Semua Bab The Lullaby of Wolfbane: Bab 41 - Bab 50

The hallway to the royal infirmary feels like a different wing of the palace, same marble, same gold-trimmed doors, same guards standing like statues, yet the air is wrong. It smells like boiled herbs and hot cloth and something thin and metallic underneath, like sickness has soaked into the stone itself. Adrian walks beside me, close without touching. His presence is a steady pressure at my side, quiet, controlled, watchful. The King leads us. He’s regained his posture, but not his ease. I can see it in his shoulders, in the way his jaw tightens like he’s bracing for a blow he’s taken before. Two guards open the doors. We step inside. The Queen’s chambers are dim, curtains drawn to a dull gray light. A low fire burns, more for comfort than warmth. Chairs sit near the bed like people have been rotating through them, keeping watch in shifts. And there she is. Not the Luna from the portraits. Those paintings show a woman carv

The abandoned building looks like nothing from the outside, just a gutted shell on the edge of the capital’s older district, windows boarded, stone dark with soot and age. The kind of place the palace pretends doesn’t exist. Inside, candlelight flickers. Not scattered. Arranged. A long table sits in the center of the open floor like someone is hosting a dinner party in a ruin, candles in uneven clusters, wax spilling down glass holders, flames bending in drafts that slip through cracked boards. Boxes of takeaway food are laid out with absurd care, lids folded back like a feast is about to begin. My boots scrape over dust and splintered wood. My wolf presses forward, teeth bared. Because I can smell them. Not one. Not two. Many. Hidden in the dark rafters. Behind broken pillars. Down the hall to my left where a doorway has collapsed. They’re holding still, controlling their breathing, but they can’t hide what they are from a wolf who’s finally awake. And underneath it all, like a

I don’t sleep. I sit in Melody’s clinic office with my hands wrapped around a mug I never drink from, staring at the wrapped package like it might start breathing. Melody moves like a storm contained in a human body, fast, exact, furious in the quiet way that means she’s already decided she will win.“Start from the beginning,” she says again, voice clipped. “Every word he said. Every smell. Every person in the room.”I try. I really do. But my mind keeps snapping back to one image like a broken compass needle: Adrian on his knees. Silver cutting into his wrists. Blood on his mouth behind that gag. His eyes angry, alive, begging me not to trade my soul for his skin.Melody asks something and I blink, realizing I’ve stopped answering. Her jaw tightens. She leans down, catching my face between her hands, gentle, but immovable.“Abby,” she says, forcing me into the present. “I need your brain. Shock later. Survival now.”My throat works. I n

By the time we slip back into the palace through the service entrance, the cold has settled into my bones like it intends to live there. I keep Adrian’s ring clenched in my fist so tightly the edges bite my skin. I need the pain. It keeps me from floating away into shock. Logan doesn’t speak as we move, just stalks forward like fury given legs. Lia stays at my shoulder, steady and watchful, her calm so practiced it feels like a weapon. We don't go to the King. We go to Melody. Because the last thing we can afford right now is a roar that alerts every hidden ear in the palace that we’re moving. Melody takes one look at our faces and doesn’t bother asking for pleasantries. “What happened?” she demands, already stepping toward us. Logan’s voice is clipped, controlled with effort. “They moved him. Before we got there.” My bond pulses in my chest, answering like a cruel echo: alive, alive, alive, fa

The pain through the bond hits again, less like a knife, more like a pulse of electric heat straight under my sternum. I gasp and grab the edge of Melody’s desk.Lia’s hand is on my back immediately. “Abby. Breathe.”Melody doesn’t waste time asking if I’m okay. She’s already moving, two fingers at my wrist, eyes narrowing as she tracks my pulse like it’s a monitor.“That wasn’t panic,” I choke out.Melody’s jaw tightens. “No. It wasn’t.”My throat burns. “They hurt him.”Logan’s face turns to stone. Nate goes still in a way that makes him look older, like something finally snapped into place inside him and it isn’t going back.“We move,” I say.Logan’s voice is iron. “We move smart.”Before I can argue, Melody is already shoving her quarantine orders into a folder and handing it to one of her clinic guards.“Double the Queen’s door,” she orders. “No one enters without my signature and the Prin