LOGINShe was slipping from us little by little.
I could see it in every step Rebecca took. Her feet kept drifting toward the sound of the fighting, toward that bastard Jeremy. The mark on her shoulder wasn’t just glowing anymore — it was pulling her. Every pulse made her body tense, and her eyes went distant for half a second.![]()
Kael’s POVThe night I left, I stood over her cradle for the length of a held breath and tried to learn her face.The wedding hall had gone quiet. Somewhere below, Rohan was laughing in the way a man laughs when he has finally been given what he thought he would never deserve, and the sound reached me through the floor like warmth through a wall. I did not belong in it. I had stood at the back of the hall all evening with my arms folded and watched two people be happy, and I had felt nothing, which was worse than grief.The baby slept. Her fist was curled against her cheek and her hair was dark and fine and damp at the temples. Rebecca had named her in a ceremony I had survived by looking at the floor.
Mira’s POVI woke to the smell of wet leaves and the sound of nothing.For a long moment I lay still on my back with my eyes closed, trying to decide whether I was dead. The ground beneath me was cold and soft. Above me, I could hear wind moving through high branches, and far off, so faint it might have been imagination, the slow drum of the earth.I opened my eyes.Trees. A black ocean of them, trunks rising out of the dark like the pillars of a ruined hall, with a thin silver moon caught in the canopy. No torches. No walls. No flowers. Somewhere behind me, a long way off, I could see a smudge of orange on the sky that might have been a burning mansion or only the last of the sunset.
Ezekiel's POVI watched my daughter vanish, and the numbers went silent.From the battlements I had seen it plainly. A girl in a gray cloak among white flowers, her hands open at her sides, and then, between one breath and the next, no one at all. No shimmer, no sound. The grass simply held no girl. I looked for her with every instrument I owned and found nothing, and the cold that went through me was not arithmetic.Jeremy had stopped turning. He stood alone among the flowers, and I saw his shoulders change.Fury, in a man like that, does not shout. It narrows. He looked down at the woman lying at his feet, and I saw him decide, with perfect clarity, that if he could not have the daughter, he would take what the daughter loved.He stepped toward Rebecca.I never saw Matthew leave the wall. One moment he stood beside me, the next he was through the gap and onto the flowers with fire pouring from both hands in a great roaring sheet. I felt the heat on my face from forty pa
Jeremy's POVThe village had burned to its bones by morning, and I walked through it the way a man walks through his own house after a party.My army was cleaning up the last holdouts in the lower fields. I could hear every one of them die. I had not asked for that. Since I woke I heard every heartbeat for a mile in all directions, a vast wet clatter like rain on a tin roof, and the only silences in it were my own soldiers and the dead.I paused at a puddle and looked down. The man in it had been six feet five and golden. Now the hair at his nape was the color of ash, tied back out of old habit, and the face under it was thinner than I remembered. The loan was eating me from the edges.I flexed my left hand. Two fingers did not answer.You held it well, I had told the wolf woman, and I had meant it. I had also meant the twist of my wrist, which had cost me more than I had planned. A bill, then. I did not mind being billed. I minded not being told the total.The witch fel
Matthew’s POVI found her at the top of the east tower, where the stairs ended and a single narrow window looked north across the dark. She was sitting on the sill with her knees drawn up, still in his cloak, looking out at the horizon. In the black distance, a faint orange line smudged the sky. A village, burning. Or something worse.“Mira.”She did not turn. “I know. I’ve been watching it for an hour.”I came and stood beside her, not too close. It had taken me years to learn how.“I need to ask you something,” I said. “And I want you to know that it is not a reproach.”“Whether anyone’s answered.” She said it flatly, to the glass. “No.”“I thought not.”“I wrote again on the road. I wrote to all three. I told them everything I could.” Her voice was very quiet. “Nothing.”I looked at the line of fire. “If Kael were here, he would have known what to do with this.”“He’s not here.”“No.” I let a silence pass. “That is not your fault. I want you to hear that as well.”She f
Matthew’s POVThe mansion had never looked so much like a home as it did at dusk on the day we came to defend it.Every window held a lamp. The gates stood open, and the courtyard was packed with faces, young wolves in training leathers, witch apprentices with ash on their sleeves, hybrids who had grown up in these halls and thought of them as the only world there was. They had heard something was coming. They had not been told what. They stood in the long evening light and looked at us as we rode in, two hundred riders in green, a wagon, a family, and the girl in a borrowed cloak at the center of it all.I counted them out of habit. Fewer than I needed. More than I deserved.Rohan was out of the saddle before his horse had stopped. He gave the reins to the nearest groom, said something short, and went across the yard in long strides toward the east stairs, where a woman wit
Rebecca’s POVIt was morning already. I could hear the chirping of the birds as they sang their melody. I just wanted to sleep today, and I can still remember the look on Tyler’s face.It is still as clear as day. I was relieved I finally got the words out, but that feeling was short-lived as a gen
Rebecca’s POV‘No, no, I see you stop!’ Another bad dream, I woke up drenched in sweat and with the urgent need to gulp a glass of water. This was the third time I had such a terrifying dream. It was the middle of the night, and everywhere was quiet. The only sound being made was the sound of a dis
Rebecca’s POVI couldn't stop staring at him. He was undoubtedly more handsome than the last time I saw him. His brown hair was wet, which gave off the fact that he had just taken a bath. His strong masculine scent was quite literally breathtaking. “Rebecca?” My thoughts halted, and I came right b
Rebecca’s POV“Rebecca, wake up, you can sleep through a storm.” My mother opened up the curtains and exposed my room to sunlight. She wouldn't understand that I spent the whole night thinking about the mating proposal I got from Tyler.Tyler wanted to mate with me? Why? He bullied me when we were







