All Chapters of The Queen of Wolves: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

The spring lay glazed over with ice so thin it showed the water beneath. Three pups convulsed at its edge, their small bodies jerking against the frozen ground, dark foam gathering at the corners of their mouths. Their limbs moved without rhythm, without will, paws scraping furrows in the snow that filled with meltwater and blood. A mother knelt over the smallest—her hands slick with slush, pressing snow to her child’s throat while the lips above turned the color of bruised plums. The gathered pack had formed its uneven ring, shoulders tight, voices dropping to murmurs that cut off every time Héctor Cruz shifted his weight.I stood among them but not with them, a half-step outside the ring, where the heat of bodies ended and the wind began. My amber eyes moved between the pups and the spring, reading what the water showed: glassy, silver-bright, and deceptively clean. No oil-sheen of common poison. No disturbance in the frozen margin where something might have been poured. They all av

The smell reached me first—boiled yarrow and copper, something resinous that caught in the back of my throat like smoke. My eyes opened to stone carved so dark it swallowed the silver light pressing against high windows. I lay on linen that smelled of lye and old blood, my ribs bound tight enough to make each breath a calculation, my leg in a cast, and my shoulder thick with padding I couldn’t see. The cold from the mountain still lived in my marrow, a deep ache that the heat from the metal fire bowl nearby couldn’t touch. I didn’t know where I was, but I knew I wasn’t alone. A healer in gray robes leaned toward my torso, her hands reaching for the bandage edge.My body moved before thought caught up. I wrenched sideways off the cot, tearing the dressing loose from my ribs, and my shoulder struck a copper tray on the side table. Scalpels, forceps, and a ceramic jar scattered across the stone with a crash that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. I got one knee under me, lunged for the doo

The soft, cool wool sat against my skin beneath linen that smelled of lye and privilege rather than sweat and honest work. I moved down the corridor because stillness had begun to feel like a trap closing. Each step pulled at the bindings wrapped tight around my ribs, and the borrowed nightdress hung loose where my own gear would have pulled taut across my shoulders. I didn’t move like a guest, but like what I was—a wolf in foreign territory. I mapped exits and cataloged the silver-threaded mortar between black stones. I noted how the ward-light pulsed in thin veins through the walls and how servants pressed flat against the stone when I passed, their eyes dropping to the floor as if I carried a contagion.The scents in the palace included beeswax, old fur, woodsmoke from distant hearths, something medicinal underneath, and beneath that, fainter, the foul but familiar scent of a potential bathroom. I had to get a bathroom soon, so I followed the scent, my feet finding paths that angl

The arrow’s shaft still quivered low in the carved headboard where Mihai’s head had rested, the iron head buried deep enough to have cracked his skull. Glass sang across the silver-threaded rug in a scatter of knives, and the mountain wind drove through the shattered window with a weight that bent the curtains inward like torn sails. I held the infant against my chest with both arms locked, his small heart fluttering against my ribs where the bandages had already pulled loose from my cracked bone. The cold carried something beneath it—grave-chill, the rot of old blood, and the particular silence of predators who had already fed.Then they came through the window frame. Two of them, pale as the frost on the glass they crushed beneath their boots, moved like streaks of white and shadow rather than bodies with weight. I barely heard the scrape of leather on diamond shards, but nothing else—no shouted alarm, no boots in the corridor, and no ward-horn sounding through the palace stone. Th