Semua Bab Marked for Betrayal: Bab 41 - Bab 50

POV: Mia (Zero)The fire was real. It wasn’t a distraction.Smoke rolled in from the southern ridge like breath from a dying god, thick with pine, fur, and accelerant. The watchtower bell rang again—three sharp notes. That wasn’t a patrol alarm. That was a breach.Alex reached the wall first. Nova and I weren’t far behind. From the ridge, we saw them.Not an army.A strike team.Twelve Hollow Fang wolves, cloaked in black and bone, moving through the forest like ghosts. Each had marks carved into their arms—binding runes that weren’t just symbolic. They’d been sealed with blood. They weren’t here to threaten.They were here to end something.“Split their line,” I shouted to Nova. “Cut them before they get to the barracks.”She was already shifting before I finished. Her eyes flashed silver, and her voice dropped into the low growl she rarely used. “They don’t run like wolves. They run like assassins.”Chito was already moving with two sentries. They’d positioned to intercept from the

POV: NovaI ran until the forest swallowed me.Branches whipped my face, roots tore at my boots, but I didn’t stop. Not when the howls rose behind me. Not when the smoke from the forge turned the sky the color of memory. I didn’t stop even when my legs trembled and my lungs burned like I'd swallowed coals.Because if I stopped, I’d start doubting myself.And if I started doubting, I’d never recover from what I’d done.The Hollow Fang hadn’t followed. They’d scattered as planned—back into the dark, to report, to hide, to hunt again. We weren’t friends. We weren’t allies. They were simply the only ones who’d listen when I told them what Mia had become.No one else had.Not Alex. Not Chito. Not even the pack I’d bled beside.They saw her as a leader.I saw her for what she was becoming: a doorway.To what, I wasn’t sure.But I knew something ancient had begun to slip through the cracks of her control—and it terrified me.I reached the ridge line and finally collapsed beneath an old ash t

POV: Mia (Zero)I didn’t ease back into myself. I snapped.One second, I was lost in the cold weight of silence—no breath, no wolf, no pulse in my limbs—and the next, I was choking on firelight and blood and the unmistakable scent of home.Darkhaven.Not burned. Not overrun.Still standing.But barely.Alex was asleep beside my cot, head slumped forward, hand still curled around mine. His blood was on my sleeve. Old, dried. Not his worst wound—but deeper than I liked. I tried not to wake him as I sat up, but the cot creaked, and his eyes opened instantly. Alert. Wolf-quick. He tensed—then relaxed when he saw me upright.“You’re back.”“I wasn’t gone.”“You weren’t here either.”I looked down at my arm. Bruised. Bandaged. My side still burned where the Hollow Fang blade had scraped bone. But my mind was clear.Too clear.“The scout,” I said. “The message.”He reached beside the bed and handed me the scroll.I read the words.The heir must kneel soon.And the scrawl beneath it chilled m

POV: Mia (Zero)The cloth in my hands was rough, thickened by ash and time, but the symbol burned through it with such intensity that it felt like it was still alive beneath my fingertips. The lines of the sigil were carved deep, not in ink but in something darker—dried blood, old and ancient, blackened at the edges like it had been scorched into the weave. At first, I thought it was another warning, another threat from the Hollow Fang or their gods, but Chito’s voice had carried certainty when he spoke.“It’s a name,” he had said, standing beside the embers of the ritual fire. “And not just a name. It’s the first.”I hadn’t responded then, too stunned by the weight of the revelation, too aware of the blood still drying beneath my fingernails and the echo of the altar’s destruction still pulsing in the soles of my boots. Now, back within the walls of Darkhaven, I sat in the long hall with the cloth stretched across the council table, the fire low behind me, and silence pressing in fro

POV: Mia (Zero)The sky changed as we crossed into the southern ridge.It wasn’t just the light that dimmed, or the color of the clouds—it was the weight in the air, a pressure behind the eyes and inside the bones, like something watching from beneath the roots of the earth itself. The scouts didn’t speak. Even Chito, who usually masked discomfort with grit or wisdom, held his silence as if afraid that words might draw something ancient closer.According to the fragments we found in the stone archive beneath the Cross Vale, this place had a name once: Narethin, which meant “the place where breath ends.” It was the last known location Seran had walked before disappearing from every bloodline record. Not a battlefield. Not a grave. Something older. A sanctum, maybe. Or a prison.I wasn’t sure which one I was walking into.Alex moved beside me, his blade sheathed but hand near the hilt. He hadn’t said much since the Sealed One’s refusal. The tension in him was different now. Not mistrust