LOGINA sudden, violent shiver raced down Corinne’s spine without warning.
It began at the base of her skull an icy, electric current that rolled through every vertebra, every rib, every limb until her fingers and toes tingled with sharp pins and needles. The air in the room changed in a single heartbeat. It grew heavier, colder, charged with a presence that was both intimately familiar and terrifyingly new. The flame of the lamp flickered hard, almost dying, then flared brighter. The shThe torchlight beyond the bars flickered in the damp draft.The guards did not speak again.And the fury in Trisha’s chest settled slowly into something colder, sharper, and far more dangerous than the hot, screaming outburst that had come before it.She had spent years being soft when softness served her purpose.Tonight, in the cold and the iron and the silence that followed Corinne’s departure, Trisha stopped pretending entirely.Far above the underground cells, Corinne walked the quiet stone corridor beside Percie in a silence that felt earned rather than empty.The silver bond carried the residual weight of the confrontation in the cell the sharp, clarifying satisfaction of truths finally spoken aloud without desperation, the cold certainty that she no longer needed Trisha’s answers or Leon’s regret to know her own worth, and the steady, unyielding presence of the man who had stood in the doorway without ever a
The iron door had barely finished echoing through the damp corridor when the rage finally tore free of every carefully constructed restraint Trisha had ever worn.She stood in the center of the cold cell, chest heaving, broken arm throbbing in vicious time with the furious beat of her heart. The soft tears she had once weaponized like perfected blades were gone. The carefully broken voice that had always brought Leon back to her side was gone. Every practiced expression she had used for years to keep the Alpha close and the true Luna small had burned away the moment that calm, unreachable woman walked out of the cell and left her with nothing but stone, iron, and the crushing weight of a story that no longer bent to her will.“She looked at me,” Trisha snarled at the empty air, voice raw and shaking with the force of everything she could no longer contain. “She stood there with that silver light glowing around her like she had already won and that quiet man watching from the doorway l
Trisha’s breathing grew sharp and uneven. Her uninjured hand curled into a fist against the stone bench. “This is not over. Do you hear me? Someone still needs the borders weak. Someone still needs this pack divided and bleeding. Someone still wants you gone permanently this time, not just for one convenient battlefield. You think the crystal and this iron door end anything? You have no idea how deep the knife goes or whose hand is still holding the hilt.”Percie’s voice came from the doorway, low, absolute, and carrying the same controlled steel that had ended Kaen beneath burning streets. “Then the knife will find the hand that holds it. And it will not be hers.”Trisha’s eyes flicked to him taking in the bandages, the scar, the quiet way he stood as if the cell and the guards and the entire underground meant nothing compared to the woman he had followed into it then snapped back to Corinne. Hatred and desperate calculation
“I didn’t come to gloat,” Corinne said. Her voice was quiet, steady, stripped of the desperate, aching heat that had once defined every conversation she had ever had about this woman. “I came to ask you why.”Trisha’s laugh was short, sharp, and entirely without humor. It echoed off the damp walls. “Why? You already heard the crystal. You already stood in the great hall and watched every surviving adult turn their faces toward me like I was the only knife in the dark. What more could you possibly need from the woman you have already condemned?”“The truth from your own mouth.” Corinne did not look away. She did not raise her voice. The silver bond pulsed once, cool and clarifying, reminding her that the hollow in her chest no longer belonged to the man Trisha was still fighting over. “Not Kaen’s dying confession. Not the soft version you offered Leon with tears that always arrived at the perfect moment
The night following the assembly would not see sleep come to Silvercrest.No, it saw a silence heavy as the smoke that rose up in wisps of pale gray from the south end of the town. Warriors patrolled the stone passages carrying bandaged limbs and eyes that no longer exuded the assurance of those who thought their territory could never be violated. Healers toiled until their hands trembled and their voices broke. Elders whispered among themselves in hushed tones inside shuttered rooms of wards purposely compromised and a danger that remained out there, somewhere beyond the woods.Corinne slept not.She sat on the edge of the narrow bed in the eastern wing, her silver link cool and steady at the center of her chest, like a second heartbeat. She knew Isla was there, the white of her fur against Percie’s dark wolf form, both watching and listening. The acceptance she had uttered in the great hall had made its way into her bones. It did not feel like victory. It felt like the closing of a
“And now?” Percie’s question was quiet, giving her space to answer or not.“Now I know the only villain was the version of me who believed love meant disappearing so someone else could be more comfortable.” Corinne’s voice remained steady even as a single tear slipped free and tracked down her cheek. She did not wipe it away. “I used to dream of him saying he was sorry. Of him realizing what he had done. Of him finally choosing me the way I had always chosen him. Tonight, when he looked at me in that hall with all that regret… I felt nothing but the end of a long, exhausting wait. And it didn’t break me the way I always feared it would. It freed me.”Percie stopped walking. He turned to face her fully beneath the thin moonlight filtering through the trees. The scar that cut through his left brow stood out in sharp relief against his skin. The silver bond carried the full depth of what he felt in that moment







