LOGINElara’s povI didn't go back to the mansion that morning.Not at first. There was too much to do.Elias worked beside me through the dawn and well into the day. He didn't ask what to do. He simply watched me for a few minutes, learned the rhythm of the ward, and then began to move through it with the same quiet, grim efficiency he brought to everything. He hauled water. He scrubbed floors on his hands and knees with his sleeves pushed up past his elbows. He carried a boy twice his own weight in blankets from the cart that arrived, at his order, loaded with food and medicine from the pack's own stores.Nobody had ever seen the Alpha's son on his knees in a gutter. They stared. Then, slowly, one by one, they started to help.By midday, the hall smelled of lye instead of rot. By afternoon, a pair of local healers had arrived, summoned from villages up and down the ridge, with their own satchels and their own tired, hopeful faces. I handed my notes to the eldest and showed the younger one
Elara’s povDestroyed.The word rang in my skull like a struck bell, and for a few long seconds I couldn't hear anything else.I stood in the center of that filthy hall, among a hundred and forty frightened people, and looked at the man who had just said it. A lean, scarred soldier with a tired face and a spear in his fist, calmly informing us that his orders were to burn down a building full of the sick and dying.And behind him, forty more men who'd come to help him do it."Say that again," I said.My voice was very quiet. It carried anyway.The lieutenant's gaze flicked to me. "My lady?""Say it again. Slowly. I want to be certain I understood.""The Luna has ordered that the building be cleared and torched." He spoke with a flat, careful courtesy, the way a man recites a grocery list. "The patients are to be turned out. The structure is to be razed. Those are the orders.""The patients are
Elias’s POV "Kidnapped."The word came out of me in a whisper, and then it came out again as a roar."*Kidnapped?*"The guard in front of me flinched. He was young, barely twenty, with a tremor in his hands and mud on his boots, and he'd run the length of the house to find me. He'd found me in my wife's empty room, on my knees, with a black glove crushed in my fist."Yes, my lord," he stammered. "A patrol came to the kitchen gate not an hour ago. They said they'd seen men take the lady through the lower village. Hooded men. They said she'd been carried off to the old health center, my lord. By force.""By *whom?*""They didn't know. They only said that the lady was taken, and that you were needed."I stood. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else.*The health center.* The place my parents had forbidden us to go. The place my wife had asked to see.*Taken.*It was impossible. She had locked her door from the inside. There had been no struggle, no noise. And yet the room was em
Elara’s POV I stood in the black mouth of the servants' passage with my heart in my throat and listened to nothing. No bell. No shouting. No pounding boots on the stairs. Just the faint, ordinary creak of an old house settling for the night, and somewhere far above me, the muffled laughter of a maid.It worked."Told you," Frey whispered at my shoulder."You told me nothing of the kind. You said we'd be dead in a ditch by dawn.""I said it was possible." She shifted her sling and glanced back down the narrow stone corridor, where the faint glow of my abandoned lamp still bled through the crack behind the wardrobe. "But I also said that a household which uses its walls as a weapon has probably never bothered to guard them."She was right. It had been Frey who found the passage, two days after the rattling began. A thin panel at the back of my wardrobe, no wider than a man's shoulders, opening onto a stair that wound down through the thickness of the wall. It must have been how my midn
Elias’s POV I watched Nathan eat breakfast, and I thought about all the ways I could kill him.It was a pleasant exercise. I'd been indulging it for three days. He sat at my father's right hand, buttering a roll with that insufferable calm, laughing at my mother's jokes, accepting second helpings from servants who bowed lower for him than they'd ever bowed for me. The Alpha of Goldstone, a guest of honor in my own house.Project, he'd said. Business.A child could have seen through it. Nathan Pierce had never once in his life left Goldstone for the sake of a contract. He had a dozen clerks for that. He hadn't ridden eight days north out of professional duty. He'd come because she was here.Because Elara was here.My hand tightened around my cup until the porcelain creaked.I knew him. I had known him for years. I knew that he never let a chance slip through his fingers, and that he had been staring at my wife across a ballroom for the better part of a month like a starving man at a b
Elara’s POV "That was a trick."Yvonne's voice cracked across the lawn like a dropped plate.She still held her splintered arrow in one hand, the two broken halves dangling from her fingers, and her face had gone from white to a blotchy, furious pink. Her eyes darted from the shattered shaft to me and back again as though one of us might explain it away."You cheated," she said. "You must have. Nobody can do that. Nobody. My arrow wasn't even in the bullseye, it hadn't even landed, and you..." She shook the pieces at me. "It's a cheap trick. A healer's trick. Some kind of charm, or a spell, or...""A spell," I repeated."Yes!""I'm a healer, Yvonne. Not a witch.""Then how?"I set the bow against my shoulder and considered her. The attendants had fallen silent. A pair of gardeners had stopped clipping the hedge. Elias's mother stood stiffly under the awning, one hand knotted in her sleeve, and her expression was the one a woman wears when she's watching a cart roll slowly toward a di







