Rhea's POV "Jax. Come here." He walked toward me without argument, crossing the room in his socks, and I crouched down and took his face in my hands the way I had in the courtyard, checking him, trying to find the crack in that impossible composure. There was no crack. "How long," I said quietly. "Since before I can remember." He said it like it was the simplest thing. "The dreams started when I was really small. Before I could talk properly. They were confusing at first, just images, just feelings. But the spirit wolf, the one Lyra called for me today, he has been in my dreams my whole life." He glanced at Cain, then back to me. "He is not just a wolf. He is a messenger. He has been explaining things to me slowly, in pieces, because he said if he told me everything at once it would break me." "What has he told you," Kael said from behind me. Jax looked at his father. "Everything you just heard. The Veil. The sealing. What I am." He paused. "What it costs." The word costs land

Rhea's POV "Everyone stand down." I said it before Kael could move. Before Mara could draw. Before any of the wolves in the room could do the thing their instincts were screaming at them to do, which was launch themselves at the two men who had just come through a hole in reality and park themselves in the center of our main room like they owned the floor they were standing on. Nobody moved. Good. I stepped forward. The man in the suit watched me come. Up close he was smaller than I had registered from across the room, slight in the way very old things sometimes were, like centuries had compressed him down to his essential parts and discarded everything unnecessary. His eyes were the colour of old coins and they tracked me with an intelligence that was almost uncomfortable to meet directly. "You are Erasmus Vale," I said. A feeling shifted in his face. Not surprising. He had not been surprised by anything in a very long time. More like a recalibration, a reassessment of what h

Rhea's POV "Turn on the radio." Vera was already reaching for the dial before I finished saying it. The signal was patchy out here in the northern territory but she found a station and the broadcaster's voice came through tight and breathless, the particular tone journalists used when something was happening that their vocabulary was not built to describe. "Worldwide reports are coming in of a second lunar body visible in the night sky. Scientists are calling it an unprecedented optical phenomenon, insisting there is no danger, but social media is overwhelmed with footage from six continents. Religious groups are gathering in public squares across the globe. The White House has issued a brief statement asking citizens to remain calm." I turned it off. "Every wolf on earth felt that the moment it appeared," Vera said quietly. She was holding her hands in her lap and they were not steady. "They know what it means even if they have no words for it. The instinct is in the blood." "

Rhea's POV"Don't let her shift back."I heard Vera's voice from somewhere to my left, urgent and clear above everything else happening in the ruins. I did not fully understand it yet because I was still processing what I was, what I had become the moment my wolf came through, what the silver light coating my fur meant and why every wolf in the field had gone completely motionless.I looked at Cain.He was standing at the edge of the ritual circle with his hand raised to stop the two wolves beside him from moving, and he was staring at me with an expression I had not seen on his face once in the short time I had known him.He was stunned.Cain Ironfang, two hundred and nineteen years old, architect of more patience and planning than I could comprehend, was standing in the ruins of his ancestral home with his mouth slightly open and his ancient eyes wide.That told me everything about what I was looking at when I looked at myself.I turned toward Voss's wolves. There were twelve of the

Rhea's POV"What does that mean?"Kael said it to the air, to whatever had just used my mouth, his arms still locked around me and his voice doing that thing it did when he was furious and frightened in equal measure and was managing both with extreme precision.The silver faded from my vision. I was fully myself again, in my own body, in my own head, and I was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature."It means what it said," Cain answered. He had crossed the ruins to stand near us, and whatever shock my white wolf had caused him was packed away now, his face back to that measured calm. "The Veilkeeper does not hold the door from this side. She holds it from within. That is the function. The latch works from the inside."Kael looked at him. "She goes in.""Yes.""And the door seals behind her.""That is the nature of a permanent seal." Cain said it without cruelty, just fact, laid out clean. "The Veilkeeper enters, holding the passage stable while the Veilborn completes

Rhea's POV "He is not gone. He went through." Cain said it before I could spiral past the point of functioning, his voice cutting across the ruins with the authority of someone who had been on the other side and knew what going through looked like versus what gone looked like. I stopped spinning and faced him. "You are certain." "The tear widened when Vale's charge detonated. The boy went in to prevent a full uncontrolled breach. He contained it with his body." Cain was already moving toward the tear, studying it, his hands moving around its edges without touching it. "He is buying us time. His spirit wolf is guiding him." I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and closed my eyes for exactly two seconds. And felt him. Faint, like a signal from very far away, but there. A tether I had not known existed until this moment, thin as a thread and absolutely certain, and on the other end of it was Jax. Moving. Alive. Frightened in the way that did not stop you, the functional kind

All Chapters of RUNAWAY BRIDE: BOUND TO THE BIKER ALPHA: Chapter 41 - Chapter 46

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