INICIAR SESIÓNEMBER'S POV
The path is narrow, tucked away from the main flow of guests, designed for staff to move unseen.My heart races from the dance floor, from the decision I've made to leave with him, from the understanding that I'm walking toward something I don't fully comprehend.He opens a door. I step through.And forget how to breathe.The observatory is a glass-domed room at the top of one of the resort's towers. The ceiling is entirely transpaEMBER’S POVNobody moves.The six arrows point at the house, and Harrison stands before them with his one remaining arm raised, and the silence that follows his words is not the kind that invites a response.“Thirty seconds,” Harrison says. “Bring him out, or my men come in.”I back away from the window.My phone is on the kitchen counter where I left it beside the cold tea, and Queenie’s is in her jacket pocket, and Knox is an hour away at minimum doing whatever Knox is doing with Logan.Even if I could reach him right now, he would arrive to a house full of arrows and dead bodies.Calling Knox is not a plan that would work right now. Even by some miracle, we’d all be dead before he arrives.“Everyone away from the windows,” Maurice says, and there’s a quality in his voice I’ve never heard from him before. “When those arrows come, they’ll punch straight through the siding. This place is weathered and old, and I doubt it can do much to protect us against those reinforced arrows.”He g
KNOX’S POVWhatever just happened to Gale — wherever he is, whatever is being done to him right now in a storage room in a shabby house where I put him — Logan FELT it. Through whatever bond they share.My phone buzzes in my jacket. The vibration travels through the silver haze like a distant drum.Logan hears it too.His head snaps toward my pocket with the speed of a predator acquiring a target, and I see the calculation happen behind his wild, bloodied eyes.Faster than thought, faster than language, the rapid-fire processing of a desperate man assembling a plan from broken pieces.His hand moves to his pocket. The remote.“Logan, wait—”He presses it.The silver DETONATES. Every thread in the restraint ignites simultaneously, and my entire nervous system goes dark like a city losing power in a storm.My muscles lock. My legs fold. I hit the concrete floor face-first, and the impact splits my lip, but I barely feel it because the silver is everywhere — in my blood, in my bones, in
KNOX’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
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 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







