All Chapters of BETWEEN DEATH AND DESIRE : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Three weeks pass, and I learn how to disappear.I learn the halls that guards do not watch. I learn which kitchen mistress does not count the bread, and which one counts twice. I learn to keep my eyes down and my voice small, because Rue's body flinches at loud noise and I have decided that is useful now. Better they think I am weak than wonder what I really am.I also learn, slowly, in pieces, what happened to Elara Veyne.I hear it first from an old wolf scrubbing pots beside me, talking to no one in particular the way old women do. "Poisoned the heir, she did," the woman mutters, not even looking at me. "Sweet-faced little thing, too. You would never have guessed."My hands go still in the wash water."Who?" I ask, careful to sound bored."Before your time, girl. Elara Veyne. Five years back. Council caught her red-handed—poison in the heir's cup, plain as day. Alpha had no choice." She shakes her head. "Shame. Pretty girl."I did not poison anyone, I want to scream. I never touche

The court gathers three days after they find the body. I am not supposed to be there.Omegas do not stand in the throne room while the Council speaks. Even Omegas who sleep in a cot next to the Alpha's chambers. But Kael tells me to bring his correspondence in personally that morning. By the time I realize what I have walked into, it is too late to leave without drawing eyes.So I stand near the wall. Correspondence pressed to my chest like a shield. I watch.The Elders sit in a half-circle of old stone chairs. Five of them. Gray and grim and ancient in the way that makes you forget they were ever young. Kael sits at the center on a chair that is not quite a throne but wants to be one. Standing in front of all of them, elegant as a knife, is a woman I have never seen before.White-blonde hair. Pale green eyes, cold enough to make the room feel colder just looking at them. She moves like she has never once worried about mud on her shoes, even standing on stone."Lady Seraphine," Elder

The east courtyard is chaos by the time I reach it.Wolves crowd around the fountain, shouting over each other, and I shove through them without a single polite word, because politeness is for people who are not watching the ground turn red under the man they love.Kael is on his back near the fountain's edge. His shirt is torn open at the shoulder, and beneath it the wound gapes wide and wrong, black at the edges like something has poisoned the blood around it instead of just spilling it.His eyes are open. Barely. His breathing comes in short, wet pulls that scare me more than the blood does."Move," I say, and something in my voice makes the crowd actually listen.I drop to my knees beside him. My hands go to the wound before my mind has finished deciding to let them."Rue." His voice is barely there. His hand finds my wrist, weak, but holding on like it is the only solid thing left in the world. "You should not be here.""Be quiet," I say. "Save your strength for staying alive.""

I do not sleep that night. I sit on the edge of my cot with the carved rib bone in my lap, turning it over and over in my hands until the symbols feel burned into my eyes even when I close them.Remember the Altar, or lose everything again.When the sky finally turns gray through the narrow window, I have made a decision I know is foolish before I have even finished making it.I have to tell someone. Not Riven — he already carries enough of my secret, and this feels like more than his shoulders should have to hold alone. Not Nyra — she would want to come with me, and I cannot risk her getting caught in whatever this is. There is only one person left who might understand, who has known me longer than any of them, if the stories are true.Zevran Vale.I find him in the library the next morning, the way I always seem to find him — alone, surrounded by more books than any one wolf should need, a cup of something that smells too strong for this early gone cold at his elbow."Rue," he says,

The third body changes everything.They find her at dawn, not near the forest this time but inside the castle walls, in the training yard where wolves spar every morning without fear.A young healer's apprentice, barely older than Nyra, throat opened the same careful way as the two boys before her, drained dry and left arranged — arranged, not dumped — at the base of the practice ring like an offering nobody asked to receive.I hear about it from Mira, white-faced, before the sun has fully cleared the mountains."Inside the walls," she whispers, hands shaking around a cup she has forgotten to drink from. "Rue, it came inside the walls.Past every guard. Past the whole pack. What if it can just — what if none of us are safe anywhere anymore?"I do not answer her. I am already moving.I find Kael in the war room, standing over a map with Riven and two of his captains, jaw set in a hard line I have not seen since the day I met him again in that firelit study."—doubling the watch on the