LOGINEnzo Nina set plates on the table and sat down beside me, close enough that our arms touched, and I felt her presence settle into the space the way it always did, warm and supportive.“What do you know about Jessica’s current plans?” I asked.“Enough to be useful,” he said. “She’s been building her gift since the night Nina accidentally gave it to her. She’s further along than you think. The mage she has working with her has been amplifying what Nina’s contact started.” He looked at me directly. “She doesn’t want to destroy Silver Fang. She wants you specifically. The pack is just to have it. In her mind, you were always hers, and everything that has happened since has been an elaborate lie perpetrated against her.”“She cheated on me for months, and she rejected me,” I said flatly. “Five years ago. Of her own choice for Dexter.”“I know,” he said. “Logic is not the organizing principle of what she’s carrying. It’s closer to obsession than reasoning. She has convinced herself that t
Enzo Morning came the way it always did after a hard night, indifferently and too soon. I had slept for three hours on the couch in my office with Nina’s head on my shoulder and my jacket pulled over both of us, which was not comfortable by any reasonable measure and was the best sleep I had gotten in weeks. When I woke the dawn was fully established and she was still there, breathing slow and even, her hand loosely wrapped around mine even in sleep. Why we didn't sleep in a bed was something I couldn't understand. I stayed still for a long time and did not examine why too closely. When she finally stirred I was already at the desk reviewing the overnight reports from the border patrols. She sat up, pushed her hair back, looked at me with the slightly disoriented expression of someone remembering where they were and then the more settled expression of someone who was fine with the answer. “You should have woken me,” she said. “You needed the sleep,” I said. “More than I nee
Chapter 108The kitchen was very quiet.Outside the window, the sky had moved from deep dark toward the particular blue-black that preceded dawn. The herbs above the window stirred faintly in a draft from somewhere.“Your father,” I said. “When this is over. We go and get him ourselves, we won't go through the tunnels because we are not hiding, and no solo missions. Together, with a full team, we bring him here, if he agrees to come.”Her eyes went bright very suddenly and tears gathered, but the expression vanished, she blinked rapidly with the particular speed of someone who had gotten very good at not crying in front of people.“He’ll come,” she said. “He’s stubborn but he knows Crestmoon is no longer safe.”“Then it’s decided,” I said.A silence settled between us that was different from the silences before. Less weight. Something had been set down somewhere and the air where it had been was cleaner, she had gotten everything off her chest, and I got clarity.Then I asked the one
Enzo We sat in the kitchen not my office, not any of the spaces that would make it too serious, or a room that carried the weight of Alpha business and pack politics and all the things that had been pressing down on both of us for months. The kitchen at two in the morning was something else entirely, warm and ordinary, smelling of the bread someone had baked earlier and the herbs that hung drying from the rack above the window. I had made tea without asking if she wanted any. She had sat down without asking if that was acceptable. We had arrived at the table the way we arrived at most things, without a plan, through the accumulated gravity of two people who had been circling each other for months and had finally run out of distance to circle. Kai was in the guest room at the end of the east corridor. I was aware of exactly where Kai was at all times, but why he was here was what I didn't understand. Nina wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at it for a moment in the way
Anthony seemed different, Something moved through the expression that was not quite guilt and not quite relief, and was possibly both he was trying to hide his expression.“May I sit down?” he asked. “Yes, no one is stopping you” I said. “And then you’re going to tell me everything. Not the version you’ve been lying about.”He moved to the chair by the window and lowered himself into it with the careful movement of genuine old age. I remained standing. The room was very quiet, the night pressing against the window glass, the pipe tobacco ghost haunting the curtains.“How long have you known?” he asked.“Long enough,” I said. “The dates on the records go back four years. When did it actually start?”He folded his hands in his lap. “Five years ago,” he said. “The day I put the title on your shoulders.”The words fell into the room with the weight of a confession that had been held so long it had lost its shape.“I looked at that broken pack,” he said quietly, “and I thought, let the bo
Max fell into step beside me in the corridor, matching my pace, waiting.“Anthony,” I said.“Yes,” he said.We walked in silence for a moment.“Four years,” I said.“Yes.”“He was at my father’s funeral in Crestmoon. When we moved here, he placed the Alpha title on my shoulders.” I kept walking, kept my voice level. “He has sat in my war room for five years and eaten at my table and counseled me on every significant decision this pack has made.”“Yes,” Max said again. Quietly.“And he has been making every significant decision for Dexter for four of those five years.”“Yes.”We reached the staircase. I stopped at the bottom, one hand on the newel post, and stood there for a moment with my eyes closed.The grief was there. I was surprised by how much of it there was, how cleanly separate it was from the anger, how both could coexist without diminishing each other. I had thought that what I felt about Anthony after the garden conversation was complicated enough. This was something else,
CassieFrom the cave, where they abandoned me as a home at the end of the pack, I watched it all like a scene ripped straight from my worst nightmare, playing out in agonizing slow motion, I felt like I was going to throw up.The Alpha, my Alpha Enzo carried that dripping pathetic little nobody thr
EnzoThe pack house had gone quiet after midnight, the kind of quiet that presses against your eardrums and makes every creak feel like a warning. I hadn’t slept I couldn't not with all that was bothering me.Not with Nina lying in the guest suite two doors down, breathing the same air as me but fe
Enzo Everything about her was a quiet assault on my control.The way her dark lashes fanned against pale cheeks still bruised from battle. The faint rise and fall of her chest beneath the thin hospital gown, the stubborn set of her jaw even in sleep, like she was already fighting me in her dreams.
NinaThe next dayI stumble out of the pack house, my legs carrying me on autopilot through the winding paths of the compound. The air is crisp, laced with pine and the distant howl of patrols, but it does nothing to clear the fog in my head. Dexter’s words echo like a curse: medical records, Luna,







