MasukPOV: AshaDante spread the pages across the table like a man laying out cards he already suspected were bad.“There's a pattern here,” he said, “once you know to look for it.”I sat between him and Hera, while Zade sat on the opposite end of the table.The correspondence from the night before was still folded in my pocket, where I'd kept it since Zade handed it to me. “Walk me through it,” I said.Dante tapped the first page. “Your father's debt was real, with four years of arrears slowly building up. That part holds up, and nobody's going to argue that away.”“But?”“But the terms attached to it changed twice in the final year. Both times, right around when Marrok's correspondence started naming you specifically.” He slid a second page toward me. “The original agreement didn't include a service clause at all. It was strictly financial. Someone added the clause later.”Hera leaned forward, frowning at the ink. “Added it how? Doesn't a contract need both parties to agree to changes?”
POV: Asha“What about Hera…” My voice trailed off as soon as I began speaking. “She usually picks me up from here.”I nearly facepalmed myself as the words escaped my lips.“She has other tasks to attend to,” he said firmly.I stared at him for a few seconds, then gave a small nod.He led me out past the clinic, along the path that curved toward the treeline where the noise of the pack fell away into something quieter. Neither of us spoke for the first few minutes. I didn't trust myself to start, and he seemed to be choosing his words the way a man chooses footing on ice.“Dante found something in Marrok's contract,” he said finally. “I want you to hear it from me before it reaches you some other way.”My stomach tightened. “Okay.”“Marrok contacted your father three months before the default. A month later, your name appeared in the settlement clause. Then your father defaulted.”“That doesn't make sense,” I said as my footsteps slowed to a stop. “In fact, it is a lot of steps for a
POV: AshaRylie had been stronger for three days. Although she still tired easily and slipped away in the afternoons like someone dozing off mid-sentence, she no longer plunged into that terrifying nothing every time Zade wasn’t near. And when I reached out to her now, she almost always reached back.“That's real progress,” Hestia said, releasing my wrist after her morning check. “Better than I expected too.”I should have been happy at the news.Instead, I caught myself looking toward the doorway every time footsteps passed in the corridor outside.Not him.Still not him.Three days after that night, and he hadn’t come near the Forbidden Wing again. Not even once.He's scared, Rylie offered, entirely too pleased with herself.Of what?Of how much he wanted to mark us.We are not discussing that.You brought it up.I absolutely did not.She settled at the back of my mind once more, smugly. Thoughts about what Hera had said about the prophecy and Zade never wanting a mate began to c
Pov: ZadeI hadn't gone near the Forbidden Wing since I left her room, and Xavier hated me for it. He'd been hating me for it since the moment my arms left her waist.His low and furious pacing that hadn't stopped since then pressed against the inside of my skull like a fist against a door he intended to break down eventually, whether I let him or not.Go back, he said, for what felt like the hundredth time that morning.No.She is ours; we have to claim her.That right there is the problem, and what I cannot allow.Instead of answering with words, he continued to pace furiously inside my head. He pushed hard enough that my hands had stopped being steady somewhere around the second morning.I stopped responding to him altogether.She wasn’t only my mate anymore. That fact was something I had been able to carry on with, badly, but I survived it.What I am barely surviving now is the memory of my own fangs lengthening against her throat, of how close I'd come, of how little it would hav
POV: Asha“A second chance mate,”“What?”I had spent most of breakfast trying to explain to Hera why none of it made sense. My mind kept shifting from Cole to Zade to Rylie’s certainty.Hera finally stopped chewing.“Think about it.” Hera turned to face me as we both sat on my bed. “This Cole, your very foolish and stupid former Alpha’s son, rejected you, and then you got a second-chance mate as a make-up from the Moon Goddess, which unfortunately happened to be my brother. I’ve heard of such things happening.”I sank deeper into thought.However, despite trying to make sense of the bond between Zade and me, my thoughts kept drifting back to last night. The feel of Zade’s arms around me, his muscles pressing against my back.I shut my eyes fast and shook my head vigorously. My thoughts were moving too fast.Focus.“That’s rare, though. Right? A second chance.”"Very. I've never personally known anyone that it happened to directly. But the elders talk about it like it's real.""How cou
POV: AshaHestia had won the argument earlier, sort of. Zade had refused the longer contact she wanted, agreeing only to brief periods of hand contact while she monitored me.It had worked for a few hours.Until now.The episode came harder that night, well past midnight, dragging me out of sleep with a violent, disorienting jolt.Rylie's presence felt very shaky in my mind, caught halfway between surfacing and retreating, neither fully here nor fully gone.Pain pierced through my skull with every failed attempt, sharp enough that I curled into myself as I held back sounds I didn't want carrying through the walls.A cry escaped me before I could bite it back.Ry, hold on. I gasped, gripping the sheets as the room blurred around me and my heartbeat pounded loudly in my ears.Footsteps pounded in the corridor, and less than a minute or so later, Hera burst through my door. Her expression was tight with alarm at whatever she found on my face. Hestia arrived moments after, moving with th







