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7: Second Heat
publish date:
2026-10-14 17:55:58
Latest chapter
Sinful Tales of Ever After 10: Making the Wolf Fall
If my grandmother taught me anything, it was patience.Sable had poisoned the pack against me with whispers. I couldn't fight whispers by shouting. I'd have to fight them the way water fights stone: slowly, every day, until the shape of things changed.So I started small.Wren's mother had forbidden her to come near me, so I went to Wren's mother. I found her at the washing lines, took the other end of a wet sheet without asking, and helped her fold it. Then the next one, and the next. When she finally, grudgingly, asked why I bothered, I told her the truth: my own mother had taught me my letters before she died, it was the one part of her nobody could ever take from me, and I'd like to give that to her daughter, if she'd let me.Two days later, Wren was back. By the end of the week she'd brought three friends. We sat on the floor of the long hall in the afternoons, after the meal was cleared, scratching letters onto the flagstones with lumps of charcoal from the hearth, and the pups
Sinful Tales of Ever After 9: The Red Cloak
I didn't ask him about the east house.I'd decided that sometime around dawn, lying awake with my arms wrapped around myself. Sable wantedme to ask. She wanted me to watch his face, see whatever she knew I'd see there, and break. I'd spent my whole life among people who set traps for me. I wasn't going to walk into one just because I was frightened.So I did what I'd always done. I went looking for the truth myself.Lucan rode out with Garrick at noon to settle a boundary dispute with a neighboring pack. They'd be gone until dark. I waited until the hall was empty, then slipped into his study.I wasn't looking for anything in particular. Papers about the east house, maybe. Letters. Anything at all. Instead, I found a door.It was set into the wall behind the bookshelf, low and narrow and fitted so neatly into the paneling that I'd never noticed it. The only reason I noticed it now was the smell: beeswax and dried lavender, drifting through the crack along its edge.It was locked. But
Sinful Tales of Ever After 8: Sable's Game
The first gift arrived the next morning.A small tin of tea, tied with a lavender ribbon, left on the bench outside my door. The card read, in an elegant slanting hand: Among women, a peace offering. — S.I almost threw it in the fire. Then I realized that throwing it in the fire was exactly what a frightened, jealous little vessel would do, and that Sable was probably counting on it, so she could tell the pack, I tried to be kind, and she spat on it.So I brewed a cup in the long hall, at the table, where everyone could see.It tasted of honey with something bitter underneath. I'd drunk half before the room began to tilt.I remember the cup slipping from my fingers and shattering on the stone. I remember Wren screaming. I remember lying on the floor with my stomach turning itself inside out, shaking so hard my teeth rattled, and the cold, a cold that sank into my bones like winter come early.Thessaly came. She knelt beside me, picked up a shard of the cup, and sniffed it. Her face w
Sinful Tales of Ever After 7: Second Heat
I turned around slowly, the way you turn around in the woods when you hear a branch break.He was leaning in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, barefoot, his hair wet as if he'd just come up from the river. He didn't look angry. He looked tired, in a way that went deeper than sleep."Why is my name in your book?" I asked.He came in and closed the door behind him. For a moment he only looked at the ledger, at the torn line beneath the lamp."I write them the night they arrive," he said. "Before. While they're still alive. It seemed wrong that the first time anyone wrote their names down should be after.""And the dates?""The day I bury them."I looked at the scored-out stroke, at the paper torn through. "You started one for me."He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn't answer."The first night," he said finally. "Around three in the morning, your heart stopped."The lamp hissed. The floor seemed to tilt under me."I'd been counting it. Listening. And then it just wasn't there anymore
Sinful Tales of Ever After 6: Rules of the Den
"Sable," Lucan said. Only that. But the temperature of the room dropped ten degrees."Don't growl at me, darling. I came to pay my respects to the dead." She tilted her pale head toward me. "Though it seems I'm early. What's your name, little vessel?"I pulled the fur higher and met her eyes. "Ruby.""Ruby." She rolled it in her mouth like a sweet she didn't care for. "How quaint. Like the cloak." Her gaze went to my bloodstained cloak on the chair, then back to my neck, to the bandage, and for one instant the smile cracked and I saw underneath it. Not jealousy. Something hungrier. "Enjoy him while it lasts. They usually don't.""Out," said Lucan.She went, unhurried, trailing jasmine. He shut the door behind her and stood with his palm flat against the wood."Who is she?""Sable Dren. Her father sits on the pack council." A pause. "Her family expected me to mark her.""Why didn't you?"He looked at me over his shoulder. "Because I've never wanted anything from that family but distanc
Sinful Tales of Ever After 5: Heat
He was sitting on the floor of the corridor with his back against the wall and his forearms on his knees, and when the door swung open he looked up at me as if I were the one with teeth.For a moment neither of us moved. The lamp at the end of the hall had burned low. His eyes caught the light and threw it back gold."Ruby." My name sounded like a warning. "Close the door.""No."He got to his feet slowly, using the wall, as if his body didn't fully belong to him. Up close, I could see what holding himself out here had cost him. A sheen of sweat at his temples. His hands fisted so tight the knuckles had gone white. A muscle jumping in his jaw."You don't know what you're asking for," he said."Then tell me.""It's the heat. It's my blood. Tomorrow it'll pass and you'll look at me the way you looked at me in that clearing, and you'll be right to.""Maybe." I stepped out into the corridor, barefoot on the cold boards. The heat rolled through me in a long, slow wave, and I let it, and ke
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