(Calla’s POV)The sun had barely stretched its fingers across the horizon when Asher stirred beside me, his tiny body tangled in the soft linens. I had returned to bed not long before—mind buzzing from the whispers I’d heard earlier near the servants’ wing, and the strange, yellow eyes that still haunted my thoughts.I must’ve drifted, somewhere between anxious wakefulness and shallow sleep. But now, with the weight of my son’s hand on my arm and the shift in his breath, I knew something was wrong.“Asher?” I whispered, brushing the damp curls from his forehead. The moment my palm met his skin, my chest tightened.He was burning up.Again.His fever had returned—worse this time. His cheeks were flushed a worrying red, yet the skin around his eyes looked grey and sunken. His eyelids fluttered before his lashes parted, revealing those sweet hazel eyes now dull and glassy.I reached for the damp cloth on the bedside table, gently pressing it to his head. “How do you feel, baby?”He blink
(Calla’s POV)I hadn’t slept. Not really.The eyes—those fucking piercing yellow eyes—still haunted the edges of my vision every time I closed them. I had stood at that window for what felt like hours last night, breathing as quietly as I could, hoping whatever had been watching was only a trick of the dark.But it hadn’t felt like a trick. It had felt…intentional.Like someone who knew me. Someone who knew exactly who I was. Someone who had something against me. Those weren’t kind eyes. They were malicious eyes. Eyes of a creature that had evil intents.By the time dawn arrived and was beginning to color the sky in its own way, painting the horizon in soft grey light that usually brought me peace but not at the moment because I was still wide awake. My body was stiff, curled up in bed next to Asher, who slept with the sort of peaceful heaviness only a child could manage. His small hand had found mine sometime in the night. I held onto it like a lifeline.He had crawled into my bed a
(Calla's POV)The air within the cabin had been too still, too parched. I still sat with my back against the window seat with the same book that I couldn't understand all afternoon, following the lines of the page where it was thinning out and cracking into fragments in my mind as it whirled round and round.My book cover, soft leather, was toasty against the palms of my hands, creased from nights of sleepless clutching, but the words on the page could have been some alien tongue. I wasn't reading. Barely got through it, scanning my eyes over it, reading the letters out with my eyes without making anything of it.The heroine of the tale was doing it right, brazenly, boldly, shamelessly. None of it, I was doing. I envied her confidence, the manner in which she appeared to know what she desired and strove to obtain it without questioning each breath, each pulse of her heart, each nervously raised eyebrow.I should have shoved open the cabin door and step outside into new air, down by th
(Calla's POV)The pine and fresh bread still filled the air as I stirred, entwined in a knot of linen sheets and leftover warmth. I just lay there for a while, letting morning filter through me. It was quiet, not resonating quiet, but quiet, like there is before you answer a question.The gauze coverings dimmed the light and dropped a golden haze across everything, filling the air with the scent of a night under the moon. My muscles ached from the tour we'd taken yesterday around the estate with Rowan, but through it all, the not knowing, the never-made memories, had never felt so alive as this morning in months.The sun had not yet risen, yet Asher was up.I found him in the kitchen sitting on one of the stools, as if waiting for me. His wee legs pumping up and down under the table and his hair standing all around like he had just been in a battle with himself over an all-night pillow fight. Catching my eye, spooning cereal into his mouth with that irreproachable smile already star
(Calla's POV)There was nothing but silence this morning. No birds, no thudding door for the hallway, not even the merriment echoing through Asher's room at an ungodly hour of the day. Only a glacial quiet that burrowed under your skin, and for one swift moment, you were aware that something in you had changed sometime during the night, as if absolutely nothing had.I leaned against the ceiling for hours, tracing the familiar contours in the plaster with my eyes. This bedroom, Rowan's guest room, still held resonances of the life I'd imagined here.The same crown molding, the same fall of morning light across hardwood floors in golden rectangles. It all seemed different to me now, though, poisoned by years lost, and the weights of secrets I carried like boulders in my chest.There was a heaviness creeping into my chest, not fear, but doubt, keen-edged and unspoken, but suffocating.What was I doing?I had come back to this town to protect Asher, to enable him to recover. To rescue hi
Rowan’s POVThere’s something about her space—her nest, as my wolf calls it—that reduces me to ashes.Every damn time.It’s not just the warmth in the air or the subtle scent of lavender and sun-kissed fruit she always carries around. It’s her. Something about her unravels me. Something about her makes me forget who the hell I’m supposed to be.Alpha. Soldier. Leader.And yet, the moment the door shuts behind us, when it’s just her and I breathing the same air, I forget every ounce of self-discipline I’ve ever learned. I become someone else. Someone consumed.And it’s starting to terrify me.Tonight should have ended with me walking away like a gentleman, respecting boundaries. She told me to calm the fuck down—and I did. But that wasn’t strength. That was survival instinct. Because one more minute of her looking like that, breathing like that, smelling like that, and I would’ve lost myself. Again.I leaned against the wall of my chambers, still shirtless, still breathing harder than