All Chapters of the last wolf witch.: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Selene's POVThey said the last wolf witch died a decade ago.They were almost right.I pressed my back against the cold stone wall and counted breaths. Four in. Four out. The way my mother taught me when I was small enough to sit in her lap — back when we still had a home, still had a hearth, still had the luxury of believing the world might leave us alone.That was before the hunters came.The forest outside Thornveil was quiet, which meant nothing good. Silence in these woods was not peace. It was the moment before a trap snapped shut. I'd been running for three days straight, sleeping in snatches against tree roots, surviving on stream water and whatever my shaking hands could forage. My boots had soaked through somewhere around the second creek crossing. I couldn't feel my toes anymore.I told myself I didn't care. "You are the last, Selene." My mother's voice still lived somewhere behind my sternum, warm and permanent as a coal. "Which means you are also the most dangerous th

Selene's POVBy morning, everyone in Ironmoor knew what I was.I could feel it the way you feel weather before it arrives — a shift in pressure, a collective held breath. When Lyra came to bring me food at dawn, she didn't say anything about it. She set the tray down, looked at me with that same flat inventory gaze, and said, "Word traveled fast. Don't go outside yet.""And if I do?""Then you'll have a worse morning than me." She paused at the door. "The Alpha hasn't announced anything officially. Until he does, you're nobody. Nobody is safer than what they're currently imagining."She left before I could ask what they were imagining.I ate. I washed my face in the basin. I looked out the window at Ironmoor in daylight and tried to read it the way my mother had taught me to read every new place — exits, sight lines, where the power gathered and where it thinned. A pack's territory had a texture to it, an emotional resonance built up over generations of wolves living and dying in the

Selene's POV · Kael's POVI started with the bond-web.Every pack has one — an invisible lattice of emotional connection binding wolf to wolf, strongest between mates and family, thinner between strangers, nonexistent between enemies. An ordinary wolf can feel the edges of it, sense the mood of the pack the way you sense a change in temperature. A wolf witch can read it like a map.I sat cross-legged on the floor of the war room — Kael had not told me to leave it, which I decided counted as permission — closed my eyes, and pressed my awareness outward like water finding its level. The bond-web of Ironmoor spread around me in the dark behind my eyelids: dozens of threads, each one a different texture and weight. Some were old and settled as rope. Some were new and bright as wire. Some were frayed.I wasn't looking for the spy's thread. I wouldn't recognise it — guilt doesn't have a signature, at least not one I could read at distance. What I was looking for was a gap. An absence. A thr

Selene's POV · Kael's POVThe war council happened in the dead room between midnight and dawn, when the pack was quiet and the fires had burned low and the only sound was the wind moving through the Ironmoor pines like it was looking for something it had lost.Lyra spread maps across the long table. Kael stood at its head. Cade sat at the far end with his hands wrapped around a cup he wasn't drinking from, his eyes carrying the particular hollowness of someone who had been running on guilt for so long that relief hadn't found its shape yet. Two senior pack wolves — a broad-shouldered woman named Renne and a quiet older man called Soren who had apparently been Kael's father's Beta before him — flanked the table's edges.I sat beside Kael.Not behind him. Not across from him. Beside him, which was still new enough that I noticed it every time — the deliberateness of it, the small territorial statement it made to every wolf in the room. He had not asked me to sit there. He had simply pul

Selene's POV · Kael's POVTwenty minutes was enough time to understand exactly what you were walking into and not enough time to be afraid of it.Ironmoor moved fast. I had spent six days inside this pack and I had watched it be wary and suspicious and cautiously curious, and now I watched it be something else entirely — a single coordinated body, every wolf knowing their position without being told, falling into formation with the quiet efficiency of people who had trained for this and trusted the person leading them to have made the right calls before the moment arrived.Lyra had the south perimeter. Renne and Soren took east and southeast. Cade — who had appeared in full gear despite Kael's initial objection, wearing the expression of someone who understood they were not going to be talked out of this and was saving everyone the time — was positioned at the inner gate with six of the pack's younger wolves. His hands were steady. His jaw was set.I stood at Kael's left shoulder at t