LOGINKNOX'S POV
The impact reverberates through the chamber—a crack of his old, empty skull against the hard wood is deeply satisfying in a way I don't have the bandwidth to examine."Call her trash again." My voice barely sounds human. My beast, Phantom, has taken over almost completely, and I'm operating on pure predator instinct—the instinct that says a man who threatens your woman is a threat that needs to be eliminated immediately and permanently. "Call her worthless. Call her usEMBER’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 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







