LOGIN“Keep her alive,” he said finally. “For now. Extract every name she knows. Every route. Every signal. If there are people beyond our borders who paid for Corinne’s death, I want them found. I want them ended.”Mara studied him for a long moment. “And Corinne?”“She has made her choice,” Leon said, the words rough. “I made mine years ago without realizing it. There is nothing left to reclaim there. Only the debt I owe for every soft decision that led us here.”Mara inclined her head once. “Then we focus on the debt that can still be paid in blood. The one that started outside our walls.”She left him alone with the dark and the weight of everything he could not undo.The door had not fully settled into its frame when it opened again.Leon’s Beta, Rylan, stepped inside without ceremony. The man’s left arm was still bound from the rogue attack, a fresh bandage visible
The cold in the underground cell had become a living thing.It seeped through the thin cloak, through the bandages, through the skin, and settled deep into Trisha’s bones until even the fire of her rage could not fully burn it away. She sat on the narrow stone bench with her broken arm cradled against her ribs, eyes open in the dark, listening to the slow drip of water and the occasional shift of the guards beyond the iron bars.The screaming had stopped hours ago.What remained was colder. Sharper. More useful.She had spent the first hours after Corinne’s visit letting the fury tear through her pacing, striking the wall, spitting every bitter truth she had kept locked behind soft tears for years. It had burned itself down to something harder. Something that no longer needed volume to be dangerous.Corinne Spark had walked out of this cell calm and unbroken, silver light steady around her, Percie Blade at her side like a promise the Goddess had finally decided to keep. She had looked
The 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







