Chapter 91

Collateral Heat POV: General Vesh (Elara Vance)Marching an army south was a logistical headache. Being magically tied to Kaelen while doing it was a whole different kind of torture.Moving ten thousand armed Lycans across frozen ground is loud and messy no matter what. The Vanguard kept tight formation, boots churning the snow into grey slush. The Shadow Legion moved through the tree line on either side, quiet as smoke.Normally I'd be riding up and down the column, checking supply wagons, yelling at captains to pick up the pace, scouting ahead. That's the job.Instead I was stuck inside an invisible five-foot box.I rode a big white Wildland wolf eating up the miles. Kaelen rode a black one right next to me, close enough our mounts' shoulders kept brushing. If my wolf so much as pulled a stride ahead, that phantom chain bolted to my chest yanked tight and knocked the wind clean out of me.And the space thing wasn't even the worst part. The worst part was catching his heat.The bond

Chapter 92

Burning the Barricades POV: General Vesh (Elara Vance)The air outside the tent was cold enough to freeze the breath in my lungs. I didn't feel it. Not really. Not with him wrapped around me like that.I woke up tangled in Kaelen's arms, buried in the furs, and for a second I just lay there, doing nothing, feeling nothing except how quiet everything had gotten. Yesterday our bond had been all noise — sharp, jangling, two nervous systems fighting each other for control. Sometime in the night, without either of us really trying, it had settled into something else. Something steady. Like we'd finally figured out how to breathe on the same beat.He was already awake when I opened my eyes. Just watching me. He didn't say anything, just reached over and tucked a piece of silver hair behind my ear, and I didn't need words either — I could feel it, plain as anything, that quiet, steady I love you running under everything else in his chest.Time to go to work, I thought, and felt my own focus

Chapter 93

The Price Of SilkPOV: General Vesh (Elara Vance)It took twenty minutes to walk from the gates to the palace, and we didn't have to draw a single sword the whole way.The city was in shock. The mercenaries we hadn't already burned to ash had dropped their shields in the mud and run for the hills. The Vanguard moved through the lower streets fast and quiet, tearing down the starve-out barricades the Dukes had put up against their own people.Kaelen and I walked straight up the middle of the main road, covered in soot and mud, still smelling faintly like ozone from the blast.People peeked out from behind doors and shutters, terrified, probably expecting us to torch the place. But when they saw the two of us walking past, leaving them alone, not even glancing at their houses, I watched the fear on their faces shift into something else. Something closer to hope, if I'm honest, and that hit me harder than I expected it to."They're looking at us like we're ghosts," I said quietly, eyes o

Chapter 94

The Bleeding WoodsPOV: General Vesh (Elara Vance)You can only push a body so far before it just stops listening to you.We left the Capital four hours after taking it. The Vanguard barely had time to scrape the mud off their armor, eat something hot, and refill their canteens before we were moving east again, under a sky so dark you couldn't find the moon in it.Going from cobblestone streets to the frozen foothills of the Eastern Peaks was rough. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in a few hours. This wasn't the soft, powdery snow I grew up with — it was hard, packed ice that chewed straight through the bottoms of our boots.I was exhausted in a way I don't have great words for. Bone-deep, hollow, the kind of tired that makes the edges of your vision go soft. In three days I'd fought a god, dragged my mate back from actual death with a spell nobody's supposed to use, and turned a steel fortress into dust. I felt scraped out. Empty.But I didn't stumble. Couldn't afford to.Beca

Chapter 95

The PathogenPOV: General Vesh (Elara Vance)I didn't walk away from that pile of ash right away.While the Vanguard threw up a defensive line around us, shields facing the dark, weeping tree line, I dropped to a knee in the frozen mud. Pulled one of my blades and used the tip to poke through what was left of the mutated Thrall.Something about it felt off. Not dead-off. Working-off. Like it hadn't gotten the memo that it was supposed to be finished.Normally when holy fire hits a vampire or a resurrected corpse, the dark magic in it just fizzles out — turns to harmless smoke and drifts away, gone in a few seconds, like it never mattered in the first place. This ash wasn't drifting anywhere. It was clumping. Thick, slow, and moving with something close to rhythm, like it was still breathing somehow, still trying to figure out what came next."Don't touch it," Kaelen said, coming up behind me. Didn't need to look at him to know his jaw was locked tight — I felt that protective instinct

Chapter 96

The Handler's Price POV: Alpha Kaelen BlackwoodThe hardest part of being an Alpha isn't the dying. It's the killing.I stood in the middle of the smoking, scrubbed-clean crater that used to be Oakhaven, watching white ash settle over my boots. The wind had finally come back, pushing what was left of two hundred of my own people out into the dark trees. I kept thinking about the census reports I used to read every winter — names, ages, how many kids each household had. Real people. Not numbers on a page anymore, and not people anymore either. Just ash finding new places to land.My pack. My people. I was supposed to be the wall standing between them and the worst of the world, and I'd just told my mate to burn them to nothing.Something heavy and jagged dropped straight onto my chest, hard enough that breathing took actual effort. My wolf was howling somewhere in the back of my skull, a small, wrecked sound. I'd failed them. Simple as that.But before that could pull me all the way u