LOGINSelene's POVI spent most of the day watching Garrick teach frightened people how to survive without him, and told myself the strange warmth in my chest watching it was just relief that he'd chosen differently this time.I found him near the well as the light started failing, the girl trailing a step behind me, quieter than she'd been all day."I want to try something," I said. "If you're willing."She nodded, though something wary had crept into her expression. "You think the thinness is connected to a name. That's what you've been circling all afternoon.""You really do hear people's thoughts.""Not all of them. Just the loud ones." A tired half-smile. "Yours have been loud since the village."I raised both hands, murmuring something low and careful, the same working I'd used on every disturbed grave for weeks now. "Most magic responds to inten
Garrick's POV"She's not what I expected," Selene said, once the girl had gone to help settle the surviving villagers into whatever shelter still stood. "I keep waiting for something in her to feel wrong the way the graves feel wrong. It doesn't. She just feels *thin*, like something stretched further than it was built to hold.""Does this mean dangerous?""I don't know yet." Selene's fingers worried at the edge of her sleeve, a habit I'd learned meant she was more unsettled than she wanted to admit. "What do we actually do with her, Garrick? Bring her south, into whatever's waiting for the two of us? Leave her here, unprotected, with whatever's hunting her still out there?"I didn't have a clean answer. I'd spent weeks telling myself finding her was strategy—leverage, a card worth holding before someone else thought to look for it. Watching her throw herself between a stra
Garrick's POVSelene hadn't been wrong about the pull at all. I felt it myself now, the closer we got. It was not a sound, not quite a scent, just something wrong in the air that thickened with every mile, the same wrongness that had been trailing us since the mountain village's graves first opened.We weren't the only place it was happening. That was the part that had started to unsettle me more than any single grave could. Every village we'd passed through in the last week carried some version of the same story—ground disturbed, livestock spooked, an old woman somewhere swearing she'd heard her dead husband's voice calling from beneath the floorboards. Isolated incidents, if you only heard one. Impossible to dismiss once you'd heard a dozen.This village had it worse than most.The ground around the well had split open in a wide, ragged ring, pale root-like things breaking the surface and pulling themselves free of the dirt entirely—not corpses, not quite, something assemb
Matthew's POV They broke off faster than I expected, once it became clear Kael wasn't coming easily. Not a rout. Nothing that sloppy. Whoever led this raid pulled his men back in the same disciplined, wordless coordination they'd used to advance—a controlled withdrawal, not a defeat, the kind of retreat that told me this had never been an all-in assault to begin with. A probe. A test of how hard we'd fight to keep one man. We'd fought hard enough. That should have felt like more of a victory than it did. I found Ezekiel in the courtyard once the last of them had vanished back into the treeline, both of us breathing hard, blood on both of us that wasn't entirely our own. "Numbers," I said. "Three dead on our side. Six more wounded, two of those seriously." His jaw was tight, already cataloguing, already doing the thing he did to keep from feeling it directly. "The eastern wall's compromised. We'll need it rebuilt before winter, not just patched." Three dead. I made mysel
Jeremy's POVThe report from the mansion reached me before dawn, delivered by a messenger too winded to soften any of it.The assault had failed to secure its target. Kael had escaped capture. And Fred—one of my more reliable Watchers for longer than I cared to count—had turned his blade on one of his own in full view of soldiers and Watchers both.I didn't feel the surprise the messenger clearly expected me to feel. I'd watched loyalty erode all around me for months now. Selene first. Now Fred. A garden untended long enough eventually stopped being a garden at all."Anything else," I asked."No, my lord.""Then leave me."I visited Elias before I did anything else, some old, worn habit of using his suffering to steady my own resolve. Tonight I let the corruption go further than I usually allowed myself—not out of strategy, but out of something rawer, something closer to fury than I liked to examine too closely. I watched it take his voice from him entirely, the words he'd always
Matthew's POVThe quiet reached me before anything else did.I noticed it the way I noticed most things now—not with my ears first, but with whatever had been sharpening in me since the bond with Rebecca finished settling. A wrongness under my skin before my mind caught up to naming it. The eastern watchtower, which should have called its hour a few minutes back, hadn't.I was moving before I finished deciding to.The second tower was already dark by the time I reached the wall—not extinguished violently, just gone quiet, the two men who should have been posted there nowhere in sight. No blood. No struggle marks. Just absence, precise and deliberate, the same wrongness we'd walked into on the ridge weeks ago, except this time I understood exactly what silence like this usually meant before something worse followed it."Sound the alarm," I told the nearest guard, low. "Quietly, if you can manage it. I don't want them knowing we've noticed yet."He didn't manage it quietly enough.
Alpha Kings POV“There are rumours about it,” One of the Advisers said. The Alpha Kings sat on their thrones listening to the report. “We need accurate information, not speculation,” Matthew said sternly.“The possibility of war happening is greater than it not happening,” another adviser said, a
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 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







