MasukPOV: FeliciaI stood in his doorway, the letter still in my hand."You should have burned it."He frowned. "The letter?""No. The part of you that still thinks you owe him anything.""I don't owe him forgiveness.""Then what?""I owe myself the truth."I understood then what he'd been doing all along…not trying to become innocent of what happened, but refusing to let his father's choices keep deciding who he became."Reading what you wrote about me frightened me," I admitted. "Not because I disliked it. Because I believed it.""Do you want me to take it back?""No." I made myself say the rest too. "Don't make me into the reward at the end of your redemption story."That landed exactly the way I meant it to. He'd spent so long trying to become worthy of me that he could turn us into another form of penance without noticing."I don't want to earn you," he said."Good.""I want to know you.""That's harder.""I know."⸻I stepped fully into his room. For most of our story I'd been the on
POV: Felicia"Mama! Look!"I turned. Orion was standing…completely upright, wobbling, triumphant. Lucien had gone rigid a few feet away."Don't move," he whispered."I'm not moving.""I wasn't talking to you."He meant Orion. My son took one step. Then another, straight toward Lucien, who crouched lower, palms open."Come on, little man.""Lucien," I whispered."What?""If he falls, I'm blaming you.""Fair."Orion took a final wobbling step and fell directly into Lucien's arms. Lucien laughed…not his controlled laugh, something real and unguarded I realized I'd never actually heard from him before, a sound that seemed to surprise him as much as it did me. He held his son a beat too long before setting him back on his feet, like he needed the extra second to believe it had actually happened.⸻He wasn't finished. Within the hour, all four children were walking, almost in coordination, like something in them had agreed to this together.Orion walked straight to Lucien again, three deter
POV: FeliciaI was still standing on the balcony when the doors slammed open behind us.Cassian, breathless. "Felicia.""What happened?"His eyes flicked between me and Lucien. "Someone just asked the council whether your children should be allowed to inherit the throne at all."My stomach tightened. "Who?"He hesitated. "Your own council."⸻Lord Evren was still on his feet when we walked back in, but this time he wasn't attacking me. He was defending the proposal. That made it worse.Centuries of divine bloodlines had become political dynasties, he argued. My children were already powerful, already displaying gifts no one could explain. I'd just told this council that divine inheritance and political authority shouldn't be tangled together.So why should my children inherit a throne simply for being born to me?"Are you asking me to protect my children from politics?" I asked."Yes.""Or are you asking me to surrender them to it?"The room's temperature shifted. He insisted he meant
POV: Felicia"You said they almost left her outside."Lucien looked at me across the desk, the healer's letter spread between us. I hadn't slept much since reading it."They did.""Then why is she alive?""Because someone heard her crying.""Who?""Maren. The healer who found her." He paused. "She didn't just find the baby, Felicia. She fought three people who wanted to leave her there."My stomach tightened. This wasn't neglect. This was disagreement…some wolves wanting the child sent straight to Silvercrest, others wanting her kept anonymous, and one faction apparently arguing the safest option was pretending she'd never been found at all.The danger wasn't only outside the pack. It lived inside the people supposedly protecting her too.⸻Council members recommended bringing her to Silvercrest immediately. I refused, not because I thought Silvercrest unsafe, but because of the language they kept reaching for.Asset. Protection. Chosen. Political responsibility.Nobody was asking wha
POV: FeliciaThe letter from Blackthorn lay between us on the desk. I'd read it three times already."She was found outside the packhouse?" I asked.Lucien nodded."Alive?""Barely.""And her parents?""Unknown."I looked up. "You said she was abandoned."His expression shifted. "I said that's what they want us to believe."⸻He'd learned more while searching. The baby had been found three nights earlier, at the exact moment the Frost City's records predicted, wrapped in ordinary cloth. Underneath it, a second layer…silver-thread fabric, the same material the Frost City used.Someone had known precisely where and when she would be born. Someone had carried her all the way to Blackthorn on purpose and left her anonymously for his pack to find.I thought of myself immediately. I'd been abandoned because no one understood what I was. This girl might have been placed exactly because someone understood exactly what she was.⸻"We're bringing her to Silvercrest," I said.Lucien didn't answe
POV: FeliciaThe massive doors closed behind us, sealing the cavern shut.Then hundreds of lights ignited overhead at once, and I realized we weren't trapped in a ruin at all. We stood at the edge of an entire underground city."You brought the wrong Queen," a voice called from somewhere above.Lucien's hand went to his blade. Cassian stepped in front of me on instinct."She says you weren't supposed to be here," the archivist translated."Then why did you let us in?" I called back.A pause. "Because she was."My blood went cold. "Who?"The answer drifted down from somewhere deeper in the stone."The child."⸻The doors opened again, and the scale of what waited beyond them stole my breath entirely. This wasn't a settlement. It was a civilization carved vertically into the mountain…homes cut into stone, bridges spanning chasms I couldn't see the bottom of, markets, schools, temples, water running through channels lit by crystal lamps. Children ran through the streets below. Warriors w







