로그인KNOX’S POV“I’m not revealing his location while you’re holding a trigger that could end my reign.”“And I’m not surrendering my only leverage on the word of a man who is illegally detaining my chosen mate.”We stare at each other. Two men at an impasse built from identical materials — love and fear and the absolute unwillingness to blink first. In another life, I think I might have liked Logan. The sheer, obstinate, self-destructive devotion is something I understand at a molecular level, and under different circumstances — circumstances that don’t involve him threatening to expose the worst night of my life — I could almost respect it.“Gale is alive,” I say. “Unharmed. Being held in a location I control. I’m prepared to take you to him personally.”“After I give you the drive.”“After you disarm the trigger and tell me where the drive is stored.”“No.”“Logan.”“No.” He stands. The crate screeches against concrete. “I’ve been reasonable. I gave you forty-eight hours. I came alone
KNOX’S POVThe words land in my chest, and I feel the bruise of them immediately. Twenty years of unwavering loyalty. Twenty years of placing himself between me and danger by any means necessary, through near-deaths and battles and the kind of thankless service that never makes it into the history books.My jaw tightens. I force myself to feel nothing. Not an inch of mercy. Not a drip of care.Because this is the man who drugged my coffee and killed my wife and murdered sixty-three people and documented me like a lab animal and lied to my face for a decade.But he is also the man who committed his life to my family’s legacy. The man I considered my brother long before any of this, back when life was simpler and the worst days could be solved with a bottle of beer after brutal training and shared laughter that meant nothing and everything at the same time.Both things. At the same time.I don’t honour the confession with a response. I harden the bruise the way you harden a bruise,
KNOX’S POV“No.”“He raised you.”“He saved me.” Nathaniel’s voice is stripped to the bone. “I was eleven. Living in the drainage tunnels under the old industrial district. Eating whatever I could steal. He found me during one of his community rounds — the pack clinics he ran in the low-income districts. I had a fever that should have killed me, and he brought me home and treated me for three weeks, and when the fever broke, he didn’t send me back to the tunnels.” A pause. “He gave me a bed. He gave me books. He gave me a name on medical forms and a place at his table, and he never once made me feel like a burden.”I let that sit. This image of poor, sickly Nathaniel rearranges everything I thought I knew about him.“His name was Petrov,” Nathaniel says. “And your father killed him.”The air in the car vanishes. For a second, the words pierce straight through my chest — not because they’re an accusation, because they’re not. There’s no blame in the way he says it. His face gives not
KNOX’S POVNathaniel pauses for a moment, then nods once. He offers no argument, rehearsed defence, or rationalisation. No carefully worded explanation for why twenty years of service should outweigh sixty-three bodies and a drugged cup of coffee. All I get is that nod. The absence of a fight from a man who has fought me on every decision I’ve made since I was seventeen was the most damning part. It is the silent admission that what he’s done has no defence, and any attempt to build one would insult us both.I stared out the window, and my mind did what it’s been doing all morning — reaching backwards, trying to reconcile the man beside me with every version of him I’ve known. Because the Nathaniel in that living room this morning, confessing to engineering a massacre, is not the Nathaniel I chose. Not the one I found.I was seventeen when I arrived in North America. Seventeen, with my father’s blood still under my fingernails because the flight from Zürich was seven hours, an
KNOX’S POVMy hands are the problem.Not in the way Nathaniel would diagnose it, not the gene or the claws or the shift. The problem is simpler and worse. I’m sitting in the passenger seat watching my fingers open and close around my own knee, and I cannot stop seeing them do other things.The boy was holding his sister. That’s the detail that won’t leave. Not the ballroom or the blood or the woman in the red dress whose face I still can’t fully see. The detail that followed me into this car is the boy. Sabias. Seven years old, holding his sister Mira under a bed in a guest room with a nightlight still glowing because someone on my staff knew the child was afraid of the dark and cared enough to plug one in.He was telling her to be quiet. That if they were quiet enough, the monster would leave.The monster didn’t leave.I flex my fingers against my knee. Open, close. Checking that the nails are blunt and human and that the things under them are not pressing through. These are the
EMBER’S POVMaurice’s face shifts. A new layer of guilt settling over the existing ones, and I’m beginning to wonder how many layers this man carries before the whole structure collapses under the weight.He stands and leads us through the house, past the bathroom where I used to lock myself during my parents’ worst fights, past the bedroom where I’d press my face into the pillow and pretend the shouting was wind, to a door at the back of the house that I don’t remember being there when I was growing up. A storage room reinforced and padlocked.Maurice produces a key from his pocket and opens it.The smell hits first. Stale air and unwashed body and something rotten under. The room is small and dim and in the corner, chained to a pipe that runs along the floor, is Gale Crawford.I almost laugh.He’s thinner than I remember. Unshaven, hollow-cheeked, wearing clothes that haven’t been changed in longer than is decent. His wrists are raw where the chains have rubbed and there’s a split
EMBER’S POV(PRESENT)We stay tangled together for a long time, neither of us willing to be the first to let go. His hand strokes through my hair.My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt. The room is quiet except for our breathing and the distant hum of something mechanical — a generator, mayb
EMBER’S POV“I want to recover here. In this penthouse. Not locked away somewhere safe and isolated.”And there it is. The trade she’s been building toward.I almost laugh.“You want to stay here,” I repeat slowly. “With us. With Knox.”“You heard me. What part of dying don’t you seem to understand
EMBER'S POVI'm terrified this will ruin the moment. This fragile, beautiful thing we've built under the Northern Lights.But I'm tired of everyone telling me what to think about Knox. Tired of Gale's poison and Rayana's warnings and rumors whispered behind hands at cocktail receptions.We don't ow
EMBER’S POVI stare down at Knox on his knees, my pulse slamming so hard I can feel it between my legs. He's grinning up at me like a wolf who's already tasted blood, gold eyes glowing, fangs just barely peeking past his lip.I fold my arms, pretending my thighs aren't already trembling."What do I







