Alpha Zane's POV "You have been standing here?" I asked Krayne whose head was bowed to me at the door. "I apologize, your highness." He bowed even deeper, his head so low that his chin almost touched his chest. "Stand upright, Krayne. I do not care so much for those formalities." My footsteps echoed softly down the hallway as I walked to the staircase. "I got—" "Shh," I hushed him, putting a finger to my lip and pointing at the door I just walked out of. "She's asleep," I spelled it out for him. "Oh oh yes." He made a sad attempt at whispering since he was only really used to yelling orders and barking out instructions. "How long?" I needed to clarify something. His head jerked down sharply, probably because he was recalling what must have been a traumatic experience for his ears. Or he was thinking of a diplomatic lie to tell me. Maybe both. "Long enough, your highness." He chose to say the truth. Not a bad choice. I would have snapped his neck if he had lied. "I see." My

Freya's POV My eyelids fluttered open, heavy with the lingering effects of the drug that had been pressed into my nose the night before with a handkerchief. My surroundings looked like my eyes were still closed. The room was a blur of darkness, and my ears were filled with a strange, almost imperceptible droning noise like the distant hum of a hive. I tried to make sense of my surroundings, but my mind was still foggy. "Ugh." I groaned as my hand touched something mushy and sticky beside me while I tried to get up from my lying position. Startled, I jerked upright, my brain reeling as I slammed my head on something hard behind me. "The fuck is this?" "Food. And you ruined it. Took me a great deal of time and effort to prepare." A lilting, crisply accented voice muttered, a faint edge of annoyance evident in her tone. The hairs on the back of my neck rose upon hearing her voice. I crouched immediately, ready to shift if need be. "Who are you?" My hypertuned senses would normally

Freya's POV For a moment, I was frozen. Which was ironic, in a way. I had always thought of Gertrude as cold and immobile, but now I was the one who couldn’t move. I saw why Gertrude made us run. And the reason only fueled my intense loathing for her even more. How dare she? And there I was, naively thinking it was her way to help me relax and stave off the gnawing uneasiness back in the cave. Now that I thought about it, I could see how stupid I sounded. "Get her some clothes, Tuin," she whispered to the lad that led us in. My eyes took in my surroundings. The room seemed to blur as I struggled to absorb all that I was seeing. It was like I had entered a strange still life in black and white, with males, females and pups arranged around the room like living corpses, waiting to die again, their faces thrown into stark contrast by the flash of a lightning bolt through the small windows. What was this place? She cleared her throat with a discreet cough, her gaze darting around

Freya's POVI think I used the wrong word.She didn't come to me. "Come" was too gentle a word. Too elegant.She, more like, staggered into my thoughts, the vision of her as vivid as day, her eyes wide with agony, her body wracked with sobs and slick with sweat and tears. The pain from her was so intense, it consumed me even from the inside out. I could literally taste the stench of her suffering on my tongue.I really looked at her.She looked exactly like me. Her face was the perfect reflection of mine, her eyes the same shade of blue, her hair the same shade of white. It was as if I was staring at myself in my dressing mirror.She was my spitting image. I was told that we looked the same but I wasn't expecting us both to look like fucking clones of each other. This extraordinary coincidence filled me with a sense of unease. How could fate be so broken, to bestow upon Zane such a twisted blessing?At first, it was only her I saw. Then the vision broadened to reveal that she was laid

Freya's POV I had an old power. An old power that even Gertrude, the killer of mothers and the layer of curses, or anyone else in the whole of Adivaine could only dream of having. The prophecy was the only way for me to access that power. Gertrude said this to me on the first day I fought against having the prophecy fulfilled by my own hands. "I can't identify what power it is that you have but I know that you know this, feel this." She said this with so much conviction I briefly wondered if we switched bodies sometime in the past without my knowledge. I sure did feel a lot of power. To sleep. Take that moment for example, I had yawned no less than a hundred times since I began trying to reach Adalia again. And by "since" I mean thirty minutes ago. Darius scoffed and watched me with narrowed eyes, his expression a battleground of annoyance and amusement. "You really do feel sleepy, don't you?" He asked. It seemed like a trick question so I didn't deign to answer it. I was much