Se connecterEMBER’S POV“Absolutely not,” Knox says it casually. “Gale is an unrepentant, violent piece of shit who beat my woman for eight years and hasn’t shown a flicker of remorse. He’s not going anywhere except deeper into hell.” His thumb traces my thigh. “But Logan doesn’t need to know that. Logan needs to believe the trade is real long enough to hand over the flash drive. Once I have it, I take both of them. Logan joins Gale. They can spend the rest of their natural lives rotting together. Every true love story deserves a happy ending.”“And if he doesn’t take the bait?” Nathaniel asks.“Then we use brute force. Kill him if we have to. But he is not walking away alive with that flash drive.”I feel the logic of it settle into place. Smart. Clean. Gives Logan what he wants while neutralising the weapon.“Where IS Gale?” I ask.Knox’s hand tightens on my thigh.“Ember.”“Where is Gale, Knox?”A pause. “Your father’s house,” Knox says. “Maurice’s property. He’s been there the whole time. Gu
EMBER’S POVThe room goes quiet. Everyone is looking at me.“Rafael is only one part of it,” I say slowly. “If we go by everything Nathaniel just told us, the real danger was never Rafael. It’s the gene itself. Having Knox susceptible to it means he’s one bad day away from another episode. One drugging.” I look at Nathaniel, and the word lands exactly where I aim it. “One person cruel enough to weaponise his weakness against him. Or—” My voice catches. “Or if something ever went wrong with me. If we have a mature bond and I’m hurt, or taken, or killed, he could lose his mind entirely. The bond that’s supposed to cure him becomes the detonator instead. And that means—”“A new massacre,” Nathaniel supplies quietly. “Potentially worse than the first. A fully bonded Lycan without an anchor is exponentially more dangerous than an unbonded one. The bond supercharges every instinct. Including the feral ones.”Knox is quiet for a long time. His chest rises and falls against my back in measure
EMBER’S POV“Sapphire told me to scream.” The words come out simpler than the memory deserves. “Rafael was on top of me. I couldn’t fight him. My wolf had been silent for days, and then suddenly she was THERE, louder than she’d ever been. She said trust me. She said scream. So I opened my mouth, and what came out wasn’t my voice. It was something older and bigger, and it came from a place in me I didn’t know existed. It hit everyone in the room, like some form of wave. Rafael flew off my body. The guards dropped. And then they just… turned. On each other. Like whatever I’d released had scrambled something fundamental in them. Their training, their loyalty, their ability to tell friend from enemy — all of it was gone. They started firing at each other, fighting each other, and I ran.”Nobody speaks for a moment. Nathaniel writes on the board: SAPPHIRE — COMMAND / OVERRIDE.“That’s consistent with ancient texts about a specific type of wolf that hasn’t existed in generations,” he says.
EMBER’S POVA sound escapes him. Broken and startled, a small laugh that somehow makes it through the madness.“You’re insane,” he says. “You want me to make the man who killed sixty-three people a hypothetical GODPARENT.”“I want you to sit back down in that chair and hold me and let me anchor you while we figure out what the hell we do next. The godparent discussion, hypothetical or otherwise, can wait until I’ve had significantly more coffee and significantly less trauma.”His hand opens.Nathaniel drops to the floor in a heap, gasping, clutching his throat. Queenie doesn’t rush to him this time. Rather, she turns away, going to the window with her back to the room and her arms around herself, and the distance between her and her husband on the floor is three feet and a thousand miles simultaneously.Knox’s arms close around me. Crushing. His face in my neck, his body shaking, and the claws retract against my back one by one, human fingers replacing them, and the gold drains fro
EMBER’S POV“THEY WERE QUIET.” The scream tears out of him, the gold in his eyes BLAZES, the claws punch through on both hands, and the chair creaks under the force of his body going rigid. “They were so quiet, and I still found them and the boy LOOKED at me, Ember, he looked at me right before I—”He can’t finish. The sound that replaces words is something I hope I never hear again as long as I live. The sound of a man’s soul hitting a wall it can’t survive, and the impact echoes through every room he’ll ever walk into for the rest of his life.He stands. I slide off. He crosses the room toward Nathaniel with a speed that isn’t human, his body moving on feral autopilot, claws fully extended, gold eyes burning with sixty-three deaths that just found their architect.“YOU.” The word is barely recognisable through the shift. “You drugged me. You lowered the threshold. You made SURE the gene would overwhelm the bond. And then you pointed me at a room full of people, and you WATCHED.”“I
EMBER’S POVKnox makes a sound. A low and guttural sound coming from somewhere deeper than his chest, somewhere that lives in the spine and the blood and the ancient lineage of what he is. His hand on my hip goes rigid.“But here’s the part I can never undo.” Nathaniel’s voice is breaking now. “Celeste agreed to the test. She agreed because she loved you, and she wanted you cured because she believed your distance could be fixed if the feral gene was gone. She would have done anything I asked if I told her it would fix the gene. If it would make you feel closer to her at heart. But Celeste had her own—” He stops and clears his throat. “She had her own feelings about Kieran. Feelings she’d been navigating for months. Feelings I KNEW about and used as leverage because a scenario with genuine chemistry would be more convincing than a purely staged one.”All breaths are held.“To the best of my knowledge,” Nathaniel continues, barely above a whisper, “the test was supposed to be containe
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
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







