Mag-log inWhat Thirty Lashes CostsTalia’s POVThey dragged me to the center of the room and I didn’t fight them.Not because I had accepted it, but because my body had spent the last several days running on less than it needed. My legs went where they pulled them and my arms went where they placed them and I focused on staying upright for as long as possible.The stool was low and wide, the kind built for exactly this purpose. They pushed me down onto it, and the rope that came around my wrists was rough and pulled tight enough that I felt it immediately against my skin.I was shaking. I noticed it because my body has gone past the point that I could control it. Cold and hunger and whatever had happened between passing out in my room and waking up in that cell had all contributed to a body that was operating at the very edge of what it could manage.They stripped the back of my dress.I pressed my face against the top of the stool and closed my eyes and thought about the village. About the way
Letters That Were Never WrittenTalia’s POVI didn’t go to the execution.I knew when it happened because the sound reached me through the closed window, rising from the courtyard below. It was a collective sound that the crowd made when the young man’s head dropped to the ground. A peak of noise and then the gradual descending back to their ordinary life.I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling and felt the sickness of it move through me.Irrespective of what he had done, whatever had led him to that riverbank with that bottle, he was someone’s son. His mother had known him since he was small and had fed him at their table and had called him by his name, no one deserves to be treated this way… And now, he was gone.I pulled my knees up and stayed very still and let the sounds of the pack going back to its normal business filter through the window and tried not to think about whether anyone in that courtyard had felt anything at all while it happened.Aurora knocked at some point in
The Poison and the Name“Talia’s POVAt that moment his grip loosened. I pulled my arm free and walked out. I didn’t look back at him.I kept my pace steady through the corridor, past the guard at the turn and past two maids who flattened themselves against the wall as I walked by. My chest was still running hot from everything I had said and everything he had said back.I bumped into Monica at the end of the corridor. She opened her mouth in surprise and took a step toward me.I walked past her without slowing.“Talia.” Her voice had that specific edge. “I’m speaking to you, how dare you walk out on me?”I kept walking. Whatever she said after that I didn’t hear because I had already turned and put enough distance between us that her voice became just another sound in the pack that I was choosing not to absorb.I closed my room door and stood in the middle of the room and let everything that had been building since I saw that face outside find somewhere to go.I pressed my hands aga
You Will Always Be MineTalia’s POVI had been away from the pack since early morning and by midday I was already itching to go back.It didn’t want to admit it. The meetings had run long and the traders from the eastern territory made a lot of arguments that we reached a conclusion after a lot of dragging. The entire time I had been sitting across that table with half my attention on the room and the other half on Talia. Cassian noticed how restless I was on our way back.“You’ve adjusted your wristband four times in the last hour,” he said, riding close beside me.“The strap is loose,” I said.“It isn’t,” he said. “Aurora is with her. She’s fine...”“Alpha.”“I heard you the first time,” I said.He let a moment pass. “Monica was still in the fortress when we left. I know how she behaves when you’re not around.”That was exactly why I was worried. Even though Aurora was with her, my mother and Monica alone had more power. “Aurora is capable of protecting herself,” I said.“I believ
The Face I RecognizedTalia’s POVI was informed about the Moon Goddess celebration a while ago. It was a celebration which they said it’s more like a worship but from what I’m seeing, it’s more like a show off here. In my village during celebrations, it used to be quiet and warm. People would put small candles on their windowsills and the ones who had someone would sit with them after dinner, and the ones who didn’t would find company anyway because nobody spent that particular evening alone if they could help it. Mateo would usually organize something, a shared meal in the main hall, whatever scraps of sweetened bread could be put together from what was available.I thought about all of them sitting around that table without me. I thought about whether they were safe, whether Valik’s promised protection extended to them. I thought about the women who had been taken the night Aurora and I went out, and the village head who had run toward the hunters with his hands open.I was sittin
What the Moon Goddess DemandsValik’s POVWhen I left her room, her words were echoing constantly in my head. ‘I would leave you there. I would turn around and keep walking.‘I had heard people say things in anger before. Threats, accusations, cruelties designed to find the softest place and push. After enough years of being Alpha, I developed a kind of thickness to it, a layer that processed mean words at a level without letting them go deeper. But with Talia… Whatever she says to mean pierces deeper than I could ever imagine.Not because of the gravity of her words, but because she is the one saying it in a tone that says she had been holding it in for too long and I just subscribed to hear it… It hurts. I had stood there and felt it land on my chest and had not been able to find a single word to say.My study was at the end of the east corridor and I was inside it before I had fully decided to go there. The fire was low because I didn’t add to it.Cassian was sitting in a chair ne







