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All Chapters of Poison: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

62 Chapters

Chapter Forty-One

Killian The Council summoned me at nine. That was how the message was worded. The Royal Council requests His Majesty’s attendance. Which is Council language for we have decided something about your life and would now like you present while we explain it to you. Jaxson read it over my shoulder at breakfast, chewing, entirely unhurried about it. “Want me there?” “Yes.” He looked at me. “What?” “You answered quickly.” “I know what they’re going to ask.” “Do you?” “No. But I know I’m going to hate it.” —- There were eleven of them in the chamber by the time we arrived. Eight seated, three standing behind the curved table with tablets and folders, because apparently the end of my patience required administrative support. My father’s chair sat empty at the head of it. Mine now. Three weeks in and I still have not been able to look at it without doing a sort of private arithmetic — he sat there for thirty-one years, he sat there the morning he died, he sat there when he signed

Last Updated : 2026-10-17

Chapter Forty-Two

Hadley I had been staring at the same wolf for twenty minutes and had produced one ear. Not even a good ear. It was too narrow, then too sharp, and then somehow it looked annoyed, which is an impressive amount of personality to get out of a stick of charcoal and not at all what I had been trying to do. I rubbed it off with the side of my thumb and left a grey smear across the top of the page for my trouble. Across the studio, Rowan looked up from his phone with the specific expression of a man who has been sitting on something for ten minutes. “You know Kestrel emailed again.” “He did?” “He wants another wolf.” “Of course he does.” “He specifically asked whether Wynter’s planning one.” “Ugh.” I threw both my hands up. Rowan grinned. “There she is.” “He has a problem.” “He pays on time.” “That does not make it less of a problem.” I put the charcoal down and l

Last Updated : 2026-10-17

Chapter Forty-Three

KillianJaxson hit me hard enough in the ribs to take my footing.I went down on one shoulder, rolled through it out of pure habit, came back up and found him standing three feet away with both hands lowered and an expression of open disgust.“Again.”“No.”I straightened. “What do you mean, no?”“I mean I am not spending another ten minutes putting you on the floor while you look through me like I’m a window.”“I’m not.”“You are.”“I was thinking.”“That’s usually where the trouble starts.”I dragged the back of my wrist across my mouth and looked past him at the far wall while my ribs decided how much they intended to complain.The hall was half full. Morning rotation, warriors working in pairs, two of the younger Gammas out on the far ma

Last Updated : 2026-10-18

Chapter Forty-Four

Maddox Everybody was accounted for. That should have made me feel better. It did not, but I did it anyway, twice. Hadley was in the family wing with the twins. Kiana was in the bath, because apparently the correct response to nearly being hurt by your grandmother’s least favourite person in the world is bubbles, and Kingsley was sitting on the bathroom floor outside the tub reading something out loud about snakes, because of course he was. He had found it in the library and he had been telling anybody who came within four feet of him about the difference between a viper and an adder for two days, and nobody in that family had the heart to explain to him why. Two Elite outside the wing. Not palace guard. Elite, both of them hand-picked by Jaxson forty minutes ago, both of whom I know by name and would trust with my own life. Elara was in there with them. Rowan had gone back to the studio to finish off some last minute paperwork, and I had

Last Updated : 2026-10-18

Chapter Forty-Five

Killian Fuck. That was the first thing in my head. Not secure the scene. Not call the healers. Not one word of a lifetime of training that is supposed to arrive in exactly this situation and tell a man what to do with his hands. Just that. Maddox was gone. Garrett was dead in the doorway. Helena was dead in the bathroom. The front door was standing open onto the dark with the cold coming in off the lake, and I was in the middle of their house with Jaxson three feet behind me and no idea at all which disaster I was supposed to touch first. For one second I considered going after him. Not as King. As me. As the person who has known Maddox Callum since before either of us could spell our own names, who has been punched by him and bled on by him and carried out of two separate situations by him, and who had just watched Nyko go through a bathroom door rather than round it with that woman’s blood on his muzzle. Jaxson moved b

Last Updated : 2026-10-19

Chapter Forty-Six

KillianMaddox had been gone seven days.Not missing. Missing means nobody knows where he is.We knew. Some of the time.A black wolf on the north ridge at three in the morning. Tracks beside the lower stream that were four hours old by the time anybody stood in them. Half a deer under the pines west of the old training fields, taken down and opened and barely eaten, which told me more than any of the sightings did. One Elite swore he had come round a stand of birch and found Nyko standing forty metres away in the dark, not moving, watching him.That man did exactly what he had been ordered to do. He stopped where he was. He dropped his eyes. He backed out the way he had come without turning his shoulder, and he got to the road and then sat down on the verge and shook for ten minutes.Nyko was gone before he reached the treeline.The next one was not as careful.A warrior got to within ten metres. He was calling

Last Updated : 2026-10-19

Chapter Forty-Seven

Killian The seventeenth rogue turned up just after dawn. Wolf form, this time, which was almost a relief. The ones Nyko caught human are harder to look at. Jaxson put the report on my desk and stayed standing. “Boundary?” “North-east. About six hundred metres outside.” “Again.” “Again.” The map on the wall has acquired so many black pins that somebody in the investigation office started using red for everything else, and then ran out of red. Seventeen bodies in twenty-six days. Eleven in wolf form. Six in human. Nobody has seen a single one of them die. Nobody has seen Nyko cross the boundary going out. Nobody has seen him cross it coming back. They see him occasionally. A black shape between trees at four hundred metres. Eyes taking torchlight for half a second and then not. Tracks in a place where there were no tracks an hour ago. And then bodies. Always rogues. Not one warr

Last Updated : 2026-10-20

Chapter Forty-Eight

Nyko Blood in my mouth. Not mine. I stood over him until he stopped moving, and then I stood over him a while longer, because sometimes they are clever about it. He did not get up. I put my nose down into the fur at his throat where the smell sits deepest and pulled the air across my tongue and held it there. Rogue. Male. Old. Smoke in his coat from a fire three days burned. Meat gone bad. Another wolf on his shoulder, female, gone from him now. Sickness in his back teeth. Fear, still coming off him, which does not stop when they do. No cold. No metal. Nothing from the house. Wrong. Again. Too many times. More than I have places to keep. —- It is not a smell I can name. It has no animal in it. It was in the hall when we came through the door and it was under the blood and under my father and it went out the back and over the ground and then it stopped, all at

Last Updated : 2026-10-20

Chapter Forty-Nine

KillianThe report came through while I was halfway across the south corridor.*Orchard, Your Majesty. West side. He’s moving.*I stopped so hard the guard behind me nearly went into my back.*Toward the boundary?*A pause. I have learned to hate their pauses.*Toward the gardens.*Fuck.I turned and started walking, and then stopped walking and started moving properly.*All units hold position. Nobody approaches him. Nobody contains him. If he changes direction you let him change direction, and if he comes at you, you go backwards.*Jaxson came down the link immediately. *Already telling them.**And get more bodies into the west garden.**More people. Near the feral Royal Gamma who nearly took a warrior’s arm off.**Around the garden, Jaxson. Not on top of him.**Excellent clarification, thank you.*I ignore

Last Updated : 2026-10-21

Chapter Fifty

Killian Maddox did not cry the next day. That was worse. Yesterday he had come apart on the grass of the west garden badly enough that half the people standing there had given up pretending not to watch. Today he stood in front of the mirror in his rooms while Rowan fixed the back of his collar, and looked like somebody had emptied him out in the night and put the shell back on the stand. Black shirt. Black trousers. No jacket yet. Bandage round the right hand, another one disappearing up under the left sleeve. His face had lost enough weight that there were angles in it that had not been there a month ago, and somebody had done something sensible with his hair, which I assumed was Rowan, because Maddox currently appeared incapable of caring which direction any part of him pointed. Rowan stepped back. “There.” Maddox looked at his own reflection. Nothing came back. Not approval, not dislike, not the usual face he pulls a

Last Updated : 2026-10-21

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