Too Late To Beg, My Alpha
Every bed was made and untouched, and the silence had the specific quality of a place that had been abandoned in order rather than fled from in panic.
I walked through it alone, checking each room the way I checked them in life, making the count. Everything in its place. Everyone was gone.
Illara was barely alive with a strange-looking dagger lodged in her chest while she begged me to forgive her for making such a terrible mistake.
I woke before dawn with the dream still on me, that particular heaviness, and I lay in the dark and listened to the settlement breathe around me and thought about Dahlia's child with the too-fast heartbeat and the healer who wouldn't finish her sentences.