LOGINDahlia's POVI stared at my hand. It was smoking with wisps of something—power? energy? —curling off my palm like I'd touched fire."What—" My voice came out strangled. "What did I do?" It burned.Rayan groaned as he pushed himself up using the dresser he'd crashed into. Blood dripped from his nose. His eyes when he looked at me—pure hatred."You just made a terrible mistake," he growled, and then he stumbled out.What the fuck was that?I'd barely touched him, just slapped him across the face, and he'd—he'd flown. Literally flew backwards like I'd thrown a truck at him.My hand burned hotter. I stared at it, the smoke curling, and felt something underneath my skin."No no no no—"The door suddenly burst open, and Oryn walked in. She looked at the destroyed dresser, the dent in the wall where Rayan had hit, and the scorch mark on the floor where I was standing."Dahlia." Her voice was careful. "What happened?""I don't know." I was shaking. "I hit him and he—and my hand—Oryn, what's h
Rayan's POVPetra was not weak, and that was the problem.A weak woman I could have manipulated in five minutes. A weak woman would have handed over Dahlia the moment her authority was questioned, but Petra was not weak. Petra was furious."SERA actually said it." She was pacing, then she stood by the window with her arms folded and her jaw tight. "Said maybe it's time to reconsider the interim arrangement. 'In front of half the council.""What did you say?" I asked from the bed."I told her if she had concerns about my leadership, she could challenge me formally. She shut up after that.""Good.""Good?" She turned to look at me. "It's not good, Rayan. It's a Band-Aid. They're questioning me. They've been questioning me since Illara went into the hospital, and that girl in this house is making it worse.""Then get rid of her.""I can't just—" She stopped. " Oryn would—""What would Oryn do?" I asked. "Challenge you? She won't. She's not stupid."Petra looked at me for a long moment. "
Darryn's POVI was losing my mind.Months of searching and thinking about her, going to places she might be, and following leads that went nowhere had finally broken something in my head, because now I was sensing her in places she was not.The boutique, that scent.I had walked into that shop behind Hera and felt something shift in my chest, something familiar and wrong and her, and I had moved toward it without thinking and found a woman with dark hair in a braid who was not Dahlia.Just some woman with sharp eyes who had looked at me like I had done something offensive by existing.But behind her—I kept thinking there had been someone behind her. Someone crouched low between the shelves. Someone who had felt me coming the same way I had felt them, except there had been no one.I had looked, checked, and walked the entire aisle and found nothing except baby clothes and my own desperation making me see things that were not there.Two months of this, false sightings, and the specific
Dahlia's POVThe next morning was a Saturday, which meant Oryn and I were going into town to shop for maternity clothes and baby clothes.The baby shop was on the main street, and it had everything in a space that should not have been able to hold everything. I walked through it slowly and let myself look at things without calculating anything attached to them."What about this?" Oryn asked, holding up something in pale green."It's beautiful," I replied."You say that about everything." She hissed. “Do you even have a preference?”"Everything is beautiful when it's that small."She put it in the basket anyway and moved to the next rack, and I followed her through the aisles with my hand on my stomach."Boy clothes," Oryn said, stopping at a section of blues and greys and tiny button-up shirts. "Just in case your feeling is right.""It's not a feeling," I said. "It's just—I don't know.""A feeling," she said, and held up a onesie with a small embroidered truck on it. "This one?"I too
Oryn's POVI managed to convince Senna to come back to the house with me because it wasn't safe living out here.I put Senna in my room because it was at the end of the east corridor, away from the main traffic and from Petra and Rayan's wing, with a working lock and a window that faced the garden, not the road. I took her up the back stairs with my hand on her arm and my ears on everything else, and we made it without seeing anyone, and I closed the door, turned the key, and stood with my back against it.Senna sat on the edge of my bed and looked around the room with the expression of someone relearning what indoor spaces felt like."How long since you've slept in an actual bed?” I asked as I rummaged through my wardrobe for a cover."Long enough that I'm not going to think about it," she rested her head on the pillow.I pulled the chair from the desk and sat across from her, and looked at her properly in the light for the first time. The scar was worse than I had thought in the d
Oryn's POVI screamed while throwing my hands up in the air to protect myself from whoever it was.Senna's hand came across my face first before she pressed down on my lips to shut me up."Shut up," she shushed, low and urgent. "Oryn. Shut up right now."How could I shut up when I was tackled by a dead fucking person while she not only slapped the daylight out of me but also had her hand pressed down to my mouth!She leaned closer. “If you don't keep quiet, we're going to stay in this position, and trust me, I have all evening.”“Will you shut up?” I nodded, but she wasn't quite convinced. “Oryn? ” I nodded again, a sign that I'd keep shut.Slowly, she took her hand off my mouth, and I yelled. "Get off me." She got off me.I sat up. She sat back on her heels and looked at me with the particular alertness of someone listening to more than one thing at once, her head slightly angled toward the pack house, the hedge, and the road beyond."Is anyone coming?" she asked, looking in all poss
Dahlia's POVThe east supply room took three hours, and my feet took the worst of it. I'd gone through the boxes that were unusually full of things that maybe dated back to the Stone Age.I wanted to throw some of them out, but Petra told me not to, saying that these pieces were older than.What ru
Third-person POVThe hospital….The room smelled like antiseptic and old coffee, and the particular staleness of air that was heavy with the exhales of too many frightened people."Since they got to the hospital, Oryn didn't sit down. She packed back and forth, occasionally stopping to glance at th
Luna Jane's PovI had been standing outside that door for four minutes before I decided to walk through it.Not because I was uncertain—I was never uncertain; I had not had the luxury of uncertainty in twenty-three years of navigating this pack's politics—but because I believed in timing. In lettin
Rayan's POVI needed bolts to fix the machine, and that was the entire reason I went into town on a Wednesday afternoon. The east fence post had been loose for a week, and I had been meaning to get to it, and I got to it. Hardware store, twenty minutes, back before dinner. Simple.Kael's bar was on







