LOGINArselWhen dinner was over, the family scattered throughout the house.Elaine excused herself to go up to her room for a moment, claiming she was tired, though I knew, through our bond, that she also needed a moment alone to process the day.I waited half an hour before going up after her.I found her by the window, with moonlight streaming in in silvery streaks across the floor, gazing out at the dark forest with her arms crossed over her chest.I didn’t interrupt her right away.I leaned against the doorframe and watched her for a moment, the way she stood so straight even when something weighed on her inside, that stillness I’d learned to read as one of her ways of processing the world.“I know you’re there,” she said without turning around, a barely perceptible smile in her voice.“The bond?” I asked, stepping closer.
ArselCalming Elaine had been a challenge.She had been a source of great calm for me over the past few days, she’d been my anchor, but seeing her distraught over the possibility that she might not be just a human was difficult.She took it all in stride, but with a stoicism that worried me.I let her sleep and got up to go to the kitchen, where I found my father already awake, holding a cup of coffee and staring blankly out the window. He hugged me as soon as he saw me, a tight hug, without saying a word for several seconds, and I let him hold me for a moment before straightening up again.“How are you?” he asked, looking me in the eyes as if he could read directly what lay beneath my skin.“Standing,” I replied, because it was the only honest thing I had to say that morning.I couldn’t lie to either him or my mother.He nodded without pressing further.Tris came down the stairs rubbing her eyes, and as soon as she saw me, she ran toward me without a care in the world, as if she were
ElaineThe meeting with Bless took place at dawn, as Arsel had requested.This time it wasn’t in the map room or the sanctuary.It was in the mansion’s inner garden, the one in the east wing that I had barely explored because I was always busy with the warriors during morning training.Bless arrived alone, without Nora or Pía.That told me something about the nature of the conversation before it even began.Selene and Izan were there. Amelie was there too, with dark circles under her eyes that showed she hadn’t slept. Kiel arrived with a folder, which he placed on the stone table in the garden without saying a word.I sat down next to Arsel, and he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye once—just once—with a question in his eyes, and I nodded slightly to let him know I was okay. I thought I could handle this.He turned his attention back to the table, and he was the one who spoke first.“I need everything I say here to be treated as top-level confidential information,” he said, lo
ElaineI didn’t sleep that night.I didn’t even try.After Arsel and I left the sanctuary and returned home, I went to our bedroom and sat by the window with a cup of tea that Selene had left for me on the nightstand in the hallway without saying a word; I just sat there, as if she knew I was going to need it.Arsel stayed downstairs working.I could sense him on high alert through the bond, with that focused energy he had when something demanded his full attention. It wasn’t anxiety. It was precision. And that difference, which had taken me weeks to learn to distinguish, was one of the things that reassured me most about him, because it meant he wasn’t reacting but calculating.I, on the other hand, couldn’t calculate anything.I was too busy trying to keep the memories at bay.Because the memories kept coming.Not as jarring images this time, but like water that finds a crack in a dam and keeps seeping through, even though no one has opened any floodgates.I stared out the window at
ElaineAmelie arrived in ten minutes.She looked first at me, then at Arsel, and without saying a word, she sat down across the table and waited.I told her everything from the beginning.The two memories. When I finished, Amelie didn’t respond right away.She stared at the stone surface of the table for a moment I couldn’t quite gauge.“The bracelet you describe is an identification mark,” she said finally. “The Supreme Hunters used them to recognize one another in human spaces. They aren’t decorative. They’re enchanted to be invisible to the supernatural, but visible to anyone who carries their blood.”The silence that followed was heavy.“Does that mean I carry their blood?” I asked in a voice that didn’t quite come out right.“It means that woman wanted you to see it,” Amelie said carefully. “She wanted you to see it and remember it. And at that moment, you didn’t have the context to understand what it meant.”Arsel spoke from across the table.“What kind of gift would a woman ha
ElaineI was about to answer Arsel.I had something prepared, something that would probably have been clever, or at least sincere, when the sanctuary door burst open with the unmistakable energy of someone arriving with urgent news, someone who didn’t stop to consider for a moment that he might be interrupting something.It was Kiel.The Beta stopped dead in his tracks when he saw us, and tension hung thick in the air between us.There was exactly one second of silence in which the three of us processed the situation, each in our own way, and Kiel finally spoke.“I found something,” Kiel said, without apologizing, because Kiel never apologized for bringing urgent information, and that was something I’d begun to understand as I watched them in action. “About Scott’s secondary accounts. The ones held under the name of a shell company registered in neutral territory.”It took Arsel a moment to let go of my face.When he did, he looked at me in a way that promised to continue the conversa







