تسجيل الدخولDamian’s POV The drive back felt different. Before the warehouse, the silence in the car had been a held breath. Tight, electric, everyone braced for impact. Now it was the quiet of surfacing after a deep dive, lungs still adjusting to air that didn't taste like six years of someone else's plan. No one spoke much. Not because there was nothing to say, but because we were all still measuring the shape of what had just happened and what it meant for the hours coming. Luca drove with the same steady hands he always had. Leo sat twisted in the passenger seat, phone glowing against his face, already sifting through the data trail Selene's people left behind. The aftermath written in network traffic instead of blood. While Ava was beside me. She hadn't said much since we walked out of that building. I knew better than to ask. This wasn't her shutting down, this was her turning things over, piece by piece, giving every fragment of information the weight it deserved before she opened her
Ava’s POVThe warehouse district at dusk was where six-year plans went to curl up and die.I stared out the SUV window at buildings that had no more warmth left in them than tombstones. Empty streets stretched between hulking shells of industry, and the Mississippi bled its cold, muddy scent through every crack in the glass. That river didn’t care about any of us. It just kept moving, dark and indifferent which made me shiver, but not entirely from the temperature.Leo’s voice had crackled through the comms forty minutes ago. Selene’s network traffic, her people and her shadow contacts, had all been routing to a single address since midday. A warehouse she’d kept breathing under a shell company, hidden behind four layers of corporate rot, for six years. She’d run here the second she felt the seed dissolve. She hadn’t waited for us to corner her. She’d retreated to the one ground she’d been preparing before I even knew my own wolf existed.She was already inside. She’d been in there fo
Ava's POVI stayed in the frost in ruined training clothes as I watched four sparrows on the wall while Damian stepped away to make the call.His voice carried across the garden, low and even. The cadence of someone receiving, not delivering.I didn't try to listen but I knew Marcus was the one giving the pieces while Damian organized them. Somewhere in that process I usually reached the conclusion before either finished explaining.The bond shifted while Damian was still on the phone. Not the seed, because that was gone. Just Damian. His presence carried something adjacent to alarm. The frequency of a man whose understanding had just been reorganized.And I knew immediately that it was significant new information.The call ended.He crossed the garden and looked at me. Neither of us spoke at first."Sit down," I said.He glanced at the frost."I shifted involuntarily and pushed a supernatural parasite out of our bond this morning, Damian. Sitting in a bit of frost won't end your life
Ava’s POVIt happened just after noon.It wasn’t because noon mattered. It was because the thing inside the bond decided it was time to wake up.I was halfway through another training sequence with Sera when something shifted low in my chest. It was small at first, like a sleeper turning over beneath blankets. My breath caught, making my hand miss the next strike entirely.Sera saw it, and said quietly, “That’s it.”“Yeah.” I nodded.“How active?”“Not fully.” I swallowed. “But close.”Her gaze sharpened immediately, looking at me the scary way surgeons probably looked right before opening someone up.“And the window?”“Opening.” My breath hitched.She stepped back at once, giving me room without retreating. The movement was efficient, like she’d already rehearsed this moment in her head fifty times.I closed my eyes briefly and reached for the bond.Damian was inside the manor. I could feel him clearly now that I knew how to separate him from the rest of the noise going on in my head
Ava's POVI woke up knowing something was wrong.I hadn't even opened my eyes yet. It wasn't the territorial thing, and it wasn't the bond feeling off. It was something more immediate. The kind of feeling you get when a room has changed while you were sleeping, and now it's just waiting for you to notice.I opened my eyes, Damian wasn't in bed.That wasn't weird. He's almost never there when I wake up. But this time, his absence felt different. The bond told me he was still in the house. But there was something new in it. Something that wasn't there when I fell asleep.Like tension. He was controlling it, but it was there.I sat up.The room was gray with early morning light. The grounds outside were still and quiet. Sparrows hopped along the wall, doing their normal bird things.I felt the bond. Then I felt it, the thing inside it.I didn't focus on it but I noticed it, like a sound you can't place until you turn your head. It was just... there. Dormant. Sitting in the space between
Damian's POVMarcus picked up on the second ring, he didn't say hello. That was his way. Listen first then decide what to give you after, I on the other hand wasn’t one for complementries either. "Tell me you felt it." There was no need for me to beat aroumd the bush."Ah, who wouldn’t? Of course, from the outer perimeter." His voice was even, but there was something underneath i couldn’t quite place my finger on."Then you know why I'm calling." I leaned against the window.He paused for a moment, and then said "My wolves saw what she did to the bond.""What are you implying, Marcus?"He went silent again, but i knew what was coming next."She's my daughter." Of course she was his daughter."That's not what I asked.""Look…” he voice rang through the other end of the phone, “there's an old document. Very old. It describes two ways to access Ashmoon power without a cooperative heir.""How come I didn’t know anything about it?”“Because no one knows about it.” he stated flatly.“How
Ava's POVThe rain had not stopped since the night before. By morning the entire bayou looked different. I stood barefoot in the training field behind the house. Mud clung to my feet, and my muscles already ached. And Sera looked entirely too pleased about it.“Again,” she said.I groaned.“Sera…”
Damian's POVWe spent three hours at Odette's kitchen table and by the end of the first hour I understood that the woman who had suppressed her bloodline and built a quiet human life and died of cancer without telling her daughter any of this had spent the three years before the fire doing somethin
Ava's POVThe pack meeting was not in a forest.I don't know exactly what I had been picturing. Something atmospheric probably. Torches maybe. Ancient trees and moonlight and wolves standing in a circle doing something ceremonial and vaguely threatening. Jamie had suggested a cave when I told her t
Ava's POVThe soup got cold before we were halfway through.Neither of us noticed until I reached for my spoon at some point past nine and found the bowl had gone from warm to room temperature while I was busy asking question seventeen, which was about the full moon and what exactly happened to him







