LOGINEMBER’S POVSilas lets out a violent growl, his chair scraping viciously against the stone as he steps forward, ready to tear her throat out for even suggesting it.But Knox holds up a single hand, stopping Silas dead in his tracks.Knox lets out a dark chuckle. It’s a sound entirely devoid of humour.“Nice try, Devika.” Knox shakes his head in dry amusement. “But I don’t negotiate for or with trash. Keep the name. I don’t need you to find the snake in my house. In fact, I’m far more delighted to know one exists. Espionage happens to be one of my favourite parts of being King.”Devika watches his face, and something almost like humour passes through her eyes.“Aren’t you even a little curious about Esmerelda, at least? She was quite fond of your house, you know. At the time, I couldn’t care about the Volkovs, but Isolde and her handpicked spies were more than interested. They were a part of the house.” A small, cruel shrug. “But I find I rather enjoy watching a king realise he’s been
EMBER’S POV“So they gave up,” Devika says. “Esmerelda gave up. When the ritual failed the third time, she told me the truth, plainly, the way only she ever did. That the Maiden had chosen you and would not be moved, not by ritual, not by anything, and that meant there was only one thing left to do. If we couldn’t take the god out of you, we had to keep her asleep inside you. Forever. Buried so deep she never woke, never blazed, never gave Isolde a single thread to follow home.” Her eyes lift to mine, wet now. “That’s when the higher grade pills began, Ember. They knocked off most of your childhood memories. Everything your wolf had touched was simply beyond reach. And they made you useless. Not just weak, but too docile to lash out. Too docile to feel emotions strong enough to reach your wolf. I don’t know where I went wrong, or how you were able to break through and reach your wolf. But everything I did, I did to hide you. To keep a wolf leashed so that the most dangerous woman in t
EMBER’S POV“You were small at the time. Three, maybe four.” Her voice drops toward the floor. “You had a doll, and you carried it everywhere. Named it yourself, the first name you ever gave anything—”And something moves in the deepest, a cold thread pulling up from a place I’ve never once been able to reach, and before she can say it, my own mouth opens and the name falls out like it’s been waiting my whole life.“Molly.”Devika goes chalk-white.“Yes. Molly.”“I remember—” and it’s surfacing now, dredged up from under years of suppression. “I remember playing with her in the dirt. I brought her things. I made her—” my breath catches, “—I made her tea parties. I brought her flowers. I thought she talked to me. Mother, I remember thinking my doll was talking to me, telling me to—”“It wasn’t the doll,” Devika says quietly, and the whole room goes quiet.“W-What?”Devika sighs.“They found you in the daycare yard one day. The whole place had gone really quiet, and when they came looki
EMBER’S POVShe leans in, and that’s when the dread starts to build in her voice.“You have to understand what that meant, Ember. Esmerelda watched it happen from the inside, and it terrified even her. Isolde bluffed all she could, parading Elara as the chosen one, but the people are as clever as their queen, and they refused to be fooled for too long. A Caelora without the Silver Wolf is a wounded thing, and every hungry house in the East could smell it. The queen with no god. The throne with no teeth. Isolde grew more frightened every season the wolf stayed lost, and a frightened Isolde is a monstrous one, because that woman answers fear with blood. Executions. Purges. Anyone who whispered that the Silver Maiden might be gone for good simply vanished. The whole court began walking on glass, waiting, praying one of the girls would manifest and end it. And they never did. Because the Maiden was already gone.” Her eyes fix on me. “She’d already chosen. She’d followed your father’s esse
EMBER’S POVMy eyes snap to him and my chest caves, because I have never heard this, not once, not in all our nights, and he’s laying it on a rogue’s scale like loose change.But he keeps the pain clean off his voice, and he will not look at me, because if he looks at me, he won’t be able to do it. So I do the only thing I can.I squeeze his hand, hard. I’m here. I have you. You don’t have to carry it alone. And his hand squeezes back, once, and that’s all, and that’s everything.Devika studies the memory laid out on the glowing silver scale, and something moves through even her face.“Damn, that’s a dark one, King.” She sits back, eyes half-lidded, the gambler measuring the pot. “Hmm. To take it, or not.”The scale hums between us, light buzzing, waiting.Then Devika leans forward and accepts the wager.The magic reaches for him instantly. It seizes Knox, snapping his head violently backwards as it rips the toll from his body.A second later, it releases him, and he returns heaving f
EMBER’S POVAnd finally, it all hits me. The crushing weight of every truth Devika has spilt about my origins.The crushing realisation that I was never of Northern descent.I was Eastern.I was of royal Eastern blood.Ember of Caelora?My heart races, dread eating up my insides.Rhovan.Lord Rhovan of Caelora.My father is an Eastern Queen’s chosen mate, a man who dreamed of overthrowing his own wife, and his blood has been in me my whole life while no one ever told me.The realisation hits me so hard I can barely breathe, bringing Sapphire’s glazed eyes and cryptic words from my trance back to the surface.She had told me herself that when my own people find me, they’d kill me.I finally understand.My own people. The East.If the Alpha Queen ever discovers the bastard daughter her husband created with his secret whore, she will burn the world down to see me dead.I am the living evidence of a royal treason, and yet I have spent years believing I was an omega nobody. Meanwhile, the







