로그인EMBER’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“The last visit was different. You were about six. The woman watched you playing in the yard through the kitchen window for a long time without speaking. Then she told your mother the drops weren’t holding the way they used to. That you were getting stronger and the doses couldn’t keep up.” He sets the mug down. “She gave your mother something different. She called it permanent. Said it would ensure you never felt your wolf again — at least long enough for Devika to live out the rest of her life without worrying about her past catching up with her.”“Permanent,” I repeat, and the word tastes like rust.“Your mother cried when she took it. That’s the only time I ever saw Devika Chamberlain cry.”“Did anything ever happen after that? Any episodes, anything that made you think the suppressants weren’t holding?”Maurice thinks. “You were about twelve. You had a nightmare. A bad one. You screamed with pain in your sleep, and every wolf in the neighbourhood started howling at th
EMBER’S POV“Never. Not once. Not his name, not his bloodline, not where he was from. Just that the affair was brief and that whatever he was connected to scared her badly enough to disappear.”“What did you do? When she told you.”Maurice’s face changes. “I lost my mind.” He says it plainly. “I put my fist through the kitchen wall. That wall, right there.” He nods toward a patch near the doorway where the paint doesn’t quite match the rest. “Then I got in the car and drove to every bar in a thirty-mile radius and drank until they stopped serving me. Then I drove home and drank everything in the house. Then I went to sleep on the lawn because I couldn’t find the front door.”“While I was inside.”“Yes. Probably alone and confused, because your mother had gone to a friend’s and the man you thought was your father was lying shit-faced in the grass trying to make the stars stop spinning.” His voice thickens. “I woke up the next morning with frost on my jacket and you standing over me in
EMBER’S POVHe blinks. The word hits him harder than I expected, or maybe harder than I intended, because something in his expression collapses and rebuilds in the space of a breath. I didn’t plan to call him Dad. It just came out. The muscle memory of this porch, this house, this man standing in this exact spot where he used to wait for me after school on the days he remembered to be there.“Can we come in?” I ask. “This isn’t a social visit.”He nods quickly, wiping his hands again even though they’re already clean, and holds the screen door open for us with such careful courtesy.The house is small enough that the front door puts you in the living room, and the living room bleeds into the kitchen without much of a boundary between them. It’s cleaner than I expected. He’s been keeping house in a way he never managed when I was growing up, and the effort of it is visible in the scrubbed counters, the single plate and single cup on the drying rack, the organised spice rack that I w
EMBER’S POVQueenie doesn’t answer.I glance over and she’s staring at the dashboard and tears are sliding down her cheeks in two clean lines and her mouth is pressed shut and she’s not making a sound. She’s just sitting there, crying silently, and the silence is louder than anything she could have said because the answer is in the tears and the tears say no.I don’t push. I don’t fill the quiet with comfort or platitudes. I just let her cry, because sometimes that’s the kindest thing you can do.After a while, she wipes her face, exhales, and straightens her shoulders the way women do when they’re putting themselves back together in real time.“Well,” she says, her voice rough. “That was deeply unpleasant.”“Yeah.”“I’m going to need to think about some things.”“Yeah.”“But not right now. Right now I need to do something very stupid and very loud.”I pull the car to the shoulder, and the engine idles in the quiet.“Roll your window down,” I say.“It’s minus ten degrees, Ember.”“R
EMBER’S POVThe question lands in the car like a third passenger. I take my eyes off the road long enough to look at her and from her face, I can tell she is not fishing for reassurance or testing me. She’s asking because she genuinely doesn’t know the answer and the not knowing is eating her from the inside.“Queenie—”“I know he’s my fated mate. I know the Goddess paired us. I know all the texts and the traditions and the lore that says this bond is sacred and chosen and meant to be. But the Goddess didn’t sit in that room this morning and listen to my husband confess that he drugged his best friend’s coffee and engineered a woman’s death for research data.” Her hands are twisting in her lap, fingers pulling at each other. “How am I supposed to lie next to him tonight knowing what he’s capable of? How am I supposed to let him touch me and trust that the hands on my body belong to the man I married and not the man who stood in a monitoring station while sixty-three people died?”“I
EMBER’S POVMy mother stands in the doorway, draped in designer everything as always.A silk dress in garish emerald that probably cost more than she can actually afford. Jewelry dripping from her neck, her ears, her wrists, every piece fighting for attention.Hair and makeup done to perfection, no
EMBER’S POVThe crowd murmurs agreement, curiosity rippling through the room.Knox extends his hand toward me.“Ember. Come here.”Every eye in the ballroom turns to me.My legs feel like they’re made of water. My heart is trying to escape through my ribcage.But Knox is waiting, his hand outstretc
EMBER’S POVThe mattress dips sometime after three in the morning.I’ve been lying here for hours, staring at the ceiling, my mind running circles around the photo of Queenie still burning a hole in my phone.Sleep feels impossible. Every time I close my eyes, I see Rayana bleeding on the marble. S
EMBER’S POVI nod desperately.“Liar.” He pumps into me slowly, his thumb circling my clit with featherlight pressure that’s nowhere near enough. “You’re never quiet. It’s one of my favorite things about you.”“For goddess sake, Knox, please—”“Please what?” He’s smiling now, the bastard. Enjoying







