LOGINTHALIA’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
CHAPTER 42RAEL's POVThe news reached me in the quiet, pressurized sanctity of my private office. I was mid-sentence, reviewing a logistical report on the perimeter defenses with Talos, when the door opened without the usual formal knock. My aide stood there, his face a pale, strained map of shock and dawning, fearful realization. He didn't have to speak; the air in the room seemed to go thin the moment he entered."Alpha," he started, his voice cracking slightly. "Petra. Seven months along. She went into labour at dawn."I set the document down on the desk with deliberate, glacial care. I sat perfectly still, absorbing the information, letting it settle into the marrow of my bones. Petra. I had known her slightly—a quiet, steady woman who had been in the pack for four years. I had known she was carrying. I had known what the pack law dictated, what the last sixty years of history had hammered into us: the curse. The death. The inevitability of an Omega’s end during a term-birth."Sh
THALIA's POVThe tower was a place of echoes, and I had learned to translate them. I had spent weeks in this room, a prisoner of circumstance and my own history, and in that time, I had become a master of the pack’s language—not the language they spoke with their tongues, but the one they spoke with their movements, their shifts in pace, and the collective vibration of their presence.Mid-morning, the acoustic quality of the Great North shifted. It was subtle, the kind of change that would bypass anyone who hadn't been forced to live as a ghost in their own life. The pack had been existing in a state of brittle, jagged tension for days, a "strike-silence" that felt like a held breath. But then, it snapped.Movement. Not the rhythmic, predictable pace of guards on rotation or servants delivering trays, but something rapid, urgent, and discordant.I moved to the window, sliding into the deep, protective shadow of the stone frame. Below, in the central courtyard, the world was alive. Peo
CHAPTER 40THALIAWhen Rael came in that evening, the air in the tower felt heavy, thick with the weight of the day’s revelations. I was sitting at the table, the transcription Constance had left sitting face-down on the wood. I wasn't reading it anymore. I was just sitting there, both hands flat on the rough surface of the table, looking at the fire. It was dying down, the orange flames flickering and casting long, dancing shadows across the stone walls.He crossed to the table in a few long, silent strides. He looked at me, his gaze sharp and searching, and I met his eyes with a stillness that seemed to unsettle him. He didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't have to. He could see the change in my posture, the way the frantic, buzzing anxiety that had plagued me for weeks had finally, completely vanished."Imogen's sister was at the club the night Conan died," I said. My voice didn't shake. It was perfectly level.Rael went perfectly still. The tension in his shoulders was a palpable, d
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 pov-The morning sun was usually my favorite part of the day, but today the bright light hitting the large glass windows of the council room was just giving me a massive headache. I sat at the very head of the long wooden table, slouching back in my heavy leather chair and rubbing my temple
RAEL'S POVThe bond had the consistency of a sound you could almost hear. Not music, not voices, nothing so clear as that — just a frequency that sat below the surface of everything else, a low persistent hum that had been there since the morning after the rut and had not diminished, not even sligh
THALIA'S POVMy wolf said one word and then had the absolute audacity to go silent again, leaving me sitting on the edge of Rael's bed with the word still ringing in the back of my skull like the aftermath of a bell, and no instruction manual for what was supposed to happen next.Mate.I sat very s
THALIA’S POVMy heart squeezed painfully in my chest, and I felt like a bird trapped in a cage made of my own ribs as I stuttered, “I… you, sir—”His gaze didn’t falter for a single second. He stood there looking like a god of war, tall and terrifying, while he growled, “I won’t repeat myself anymor







