LOGINSerena's POV Ramona did not soften her words, and she did not look away."And because I want you to hear it from someone who is not trying to get anything from you."She shifted her weight, and the sword shifted with her, and she sucked a sharp breath through her teeth and kept her palms on the door.The sword moved with her, and I saw her face go white, and then steady again."I heard what you did at the river," Ramona pressed on, and her eyes never left mine. "The day the boy fell through the ice. The day no one moved. The day a human jumped in after him.""He is a child," I protested, and my hands opened helplessly at my sides. "Anyone would have done it.""No one did it," Ramona corrected, and her voice turned fierce even through the blood on her lip.She had one thing left in her, and she was spending it on correcting me."Not the Lycans. Not the nobles. Not the guards. A human did. A human this court calls a whore. A human who was sold to us in chains. And you did it without he
Serena's POVThe door clicked shut behind me, and the small room swallowed the sound of it, and for one breath I did nothing but stand inside the warm golden light and let my eyes adjust.The light was the wrong color for what was waiting in that room, and I did not know it yet.The room was small, smaller than my chambers, smaller even than the alcove in the library where I had first found the old histories. There was one low table, and one candle burning on it, and one narrow door set into the far wall with iron bands bolted across the planks. The air was close, and it smelled of wax and blood, and the candle flame bent sideways every time the door moved.The flame bent again as I stepped in, and I watched it straighten, and I did not yet understand why the room smelled of blood.Ramona was braced against that door with both palms flat on the wood and her feet dug into the stone. Her grey shawl had slipped off one shoulder and pooled at her elbow.The shawl had been grey once, a cle
Serena's POV The servant tried to answer, and her mouth moved, but no sound came. Her eyes rolled back, and her hand slipped off my wrist, and her head turned to the side.And for a moment I thought she had died in my hands, and something in me went very quiet, quieter than the room. Then I felt her chest rise, faint and slow, and I let out a breath I had been holding since the shelf fell."No," I said, and I shook her shoulder gently. "No, no, no. Stay with me. Stay with me."I put two fingers to her throat, and there was a pulse there, thin and fast and fading, but it was there. She was still alive. Barely. But alive.Her pulse was a small thing under my fingertips, like a bird under cloth. It was too fast, and too thin, already slipping away.I did not know how long she had, and I did not know if anyone would come.I pulled my hands away from her wound, and I wiped them on my trousers, and I stood up. I picked up the knife. And I looked around the dark room one more time.The libr
Serena's POVThe breathing was still there in the dark, and I stood with my back against the broken library door, and I held the knife so tight that my knuckles hurt.The wood of the door was cold against my shoulder blades, and it creaked when I shifted my weight, so I went still at once, because any sound in a room like that one felt like a confession."It is the wind," I whispered to myself, and my voice sounded small in that big black room. "It is only the wind."The breathing caught, and it rattled, and it stopped, and then it started again.I knew then that it was not the wind.I had learned to know the sounds of a house at night when I was a girl. The creak of a step your father is trying not to make. The catch of a breath behind a door. The small wet noise a person makes when they are hurt and trying not to be heard. And this was that last one.I moved away from the door, and I kept my free hand on the shelf edges so I would not lose my way. The snowlight from the tall windows
Serena’s POVNobles stood beside servants, guards stood beside cooks, and a woman in a fine silk gown was holding a kitchen boy against her chest and stroking his hair.A young lord I had seen sneer at me in the halls was carrying an old servant on his back toward the gate, but I noticed that Doña Beatriz was not among them yet.Diego did not waste a second. He moved into the crowd and started shouting orders, and his voice cut through the chaos like a blade."Form a line at the gate," Capitán Diego commanded. "Wounded in the center. Anyone who can hold a sword, on the outside. Move! Move!"People obeyed him. They always obeyed him. There was something in his voice that made you want to do what he said.Alejandro walked into the middle of the courtyard and let the survivors see him.He did not speak, but he did n
Serena's POVThe bell kept ringing, and Diego was already moving before I could take a breath."Stay behind me," Capitán Diego commanded, and his sword was up and his grey eyes were cutting down the corridor ahead of us. "If anyone comes at us from the side, you shout. Do you understand me?""I understand," I replied, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, because my heart was pounding so hard I could hear it over the bell.We ran. The torches along the walls guttered as we passed them, and the flames bent sideways in the cold draft that pushed through the hallways. My boots slid once on a patch of frost near the stairwell, and Diego grabbed my arm and hauled me upright without breaking stride."Where are we going?" I asked, and my breath came in short bursts as I kept pace beside him."To the king," Diego answered, and he did not look at me when he said it. "If there is an attack from within, the first thing they will try to do is cut off the head.""The west wing," I pressed. I
Serena's POV I had expected a monster, the kind of monster that lived in the stories my mother used to tell me before bed, with sharp teeth and claws and eyes that glowed in the dark, but when the doors of the throne room opened and the Lycan King Alejandro walked in, I realized that I had been wr
Serena's POV The snow burned my knees through the holes in my trousers, and I had been kneeling for what felt like hours, though time moved differently when you were waiting to die, and I had been waiting to die for as long as I could remember.The chains bit into my wrists, and the metal was so c
Serena's POV Three days passed while I sat in that room with the fire burning and the snow falling outside the window, and Alejandro did not come near me, did not send word to me, and did not give any sign that he remembered I existed at all.I counted the hours as the sun rose and set behind the
Serena's POV The room had a fire, and that was the first thing I noticed when the guard shoved me through the doorway and closed the door behind me with a click that echoed in my ears like the sound of a cage locking shut.It was a real fire, with logs burning and flames dancing and heat pouring o







