said, without opening his eyes.I lifted my head. “You were asleep.”“I was resting my eyes.” The corner of his mouth moved. “There’s a distinction.”“There isn’t,” I said, but I was already smiling, wh
What they do not tell you about technically dying is that coming back is rough. Elara had phrases for it: cardiac recuperation, haematological recalibration. The truth was simpler. My body had been ordered to restart a process it had stopped, and it resented the demand like damaged machinery forced back into service.Three days after leaving the medical wing, I still woke with the sense that something fundamental had shifted inside my chest. It was not pain. It was an absence with edges, as though my heart had been removed and returned to a space that no longer fitted it. Elara called it phantom sensation. I called it knowing I had been empty.Amelia’s head was on my chest, and had been for most of those three days.She had moved back into our bedroom with the quiet determination of someone who had made a decision and would not be dissuaded. The servants brought trays. Elara came twice a day to inspect the wound at my neck, which was healing with the unnerving s
I descended the worn stone steps to the dungeon level, satisfied that Amelia would be occupied with Lily for at least the next few hours. Their drinks in the garden had become animated, with Lily's health improving enough that she matched my mate glass for glass. Good. This was not something Amel
I strode through the palace corridors, my footsteps echoing against marble as servants and guards flattened themselves against walls in my wake. The rage that had simmered since Amelia mentioned her public whipping threatened to boil over with each step. This Gamma Julian—this dog who had d
I strode through the palace corridors, Amelia's unconscious form cradled against my chest, my fury a living thing barely contained beneath my skin. Each heartbeat pounded with the same rhythm as Ares's enraged mantra:‘Mine. Hurt. Kill. Protect.’Guards flattened themselves against walls as I passe
I stormed from the dungeon with Ares clawing at my insides, his presence pushing so hard against my skin that I could feel my claws extending and retracting with each pulse of rage. My mate was being threatened. Again. And she wanted to keep the threat alive, to study it like some curious artifac







