登入RAEL’S POVI received the message from Thalia through Talos just as the evening was fading into night. When I read what she needed, I moved immediately without any hesitation. I did not waste time wondering how she had reached this conclusion or why she knew the exact timeline for the archive work. I simply acted because I knew the window for Elodie’s work was closing fast and that we were running out of time to secure our position.I headed straight for the archive wing while the rest of the pack was settling in for the night. The atmosphere in the long corridors was thick and heavy, filled with the hushed voices of pack members who sensed that something major was happening behind the scenes. When I finally reached the entrance of the archives, I found Elodie already waiting for me. She looked like she had not slept in days, but her eyes were alert and she seemed to have been expecting me to arrive at any moment."I assume you have heard about the so called petition," Elodie said, he
THALIA’S POVI could map Imogen’s morning from the window—not from seeing her face directly, but from the chain of reactions her movements created in the people below. It was a pattern I had learned to read with clinical precision during my weeks in the tower. Imogen appeared in the inner courtyard mid-morning, and the quality of her walk was instantly wrong. It lacked the controlled, unhurried authority of her usual operational self.There was no deliberate pace meant to project power to a visible audience. Instead, her steps were tighter, shorter—the unmistakable body language of someone desperately managing a shock they had not yet fully processed.She marched straight toward the Omega wing and disappeared inside. She was in there for forty minutes. I stood by the glass, my fingers resting lightly against the stone frame, tracking the closed door. When she finally came back out, she didn't cross back to the main compound immediately. She stopped dead in the middle of the courtyard.
THALIA’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 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







