LOGIN• Jason •The old healer arrived just after sundown, and I knew before she said a single word that she was going to tell us something we hadn’t heard from anyone else in four months.Her name was Odalys. She was older than any healer I’d ever met, old enough that some of the staff whispered she’d served my grandfather’s court, and she moved through the room slower than the others, taking her time studying Caleb before she even looked at me or Nelson.“You’ve had four healers before me,” she said, not looking up from Caleb’s face. “What did they tell you?”“That he’s healthy,” Nelson said from the chair he never left anymore. “That there’s nothing wrong with him that they can find.”“And that told you nothing.”“No,” I said. “It told us nothing.”She finally looked up, and her eyes were sharp in a way that made me sit up straighter without meaning to. “That’s because they were looking for damage. A wound. Something broken that could be mended. There’s no wound here.”“Then what is ther
• Nelson •“The baby is fine, your majesty.”The healer’s voice reached me from somewhere behind my shoulder, steady and careful in the way healers learned to be when they’d delivered the same news too many times to a room that never quite relaxed hearing it. I heard her. I registered the words. But my eyes never left the bed.Caleb hadn’t moved in four months.Four months since we’d carried him out of that vampire kingdom, since James had melted into nothing on that stone floor and taken something out of Caleb with him when he went. Four months since the healers had laid him in this bed and told us his heart was steady, his breathing was even, and that by every measure they had, he should have woken up weeks ago.He hadn’t.“Your majesty.” The healer again, gentler this time, like she could tell my mind had wandered somewhere she couldn’t follow. “Did you hear me? The pregnancy is progressing well. All signs are healthy.”I turned to face her fully then, because there was a question
• Caleb •I watched James’s skin split further along his arms, and some small, broken part of me still wanted to reach for him.I hated that part of myself. I had hated it since the moment he told me the truth in this very room, and I hated it even more now, watching him fold in on himself while four centuries of lies caught up to him all at once.“You’re dying,” I said. It wasn’t a question.“Yes.” He didn’t even try to deny it. His voice had gone thin, stretched over pain he was clearly fighting to keep out of it. “I imagine I have very little time left, actually.”“Good.”The word left me before I could stop it, sharp and ugly, and I watched something flicker across what remained of his face. Not anger. Something closer to acceptance, like he’d been expecting me to say exactly that and had already made peace with it.“You don’t mean that,” he said quietly.“I do.” My hands were shaking. “You took everything from me. From them. You erased four hundred years of my own life and I didn
• James •One moment I was waiting in the archive for word that the werewolf kings had finally crossed into my territory, running through the last details of how I meant to greet them when they did. I had planned this moment for so long that I had stopped thinking of it as planning and started thinking of it as memory, the way you remember something you have already lived through a hundred times in your head.Then the pain came.It hit without warning, without buildup, like someone had thrown open a door I did not know existed and let something unbearable pour straight through me. My skin burned. Not the ordinary burn I had grown used to over centuries, the kind that came and went with old wounds reopening in the cold. This was different. This felt like the gate Heaven opened up and directed sunlight to me… the kind that had not touched my skin in longer than I could count, and it was tearing through every inch of me at once.I looked down at my own hands and watched the skin along
• Nelson •Fuck, he smells divine.I muttered the words into his hair without meaning to, inhaling him like I’d been starving for it and hadn’t realized until just now. Jason and I had both wrapped around him at the same moment, and neither of us seemed inclined to let go anytime soon.. not after everything, not after the portal, not after weeks of not knowing if he was even alive.“You guys are really here,” Caleb said again, like he needed to say it out loud a second time to believe it.“Are you okay?” I asked, pulling back just enough to look at him properly, searching his face for anything he might be trying to hide from us. “Have you been fine?”His jaw tightened, and something flickered behind his eyes before he answered. “No. I’ve not been fine.”The honesty of it hit harder than I expected. Part of me had wanted him to lie, to say he was okay so I could pretend the last few weeks hadn’t been what they were. But Caleb had never been good at giving us easy answers, and I loved t
• Jason •Walking through the portal and stepping out into total silence should have felt like relief. Instead, it felt wrong.I had braced myself for chaos... for guards swarming the second we crossed, for a war breaking out before we’d even gotten our bearings. I had pictured blood before I’d pictured Caleb. That was what centuries of training did to you; it made you plan for the worst first and hope for anything better second.But there was nothing. No vampires rushing toward us with weapons drawn. Just stone room stretching out in front of us, quiet and undisturbed, like we’d stepped into an empty house instead of enemy territory.“This is way too easy,” I said, turning to my brother. “I mean, walking in here and finding no one waiting for us on the other side… that’s suspicious. I was expecting a full-blown war the second we crossed.”Nelson didn’t answer right away. He was looking past me, his expression caught somewhere between confusion and disbelief.“Look,” he said instead.
•NELSON•“Alpha Nelson…” Derick’s voice cut through my head without warning, sharp through the mind link, and every instinct in me went on alert immediately. Not because of what he said. But because of what I was holding in my arms.My mate.I tightened my grip slightly around him as I moved throug
•JASON•“I think we should get a healer.” I said louder than I intended, but I didn’t take them back. Because I could feel it, every passing second slipping his breath was getting weaker.If this kept going, he would be dead in minutes. And the worst part? I couldn’t even feel his wolf, no trace of
•CALEB•I didn’t realize how much a place could hold you until I had to leave it. The bus moved slowly at first, pulling away from the station like it was giving me one last chance to change my mind. One last chance to stand up, grab my bag, and run back to everything I just destroyed with my own h
•CALEB•“Let’s break up.” The words came out of my mouth, but they didn’t feel like mine. They felt forced. Dragged out of a place inside me that was already bleeding.Luke froze like I had just hit him.Worse.His fingers tightened around mine almost instantly, like letting go would make it real.







