All Chapters of The Wolf's Game: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

AriaMy reflection is wrong.I notice it the way you notice a sour note in a familiar song. Not immediately, not consciously, but with a slow prickle along my spine that tells me something is out of place. I’m washing my hands in the small basin in my chambers, the water is cool and steady, when the woman in the mirror lifts her head a fraction too late.I freeze.The woman staring back at me has my face.My hair falls the same way around my shoulders. My eyes are the same shade, the same shape. Even the faint scar near my jaw is there, exactly as it should be, but she is not moving when I move.My breath catches.The heartbloom burns, a slow, deliberate pulse beneath my skin.“I told you not to touch the stones,” the reflection says.Her mouth moves perfectly in time with the words. Her voice is mine, but softened, sharpened, wrong in ways I can’t fully name.“Nyxara,” I whisper.She smiles. It’s my smile too, but it sits on her face like a stolen crown.“You say my name like it’s

EdrinI have told this story many times. I have told it to firelight and stone. To rivers that never answer and to skies that pretend they don’t hear my prayers. I have told it to myself until the words wore grooves into my bones.No one ever listens the way they think they do.They listen for triumph. There is none.The Game does not begin with spectacle. That is the first lie people tell themselves. It begins with a quiet thought. With an invitation folded too neatly. With a certainty that whatever you are walking toward cannot be worse than what you are leaving behind.My brother laughed when he found the card on his bed.“Survive and win what your heart desires most,” he read aloud, grinning like the world had finally decided to be generous. “About damn time.”I remember the way the light caught in his hair. The way his voice sounded when he still believed luck could tilt in our favor if we waited long enough.I should have burned the invitation. Instead, I followed him like

AriaThe first scream wakes the castle. The second tells me something is wrong. By the third, I am already running.The halls blur as I race barefoot over stone, night air biting against my skin. Doors are flung open all around me: servants, guards, and creatures who still don’t fully remember how they came to live here spilling into the corridors with fear etched across their faces.Screams echo from every direction. There are too many. Too many to track, too many to answer, too many for any single threat to explain.“Aria!” Someone shouts behind me.I don’t stop.The heartbloom burns hot against my shoulder, pulsing in time with the frantic rhythm of my heart. The castle feels… awake. Not alert, not protective, but agitated. Like a sleeper thrashing through a nightmare.I skid to a halt at a crossroads of corridors, with my chest heaving. Sound comes from everywhere. A high-pitched terror, hoarse sobbing, someone retching violently against stone. A guard stumbles past me, pal

AriaI am pretending. It isn’t hard to do with Kael’s arms wrapped around me. Here in the comfort of our chambers, we can ignore the horrors that wait on the other side of that door. Tightening my grip on his shirt, I pull him in for another kiss. Our lips move together with practiced comfort that we have grown to know from one another. Violet purrs happily in my mind. It has been too long since we have been together, just the two of us, and as far as I am concerned, the castle can burn down around us. I am not giving us this moment between us. Suddenly, our hands are moving. Clothes fall to the floor. Kael lifts me into his arms and carries me to the bed. When he looks down at me, the worry from the past week is erased from his gaze. All I can see now is a hunger. A desperation to feel me beneath him as he ravages me. Or at least I hope that’s what he wants because that is what I need. “Foreplay?” He asks with a raised eyebrow. I tap my finger on my chin, pretending to

AriaI don’t sleep.Instead, I sit on the edge of the bed with my hands clenched in the sheets, breath shallow, heart racing as if I’ve already been running for miles. Kael is nearby, watching me carefully, like he’s afraid I’ll shatter if he reaches too suddenly.“I’m not doing this again,” I say hoarsely.Kael lifts his head. “Aria.”“No.” I stand, pacing the room, the stone cool beneath my bare feet. “I won’t submit to divine logic. I won’t play another game. I won’t be told that suffering is necessary or that choice is an illusion dressed up as mercy.”The heartbloom burns, responding to my fury like it’s listening.Kael rises slowly. “No one is asking you to.”“They will,” I interrupt. “They always do.”I drag a hand through my hair, panic tightening my chest. Edrin’s words echo relentlessly. The castle is a divine artifact. I am a key to a gate that shouldn’t exist. “I destroyed the Game because I refused to believe the world needs cruelty to function,” I say. “If something o