Se connecterVictor Ashford stood in Ethan's study looking like a man who'd already made up his mind before he walked through the door, and I knew from the set of his shoulders that whatever he was about to offer me would change everything.I hadn't expected him. Ethan told me only an hour before that his father had arrived unannounced, riding hard from Ashford territory with two guards and none of the usual formal escort that typically preceded an Alpha's visit, and something about the speed of it had my stomach knotting before I even walked into the room."Clara." He said my name the way he always did, with a weight of respect that had never once wavered since the day he first defended my right to my title in front of Blackwood's council. "Sit, please. This concerns you as much as it does Ethan."I sat. Olivia had the twins in the nursery down the hall, and some part of me stayed acutely aware of the distance, my ears straining for any sound that didn't belong."Ethan told me about the tracker,"
Someone had been watching us, and I'd fed my son his breakfast three feet from the window the whole time.I found out the way you find out most things in that house, secondhand and hours too late, Olivia bursting into the nursery with her hair still wild from running and her chest heaving like she'd sprinted the entire way from the border."They caught someone," she said, no preamble at all. "A tracker. Near the eastern ridge, maybe half a mile out. Ethan's warriors have him now."My hands went still on Noah's spoon, oatmeal dripping slow off the edge of it onto the tray. "Watching what?""Watching here, Clara." Olivia's eyes flicked toward the window, toward the exact spot where I'd been sitting not twenty minutes earlier with both twins in view, sunlight pouring in like nothing in the world could touch us. "Watching this house."The spoon slipped out of my fingers entirely. Noah made an indignant sound at the interruption to his breakfast, small fists slapping the tray, and I barely
Serena offered Lucas money to spy on me, and he told me later he almost broke her jaw right there in the hallway.He didn't tell me for two full days after it happened. That was the part that stung worst when I finally heard it, not the offer itself, but the silence after, Lucas moving through Ethan's territory with his usual quiet steadiness while something this dangerous sat coiled underneath it, unspoken."I didn't want to worry you," he said, when I finally cornered him about it in the kitchen, Lily asleep against my shoulder, Noah gumming a wooden ring on the floor between us. "You've got enough on you without adding this.""Lucas." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. "You don't get to decide what's too much for me to carry. Not anymore. Tell me what happened."He exhaled, long and slow, and pulled out the chair across from me like he needed the weight of sitting down before he could say it."She caught me near the border two days ago. Said she was there checking on Ale
Alex woke up screaming my name, and the whole pack house heard it before he even opened his eyes.He didn't tell me this part himself, not directly, not for a long time after. It was Ava who told me, sitting cross legged on the floor of Ethan's nursery with Lily's small fist wrapped around her finger, her voice pitched low even though the twins were long past understanding any of it."He woke up howling," she said. "Not screaming like a person. Howling, Clara. Like his wolf tore right through him in his sleep. Half the west wing was awake before Margaret even got his door open."I remember my stomach dropping at that, some old instinct in me still wired to worry for him even after everything, even after the humiliation and the engagement and the way he'd looked at me like a stranger for months. I hated that instinct. I hated it and I couldn't kill it either."What was he dreaming about?"Ava's mouth twisted. "You. Obviously you. He wouldn't say the details to anyone but Margaret, and
Ryan told me later that he had his hand on Serena's door before he even remembered walking there.Not knocking. Just resting flat against the wood, like his body had decided something his mind hadn't caught up to yet. He said the letter Isabella handed Reed had been sitting in his chest for two days like a stone he couldn't swallow or spit out, and by the second night he'd stopped being able to sit through dinner without his hands curling into fists under the table."I wasn't thinking," he told me, weeks later, sitting across from me at Ethan's kitchen table with his jaw still tight just from the memory of it. "I keep telling myself I was building a case. Being smart about it. But standing there outside her door, Clara, I wasn't thinking about evidence. I was thinking about you sitting alone in that guest wing while she redecorated the nursery like she already owned it."He said his knuckles had actually grazed the wood once, a knock half formed, before Margaret's hand closed around h
The letter in Isabella's hands could end her cousin's life, and her fingers wouldn't stop shaking long enough to hand it over."Just give it to me," Dr. Reed said, low, like he was talking to a spooked animal. Maybe he was. "Isabella. It's just paper.""It's not just paper." My voice, if I'd been speaking, would've sounded exactly like that. I know because I've heard Isabella describe it a hundred times since, the way her own words came out cracked down the middle. "It's her handwriting. If anyone in this pack recognizes it, she's done. Do you understand that? Done."I wasn't in the room. I want to be clear about that. I'm telling this the way Isabella told it to me weeks later, sitting across from me in Ethan's kitchen with Lily asleep against my shoulder, her voice barely above a whisper even though Serena was a hundred miles away and couldn't have heard her if she'd screamed it. But I've replayed it so many times in my head that it feels like mine now. Like I was standing in that e







