LOGINNerissa POVI didn't sleep again that night.I lay on my back in the dark of the small room and looked at the ceiling and turned theword over and over in my mind until it stopped feeling like something that had happenedto someone else.I was four weeks pregnant,maybe five.I pressed my hand flat on my stomach the way I had before Harper left. Nothing feltdifferent,nothing changed in any way I could detect from the outside. My body looked the same. I felt the same except for the tiredness and the nausea and the sensitivity thathad apparently decided to announce itself this morning.My wolf was different though.She has been different since the moment the healer said the word.She turned inward,watchful and orienting herself around something new with theabsolute instinctive certainty of an animal that understood things the human mind wasstill catching up to.I lay there and let my mind catch up.The morning after zaydens forehead against mine and together still even
Nerissa POVIt started with the smell. The particular heightening of everything around me that arrived overnight and bymorning made the kitchen corridor unbearable.I stood at the entrance to it and pressed my back against the wall and breathed throughmy mouth and waited for it to pass.Meat from the morning preparation. Oil on the cooking fires. The layered smell of thekitchen that had been in continuous use for years and absorbed all of it into its walls.None of it had bothered me before.This morning it hit me like a wall.Harper appeared from the kitchen doorway with a cloth in her hands and stopped whenshe saw my face."What's wrong?" she said."The smell," I said.She looked at the kitchen. Then at me."It smells the same as it always does," she said"I know," I said.She studied my face for a moment."Come outside," she said.The outer yard was better.Cold morning air in an open space. The smell of earth and damp stone and the distanttree line.I pre
Nerissa POVDorian came to find me before dawn.I was already awake.The small room Harper arranged for me at the back of the pack house held itsmemories in the walls the way old places held everything.I sat on the edge of the bed with my mother's three letters in my lap and didn't try tosleep.His knock came soft.I folded the letters back into my riding pack and opened the door."You didn't sleep," he said."No," I said.He accepted that without filling it with anything and stepped back from the doorway."We should leave before the pack wakes," he said. "The road north takes four hours.We can be back before dark if we move now." I pulled the pack onto my shoulder and followed him out into the grey pre-dawn quiet ofa pack house that did not find its morning rhythm yet.The mountain settlement appeared through the tree line like something grown.Low stone structures,dark timber. Everything constructed with practicality of peopleThe kind of place that survived fo
Calista POVShe came back,I heard it from my chamber window before any servant thought to tellme.I looked out and there she was.Nerissa Ashwood standing in the outer yard of Red Claw Pack with her hood pushedback and her chin level and an Alpha's escort behind her like it was simply how thingswere now. Like she had always moved through the world this way and the nineteenyears of floor scrubbing and storage room sleeping and public humiliation hadhappened to someone else entirely. I stood at my window and looked at her for a long time. She was different.I knew she would be different. I spent weeks constructing the version of this momentthat I would be ready for and I had included different in all of those constructionsbecause I was not a woman who failed to account for things.But different was a word that covered a very large range of possibilities and I hadapparently not prepared for this specific version of it.She stood in that yard like someone who stopped
Rowan POVShe didn't look at me and that was the first thing I noticed and it was the wrong thing tonotice and I noticed it anyway because apparently I had lost the ability to control what Ipaid attention to where Nerissa Ashwood was concerned. She walked into that pack house and she looked at Harper and she looked at thecorridor and she looked at the door at the end of it and she said what she came to sayclearly and directly but she did not look at me.That was what stopped me.Avoidance I understood,avoidance was what she did for nineteen years inside thesewalls.where her eyes went and how long they stayed and what they gave away. The survivalinstinct of who learned that looking at the wrong thing at the wrong time producedconsequences.This was not avoidance,this was indifference.Complete and genuine and so total that it produced a sensation of standing in a roomthat you assumed contained you as a relevant element and discovering you had beenwrong about tha
Nerissa POVHarper took me to the storage room at the back of the house.Not the one I slept beside for years. A different one,tucked behind the laundry room inthe section of the pack house that nobody used except for things they wanted to keep.She pushed the door open and stepped back. I looked inside.A single wooden crate. The wood darkened with age and damp. I pushed against the farwall beneath a shelf of broken equipment that nobody had bothered to repair or discard."Mara put everything in there after your mother died,I don't think she ever opened it."Harper said.I entered the room and crouched beside the crate,putting both hands on the lid.My mother's hands touched the things inside this box. Her life before Red Claw. Beforeshe made every decision she made so that I could stand in a storage room nineteenyears later and reach for what she left behind.When I opened it,there was not much.A folded piece of fabric,dark green. The quality that didn't come from
Nerissa POVThe doors of the pack house slammed behind me.My feet hit the wet ground and I just ran without direction. The rain started heavily before I even reached the tree line.The forest swallowed me fast. Trees closing in on every side, branches slapping my face and arms, roots catching my
Nerissa POV The servant standing outside the door looked uncomfortable.“The gathering has already started.”Humiliation never came alone in the Red Claw Pack.“I have to go,” I whispered.“What?”“If I don’t…” My throat tightened. “Aunt Mara will punish both of us.”Harper cursed under her breath
Nerissa POV My chest burned like something inside me was being ripped apart.I stumbled backward clutching my heart.The air around me became too heavy to breathe.“oh shit…” I whispered shakily.Across the room, Rowan looked just as shocked.His wolf was reacting too,I could smell it now.Calista
Nerissa POV My breath became uneven.The whisper echoed again inside my head.My wolf had never spoken before,not even once.Fear crawled through me,the stranger outside the gates still stared directly toward the storage room window, his cold gray eyes sharp enough to make my entire body tense.“W







