جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 10

I gasped, my lungs burning as if I had just swallowed ash.My hands flew to my chest, expecting to feel the slick warmth of blood and the deep, jagged wound of a silver dagger. But there was no blade. There was no blood. My heart was slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird, but it was beating. Whole. Intact."Aria? Sweetheart, are you awake? The Alpha’s carriage will be here in two hours!"The voice made me freeze. It was soft, maternal, and entirely impossible.My mother. She had died three years before the apocalypse, caught in a rogue wolf attack that I now realized Caleb had likely orchestrated to isolate me.I scrambled out of the bed, my legs tangling in silk sheets that were entirely too luxurious for the wasteland I had just left. I stumbled toward the full-length vanity mirror in the corner of the room.The girl staring back at me wasn't the gaunt, drained Saintess chained to an obsidian altar. She was nineteen again. Her skin was flushed with life, her long silver-white

The midnight air bit sharply at my skin as I slipped past the balcony of my guest quarters. The Blood Moon packhouse was dead quiet, save for the distant, rhythmic howling of the perimeter patrols.In my past life, I would have been asleep, wrapped in the false security of Caleb's promises. Tonight, I wore close-fitting black leather, a silver dagger hidden in my boot, and a heavy hooded cloak.My target lay two miles east: the Forbidden Catacombs.The wolves believed the catacombs were protected by an ancient blood-lock that only an Alpha could breach. What they didn't know—what Caleb hadn't realized until Doomsday—was that the lock didn't run on wolf blood. It ran on the ancient, primordial magic of the Saintess lineage. My lineage.Stealth was my only ally. Using my knowledge of the guards' rotation schedules from the future, I slipped through the shadow of the pine trees, entirely invisible to their canine senses. Within an hour, the towering, jagged stone entrance of the catacomb

Smuggling a seven-foot-tall, shadow-wielding Lycan King into a packhouse teeming with sharp-nosed werewolves should have been impossible. But Killian wasn't an ordinary creature.By the time we reached the perimeter of the packhouse grounds, the dark, oppressive aura that had suffocated the catacombs was entirely gone. Killian drew a deep breath, and before my eyes, the shadows bleeding from his skin vanished. The terrifying, otherworldly silver in his eyes dimmed down to a deep, striking steel-grey.Even his scent shifted. The heavy, primal smell of rain and ancient magic faded, replaced by the mundane, masking scent of a regular human."Wolf magic is crude," Killian murmured, adjusting the high collar of a dark jacket we had stolen from a guard post. "They rely on their noses, but they only smell what they expect to smell. To them, I am nothing but a common human stray.""A very large, very intimidating human stray," I corrected, looking him up and down. He still towered over me, hi

The aftermath of the sparring match left the pavilion dead silent. Elena was carried off to the infirmary, her pride as broken as the tiles beneath her, while the elders stared at Killian with a mixture of fear and profound confusion. A baseline human shouldn’t have been able to move like that.Caleb, however, was no longer looking at Killian. He was staring at me, his eyes dark with a desperate, frantic calculation."A marvelous display of... human mercenary skill," Caleb said, his voice forced and tight as he raised his silver chalice toward the remaining crowd. "Let us toast to the strength of our new allies, and to the health of my beautiful future Luna."An attendant stepped forward, pouring a rich, dark blackberry wine into my golden goblet. I caught the faint, heavy scent of jasmine hidden beneath the fruity aroma.Night-blooming Lilith.My eyes narrowed slightly. It wasn’t a lethal poison. It was a rare, forbidden werewolf aphrodisiac—a drug designed to break a human's mental

The heavy scent of the damp, early-morning forest did nothing to clear the electric tension humming in my veins.By sunrise, Killian’s disguise was firmly back in place, his terrifying silver eyes dialed back to a deceptive, calm steel-grey. But every time his gaze brushed against mine, the phantom heat on my lips reminded me of the broken boundaries in the dark. We were no longer just allies rewriting a timeline; we were two souls tethered together by a burning defiance against fate."Aria, my love," Caleb’s grating voice cut through the morning mist.He stood at the edge of the woods, surrounded by fifty of the Blood Moon Pack's elite warriors, all clad in leather hunting armor. Elena was among them, her face pale, a thick bandage concealing the deep cut Killian had left on her cheek. She was staring at Killian with a lethal, hyper-focused hatred."You look radiant this morning," Caleb said, though his smile was purely transactional. "The elders have decided that before we finalize