LOGINAva'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 drive back was quiet. It wasn’t the comfortable kind. It was the kind that sits between two people who both know something changed, but neither has named it yet.The bond was different. It was not broken, neither was it weaker. It wasn’t just… the same. Something had settled into it; fine, suspended, impossible to separate out like silt after water moves through. I felt it like a bruise before it surfaces as I sat beside Damian.Luca drove. Sera rode up shotgun, quiet and still. The pack had dispersed. Marcus's wolves had vanished back into the outer territory like they'd never been there.Selene was somewhere ahead in the dark, moving north. Her plan had met something it wasn't built for. She'd regroup. That I was sure about. Tonight hadn't taken that from her but I knew it had cost her something. I could feel that as clearly as the bond beside me.***When we hot to the manor, Leo was standing at the door. His eyes went to Damian first, then me, then the space between
Damian's POVI've been in fights that lasted seconds and felt like years.This wasn't one of those.This was the other kind. The kind where everything happens at once, your wolf processes it faster than your mind can keep up, and afterward the memory refuses to arrange itself into anything clean or linear.Selene’s wolves moved first. Four of them burst into the clearing in full wolf form. They stayed low to the ground, dark fur blending with the shadows, mouths open, teeth bared. Their eyes were fixed on me. That made sense. Even with whatever she had done to our bond, the basic rule still applied. If you want to destabilize a mated pair, you attack the anchor. You force them to split their focus. You create room to move.Smart strategy. But not smart enough.I met them in the half-form. Bone and muscle and instinct sharpening without losing thought. I was human enough to think, and wolf enough to snap them into two. That state takes time to earn. Most wolves never get there. The on
Ava's POVShe came at midnight.She didn’t come from the direction any of us had expected. Not from the city side where the road wound up toward the mountain through the tree line. Selene entered the clearing from the north, the bayou side. The direction of her property, which meant she had not driven to the mountain. She walked the whole way. That told me enough. She had walked because a wolf running through claimed territory would have lit her up like a signal fire.I felt her before I saw her. That wrongness threading through the territory, controlled and deliberate like she knew how to move through places that didn't belong to her.She thought that would hide her. But she was mistaken.I didn't move, neither did I touch the altar. I let her step into the clearing thinking she still had the advantage.‘She's here,’ I told Damian through the bond.‘I sensed it’Selene stepped out of the tree line with four wolves behind her.She stopped and looked at me. I saw something flicker in
Ava’s POVThe manor felt different when everyone was getting ready for something. The kind of focus that sinks into the walls and floors into the air itself. Every person moving around already knew what tonight would ask of them. And they'd already decided to give it.Luca was in the study running ops, juggling a dozen things without breaking a sweat.Sera was on the training field pushing Theo through one last sequence. She's a believer in preparation. Like, really believes.Leo sat at the kitchen table with papers spread everywhere, phone in hand. Guy came from the wrong side of all this, and now he's making himself useful on the right one.And Jamie?Jamie was in the library.I found her in the armchair by the window, drinking tea, reading one of Damian's books. The worn kind. The kind someone's read more than once. She looked… settled. Or at least she was trying to.She looked up when I came in. Looked at me once. Then again, slower.“Oh,” she said dramatically.“Don’t,” I retorte
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 board dinner was in four days and I was stress cleaning my bedroom at eleven o'clock at night.This was not new behavior. I had always cleaned when I was anxious, something my mother used to say was my way of controlling the things I could when everything else felt uncontrollable. She







