로그인Lana's POVTime is a strange thing when you stop trying to hold it still.I have stopped counting the days. Stopped marking their passage by the quality of light through my window or the rhythm of meals or the quiet shuffle of the guard rotation changing outside my door. Those structures belong to a version of me that needed external things to feel anchored. That version is gone. What replaced her does not need to count days because she can feel time moving inside her body, in the slow, inexorable expansion of something that has no interest in waiting for her to be ready.The power is stronger every morning.I feel it when I wake, a hum in my bones that was not there when I closed my eyes the night before, as if my body has been working through the dark hours on something I did not authorize. I feel it when I walk the east corridor, electricity moving along the surface of my skin, barely contained, politely waiting. I feel it when I am absolutely still, lying on my back in the early h
Bastien's POVThe suppression magic lifted like a hand releasing a throat.I felt it go sometime in the hours after Lana's power tore through Thornwood, after the truths Gideon had spent decades burying came flooding into the open, after the careful architecture of everything he had built began coming apart at its foundations. One moment the constant weight in my chest was there, pressing down on everything, dulling every instinct and sense. The next it was simply gone, and I was gasping with the unfamiliar sensation of being entirely myself for the first time in longer than I want to calculate.I did not run. I was too depleted for running, too wrung out from weeks of suppression, too aware that the chaos beyond the walls of wherever I was being held was only the beginning of something that would require every bit of strength I had left. So I waited. I let the healers assess me with their careful hands and their unreadable expressions. I watched the guard rotations change from Gideon
Ronan's POVI see the files in her hands the moment I enter the room.I see her face, and I know.She is standing in the center of my office surrounded by scattered papers, pale as winter, her eyes blazing with something that is not anger, not grief, not any of the emotions I have developed strategies for managing over the years of my leadership. This is worse than all of them. This is the cold, absolute certainty of someone who has assembled the pieces and seen the picture clearly and will never be able to unsee it.The second folder lies open on my desk. The one I told myself I had not opened because I was afraid of what it contained, which was a lie I had become comfortable telling myself. The truth is simpler and more damning: I did not open it because I did not want confirmation. Confirmation would have required action. Acknowledgment would have required honesty. And honesty, I have spent my entire adult life understanding, is the one thing that cannot be taken back once it is gi
Lana's POVMy hands are shaking, and I did not notice until I tried to turn the page.The first page of the second file is clinical in the way of documents produced by observers rather than participants. Detached. Precise. The kind of language that has been drained of all warmth on purpose, because warmth would require whoever wrote it to acknowledge that the subject they are analyzing is a person.Subject: Lana Hubbard.Classification: Hybrid Specimen — Fox/Wolf.Designation: Lycan. Theoretical category, previously undocumented.Lycan.The word sits in my skull and refuses to settle. I have heard it before, in whispered conversations in places where people believed I could not hear, in ancient texts Maison showed me when he was trying to explain what I might be becoming, in the frightened stories that pass between wolves when they think they are among only their own. A Lycan is a creature of legend. Something that exists in the histories as a warning, not a possibility. Half Fox, hal
Lana's POVNo one speaks about it openly.The wolves are too disciplined, too careful with their Alpha's grief and Jessica's loss to voice what I see moving in their eyes every time I enter a room. But silence can carry as much accusation as words, and the silence in Red Creek since that night has been very loud. It follows me through the corridors and sits down at meals with me and waits outside my door in the mornings.Whose fault was it?I know the answer. I know it with the clarity of a truth-seer and the certainty of someone who was actually there, who poured everything she had into keeping that small life going, who exhausted herself fighting for a child she had no obligation to fight for at all. Without me, that baby would have been gone weeks before it was. I gave it more time than it would have had. I gave it everything I was capable of giving.It was not enough. But it was not nothing. And it was not my fault.That does not stop the looks.I have grown familiar with the spec
Jessica's POVThe pain is unbearable.Not the physical pain, though that is present too, a tearing, hollow ache that has settled into my body where life used to be. Not that pain. That pain I could have handled. I have been shaped by harder things than physical suffering and I know how to metabolize it, how to press through it, how to keep moving on the other side of it.It is the silence that is destroying me.One moment there was a heartbeat. That fragile, unsteady flutter I had learned to know through everything, through the lies and the schemes and the desperate months of trying to hold together a plan that was already falling apart. It was weak, yes. It was never the strong, certain pulse I had imagined in my better moments. But it was there. A presence. A life. A future.And then it was not.I scream. I do not remember making the decision to scream. The sound tears out of me without permission, raw and primal, the sound of something animal that has nothing to do with the control
Lana's POVIdris has just dropped a bomb that didn't exactly go off. What exactly was his power and why was it so important to Morwen. The image of her cold and calculated smile seemed to burn into my skin. Unlock your legacy. Claim it. Her words twisted in my gut, now intertwined with Idris’s shoc
Lana's POVThe air in the room didn’t just crackle it froze, like literally. Ronan’s presence was a wall of fury and ice. He looked terrifying.“Enjoy your date?” The question was a crack in the silence.I closed the door behind me, leaning against it. “It was a conversation.”“It was a performance
Lana's POVThe air in the study turned to glass. Ronan’s quiet question hung between us, sharp enough to cut. My gaze flicked from his stony face back to the glowing screen, to those damning words: She’s just playing with you.All the confusion, the fear, the swirling emotions of the past week crys
Lana's POVThe silence that followed my declaration was a vacuum that sucked the air from the room. Ronan had shifted from white to a terrifying rage. “You will not,” he said, his voice stern.“I will,” I replied, my own voice surprisingly steady. “I’ll take a week. Seven days. To think. To… asses







