LOGINEthan's POVThe attack came at midnight.Not at the border, not at a supply point, not through a messenger or a carefully placed act of sabotage designed to look like something else. It came straight through the eastern tree line toward the pack house itself, forty wolves moving in coordinated formation with the kind of disciplined aggression that didn't come from anger alone but from planning, from someone who had spent time thinking about exactly how to hit a target that had been preparing for a hit.I was already awake. I hadn't slept properly since Thornfield and I wasn't going to tonight either, not with Lila in holding and the news of her capture having gone out through channels I couldn't fully control. I'd known Marcus would hear it. I knew it would land hard. What I hadn't fully accounted for was how fast he'd move, the hours between Lila going down and Marcus deciding that patience was finished.The pack bond lit up all at once, every ranked wolf on the eastern perimeter reg
Sophia's POVFor about three seconds the exhibition hall held its collective breath and nobody moved.Then Lila moved, and everything happened at once.She didn't run for the door. That wasn't Lila's way and it wasn't her instinct, the instinct of someone who had spent her entire adult life turning bad situations into managed ones through aggression and control. She turned on the nearest cluster of people and her hands came up and what came out of them was not the careful, precise magic she usually deployed but something raw and panicked and enormous, the kind of power that came from a practitioner who had stopped calculating and started reacting.The force of it threw three people sideways. An elderly Alpha from the northern territory hit the display table behind him and went down with it, jewelry and glass scattering across the floor. Two others were knocked off their feet by the perimeter of the blast, not at the center of it but close enough to feel the impact. The screaming start
Violet's POVThe hardest part was the waiting.I had positioned myself near the far display table with a clear sightline across the full length of the room, close enough to the eastern corridor that I could move fast if I needed to, far enough from Lila that I wasn't in her peripheral awareness. I had a glass of water I wasn't drinking and an expression I'd been carefully maintaining for the past forty minutes and a clock running in the back of my head that I couldn't turn off no matter how many times I told myself to stop counting.Lila had taken the glass from Sophia at seven fifty-two. I knew because I'd watched it happen with the particular focus of someone who had spent two days preparing for a single moment and needed to be certain it had actually occurred. The lift of the glass, the drink, the easy social smile Lila wore while she swallowed, none of it looking like anything other than a woman enjoying champagne at a lovely event. She hadn't hesitated. Hadn't paused. Had taken i
Sophia's POVThe exhibition hall looked exactly the way I'd imagined it when I first sketched the layout three months ago, before any of this, before the war council and the messenger and Thornfield and all the weight that had accumulated around what was supposed to be a straightforward celebration of work I was proud of. The long display tables ran the length of the room with clean white cloth under each piece, the lighting was warm and directional the way the consultant had suggested, and the champagne was already poured in long elegant rows on the table near the entrance, each glass catching the light in a way that was almost unreasonably beautiful given what one of them was going to do tonight.I moved through the room an hour before the guests arrived and checked everything twice, not because I thought anything was wrong but because moving helped and standing still did not. The jewelry itself was genuinely good, I could see that clearly in the way you sometimes couldn't see your
Ethan's POVThe call came in at four in the morning, and the way the patrol leader's voice sounded on the other end of the line was enough to tell me everything before the words did. There was a specific quality to the voice of a wolf who had seen something they couldn't unfold in their mind, something that sat outside the range of what even years of pack life prepared you for, and that quality was present in every syllable before he'd finished his first sentence.Border village. Thornfield settlement. Fire.I was dressed and out the door before Sophia was fully awake, and I had Max with me by the time I reached the vehicle, because Max had heard the same thing I had through the pack bond, that low urgent frequency that moved between ranked members when something was genuinely wrong rather than just difficult. We drove without talking much. The sky was still fully dark and the road to the eastern border cut through dense tree cover that blocked what little moonlight there was, and the
Sophia's POVViolet knocked on my office door at a time that suggested she hadn't slept, and when I opened it she was already talking, notebook in hand, the particular energy of someone who had been alone with an idea long enough that it had outgrown the space in their head and needed somewhere else to go. I stepped back and let her in without interrupting, and she laid the coven text and her notes on my desk and walked me through all of it in the methodical, unsentimental way she approached most things, facts first, complications second, questions at the end.I listened to the whole thing without speaking. When she finished I was quiet for a moment, looking at the ingredient list she'd copied out in her small, precise handwriting, and then I looked up at her. "You came to me first," I said. "Before Max, before Ethan."Something shifted in her expression, briefly, the kind of shift that happened when someone noticed they'd revealed more than they intended to. "The exhibition is yours,
Sophia's POVI pulled up to the palace gates, my heart still racing from the encounter with Marcus.The guards opened the gates and I drove through, parking near the main entrance. I sat in the car for a moment, gathering my thoughts.Marcus had taken the bait. He actually believed I wanted reconci
Violet's POVThe journey to Celeste's territory took longer than I expected.Max drove while I sat in the passenger seat, watching the landscape change from dense forest to rolling hills.We'd been on the road for three hours and the silence was starting to feel heavy."You know," Max said finally,
Marcus's POVI stared at the ledger in front of me, the numbers blurring together.Red. Everything was red.The pack's finances were bleeding out. Businesses failing. Trade agreements falling through. Partners pulling out left and right.All because of Lila.Because everyone now knew I'd been mated
Max's POVI watched Violet work from across the room, her hands moving precisely as she mixed ingredients for the revelation potion.She'd been at it for hours, ever since we got back from Celeste's cottage. The starfall essence sat in a small vial beside her, glowing faintly in the dim light.She







