LOGINMona's POVVesna's rider stood in my kitchen at midnight, and the letter he carried was written on the back of a child's drawing.That was the first thing I noticed when he pulled it from his coat. A crayon picture of a house with a red roof, and underneath the roof, on the reverse of the paper, Vesna's careful handwriting. She had used what she had. The rider was young — not one of her old fighters, one of the Bloodrose settlement's new generation — and he was so exhausted from the ride that I had Kael sit him down with a bowl of soup before I even opened the paper. The kitchen was quiet. The night cook had put another log on the fire out of respect for the strange hour. I read Vesna's letter twice. It was short. Mona. A man came to my door yesterday. He knew my mother's real name and three sentences she used to say to me at bedtime. Only my mother knew those. He offered me back what he called my birthright. He said your family had stolen it. He said he would come back in one month f
Mona's POVI had not slept in three nights when the boy arrived at my gate, and if he had come a day later I might have missed him entirely.The last line on the back of my mother's letter had eaten me alive. Ask him what he did to my sister Amaya's daughter. Amaya's daughter — Vesna — the woman we had spent a decade fitting into a small house in Bloodrose. My mother had known Amaya had a daughter. My mother had known before Amaya had died, before Vesna was even five years old, and my mother had suspected the Shadow King of doing something to that child. That single sentence rearranged everything. It meant Vesna's mother might not have raised her the way we had all assumed. It meant the story we had been given — the one Amaya had told Vesna, the one Vesna had told Nova — had a shape underneath it none of us had touched yet. I sat with Nova and Selena in the herb garden for two nights running, the pages spread on a bench between us, and none of us could sleep. On the third night we agr
Mona's POVI did not get the morning I was waiting for.Leon slipped in his sleep sometime near the false dawn — that grey hour when the birds have not yet decided whether to sing. Sophie found him first. She came to the porch where I had fallen asleep against his chair, and she touched my shoulder very gently, and when I opened my eyes she said only, "He's gone, Mona." I did not scream. I did not shatter. I stood up on legs that did not feel like mine and I went into the small room where he lay, and he looked the way he had looked at fourteen when I would wake him for a hunt — mouth slightly open, one hand loose on the blanket, as if in a moment he would groan and turn over. But the moment did not come. And the thing he had been going to tell me about our mother's death, the sentence he had promised for morning, was gone with him. I sat on the edge of his bed and I held his cool hand and I said, out loud, into the quiet room, "You cheated, brother." And I did not know if I meant it a
Mona's POVSophie's letter came in the middle of a small ordinary breakfast, and I dropped my spoon into my porridge without noticing.The paper was thin. Her handwriting had gone slightly shaky in the past year, and I had been pretending not to see it. *Mona. Come when you can. He is not dying today, so don't ride like it. But he is not getting back up from this one. He asked me to tell you before anyone else.* I read it twice. My spoon was leaving a dark ring around itself in the bowl. Derek looked up from his own plate, saw my face, and set his cup down without a sound. "Leon?" he asked. I nodded. I could not speak yet. I folded the letter along its old creases. I thought of my brother the last time I had seen him — six months ago, at his own front door, waving me off with the arm that still worked properly, the other one already tucked into the sling he never quite admitted he needed. He had shouted after me, *Tell Cassian to write more, the boy has forgotten his uncle.* And I had
Mona's POVDerek told me he was stepping down in a chicken coop, and I laughed so hard I sat down on an overturned bucket.He had gone to fetch eggs for the kitchen — a thing he had started doing on ordinary mornings after we came home from our long trip, because he said the small chores were the ones that kept a man human. I had followed him because I liked watching him do small things. He set his basket down. He looked at the fussing hens. He said, without turning around, "I want Cassian to have the pack, Mona. Before the year is out." Just like that. In a chicken coop. With straw stuck to his boot. I opened my mouth to say something serious and instead I laughed, because it was so like him — the biggest decisions of his life delivered in the smallest possible rooms. He turned around with an egg in each hand and a look on his face that was half offended and half relieved. "You're laughing at me." "I'm laughing at the coop, Derek." I stood up. I crossed the straw to him. I took the e
Mona's POVThe note that said He knows Cassian went burned in my sleeve for three days before I made the choice that saved my life.I did not chase the traitor. I did not tear the Council apart. I did not put my son in a locked room with guards at the door. I sat with Derek in our chamber on the third night, and I laid the paper flat on the table between us, and I said the hardest sentence I had spoken in years. "If I keep hunting this shadow, I will lose the people I still have." Derek did not answer for a long time. He looked at the note. He looked at his hands. Then he reached across and folded the paper closed. "Then we set a trap he cannot see, and we live our lives on top of it," he said. That was the plan we made. Selena would keep watching the Council from inside. Nova would keep her mountain routes to Vesna and her ear on the wind. A hand-picked pair of Derek's oldest riders would shadow Cassian without Cassian knowing. And we — Derek and I — would do the one thing the traito
Mona's POV The glow spread from my core outward, turning my skin translucent like living flame. Father jerked back, but kept the knife at my throat."Impossible," he snarled. "The collar—""Can't stop what's already inside her," a woman's voice rang out. A figure in Academy robes stepped forward,
Mona's POV I woke in chains.Not ordinary chains - these burned against my skin, etched with runes that pulsed with sickly green light. The collar around my neck was worse, a constant weight that made breathing feel like drowning."Ah, sleeping beauty awakens." Selena's voice drifted from the shad
Mona's POVThe Shadow Walker moved faster than thought. One moment it stood at the edge of the circle, the next its claws were inches from my throat.Derek's wolf form slammed into it mid-leap, but passed right through as if the creature was made of smoke. The Shadow Walker solidified just in time
Mona's POVThe burning under my skin kept me awake all night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that phoenix symbol glowing on the pack stone, and Derek's storm-gray eyes boring into mine.*A caged phoenix.*By dawn, the house was in chaos. Father had called an emergency pack meeting, and through







