로그인THALIA’S POVThe pack below had a different sound tonight. I mean, actually loud. It wasn't the scary, jagged kind of loud where everyone is screaming at you, or the icy, suffocating silence of the strike. It was just… life. People were laughing, plates were clattering, and I could even hear some off-key singing coming from the direction of the Omega wing. I stood by the window, not even bothering to stay in the shadows like a freak. I just stood there in the moonlight, letting myself exist.My wolf was basically purring in my head. She was happy. She felt like she’d finally come home after being lost in the woods for decades. I heard a thud on the stone stairs—heavy, rhythmic, unmistakable. I didn't need to check the door; it was Rael. I turned around and just waited for him.He walked in, stopped cold, and just stared at me. He looked like he’d been hit by a truck, but in a way that made him look even more dangerous."You're not hiding," he said, his voice a low rasp."I’m tired of
THALIA's povThe morning air in the tower was thin and cold, biting at the edges of my skin even through the heavy fabric of my robe. I had been awake for hours, watching the grey dawn bleed over the horizon, my mind trapped in a loop of calculations that offered no resolution.I was standing by the tall, narrow window, staring out at the jagged, unforgiving peaks of the Great North, when I heard the distinct, deliberate sound of footsteps on the stone stairs. They weren't the heavy, rhythmic tread of a guard, nor the hurried, frantic stride of a servant. They were quiet, measured—Constance.She arrived long before the morning tray. She appeared at the door before the first rotation of the guard, a timing so precise it felt like a tactical maneuver. When she entered, she didn't offer a greeting.She walked directly to the table, her expression tight and burdened, the look of someone who had carried a dangerous secret through the dark and was finally desperate to set it down. She sat i
CHAPTER 38THALIA's POVThe letter lay on my lap, its parchment worn soft under my fingertips from the dozen times I had read it. It was my mother’s voice, captured in ink, reaching across the chasm of twenty-two years to finally speak to me.The first time I read it, I had been the strategist. I had torn through the sentences with surgical speed, dissecting the facts, the warnings, and the timeline, my mind cataloging the intelligence with the cold detachment of an archivist. The second time, I slowed, allowing the rhythm of her prose to seep into my blood.But the third time—the time that mattered—I was sitting cross-legged on the bed with my back pressed against the cold stone of the tower wall, the fire in the hearth throwing long, flickering orange shadows that danced like ghosts around the room.It was in that third reading that the true, crushing weight of it landed. My mother had known. From the moment I was birthed into the world, from the void-dark depth of my eyes, from the
RAEL's POVThe whole air in my study was bitter at five in the morning, the kind of biting cold that seemed to seep straight into your marrow, but I barely felt it. I sat at my desk, watching the fire in the hearth finally surrender to a handful of grey, dying embers that pulsed weakly in the dark.On the wood in front of me lay the report from Talos—a stack of crisp white pages that felt like a death warrant for the last remnants of my peace of mind. I read the words again, tracing the ink as if I could physically map the betrayal written there. I was reconstructing the shape of the last few weeks, pulling the timeline apart and stitching it back together now that I held all the missing pieces.It was staggering to realize the sheer scale of the preparation I had been blind to. Elodie had known Thalia was coming. She hadn't been guessing; she had been waiting. Thalia’s mother, Evelyn, had written to Elodie twelve years ago from the human world while she lay on her deathbed, begging h
THALIA's POCAfter Elodie left, the room felt impossibly large and quiet. I sat alone at the small wooden table, the letter heavy in my hands. I didn't open it. I wasn't ready to break the seal yet. Instead, I just held it, letting the weight of it ground me. I thought about my mother.I thought about a woman who had spent nine years of her life in absolute secrecy, doing everything in her power to keep me hidden from a world she knew would eventually come knocking.Then, I thought about those final months she spent dying—how she hadn't spent them in despair, but in planning. She had been writing letters, pulling strings, and weaving connections across the globe, all to ensure that the very thing she had been protecting would find its way home the moment she was no longer there to guard it.My mind wandered back to the gold contacts I had worn every single day since I was four years old. I could still see her face, so patient and so sad, explaining over and over again that the contact
THALIA'S POVElodie arrived alone—the first difference from every previous visit. No Nara, no assistant, no formal archive trappings—just Elodie with a small cloth bag, her walking stick, and the unhurried, measured pace of a woman who had decided that this particular conversation was going to happen in private, or it was not going to happen at all.The guard admitted her without a word, and as the heavy tower door groaned shut, the silence in the room seemed to stretch, thickening with a sudden, oppressive gravity. Elodie didn't offer a greeting. She simply walked to the center of the room and stood there, looking at me for a long, searching moment.It wasn't the analytical, clinical gaze she had used during the examinations—it wasn't reading or measuring or searching for discrepancies in my bloodwork. It was something closer to a reckoning."Sit down," she said. It wasn't a request.I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the floorboards beneath my feet. Elodie took the chair by the t
THALIA's POV "Get up," the guard said, slamming the heavy iron cell door open. "The Alpha King wants you downstairs."I stood up from the edge of the bed and smoothed down the front of my gray dress. "Why? What is happening downstairs?""You don't need to know the reasons," the guard barked, step
THALIA's POVI was at the narrow tower window long before the rest of the pack was even awake. The sky was still a pale, bruised purple, and the air coming through the iron bars was freezing cold. I liked the early hours. It was an old habit from the hiding-world; the early morning was the only ti
THALIA's POVI knew it was him before his boots ever reached my floor.I had spent the entire evening sitting in the heavy silence of the east tower, tracking the sounds of the castle like a lifeline. The guard change had occurred at dusk—exactly three minutes earlier than last night. That was a vu
RAEL's POVUnfortunately...Imogen was already sitting in the high-backed leather chair across from my desk when I returned from the boundary report meeting, the massive heavy oak ledgers of the pack territory spread open across her knee. These weren't the sanitized summaries meant for the outer c







