Novel-novel oleh erad_10_poly

Rudieloff rode ahead of General Finn with a force that made his horse strain beneath him, its hooves striking the road in a rapid urgent rhythm. The wind tore at his cloak, tugged at his hair, and stung his face, yet he barely felt it. His mind was fixed on one thought alone.What if he was right? What if Vivienne had somehow found Oliver?The possibility was absurd, and yet it would not leave him. It had become certainty without proof, dread without reason, and instinct without mercy. Something inside him had gone taut the moment he saw her running off. Vivienne was missing, and now every passing second seemed to tighten that invisible cord around his neck until it threatened to snap.The modest house eventually came into view at the side of the road. The peacefulness of the place almost mocked the storm gathering inside Rudieloff. He had pushed the pace the entire ride and Finn had kept up without complaining, which was a testament to the man's endurance because Rudieloff had not be

The forest had given them nothing. Rudieloff and all the team.Hours of searching, hundreds of men spread across every section of the trees, and the only thing the morning had produced was a deepening certainty that wherever Vivienne had gone, she had not gone further into the forest or she had just run through it. The soft earth along the bank of the stream showed tracks from the soldiers themselves and nothing else. The scent trails they had followed one by one had led to dead ends, to places where the wind had simply taken everything and left no answer behind.Rudieloff stood at the base of a broad tree and said nothing for a long moment.Around him, men continued to move. Adrian pushed through a thicket, his expression tight with the particular frustration of someone young enough to believe that effort alone should produce results. General Finn stood a short distance away, his arms folded, watching his scouts work a section of ground he had already covered, but he did not stop the

Far across the kingdom in the slave quarters of the Bolivia palace, the morning had brought no peace at all. Monera had not slept. She had sat facing the door of their small room through most of the night, and when morning came she was still sitting there hoping Vivienne would walk in any minute.Her hands were folded in her lap, her eyes red at the rims. Cecilia sat beside her, close enough that their arms touched, and she had not said much since a certain point in the night when words had stopped helping."She'll come back," Cecilia said, because she had been saying it at intervals through the night and it seemed wrong to stop now."I know," Monera replied, the same answer she had given every time, though the line between knowing something and believing it had grown thin in the dark hours before morning.A palace guard appeared at the entrance to their room. "The king sends word," he said. "You are both excused from your duties today."King Reginald himself had ordered that both wom

The night passed quietly as though the world itself had decided to give Vivienne a brief rest from everything that had happened. For the first time in what felt like forever, she slept in a bed that was warm, soft and safe. The blankets were thick and clean, carrying the faint scent of fresh linen, wood smoke, and a scent she recognized so well, Oliver.His scent lingered everywhere. It was on the pillow beneath her head. It clung to the blankets wrapped around her body. It had settled into the mattress itself, the way a person's presence settles into a place over years of living in it. It should have bothered her, should have made her uneasy to be surrounded by so much of him, yet instead it made her feel strangely calm. She hated admitting it, even in the privacy of her own thoughts. She pulled the blanket up closer and stared at the ceiling and tried very hard not to think about why it was comforting, which meant she thought about almost nothing else.Every time she closed her eye

Vivienne lay motionless beneath the moonlight, her silver eyes fixed upon the modest house before her. Every instinct within had her wolf recognized Oliver’s scent long before her mind could fully catch up to what her body already knew. Just the way a person would recognize a familiar voice in a crowded room. This was Oliver's home. The scent pouring from the small house was so strong that there could be no mistake. It was on the walls, it drifted from the windows, clung to the wooden fence and the narrow path leading to the door, wrapping itself around the place as though it belonged there as much as the wood and stone. It was the same scent she had followed for miles without stopping. And now here she was, standing before a door she had never seen before but feeling more certain of where she was than she had felt of anything in her entire life. She stood and began moving. Trotting around the house. Her white body moving silently through the darkness as she circled the property a

Rudieloff,s wolf tore through the forest like a storm unleashed. Branches snapped beneath his paws. Shrubs bent and broke as his massive wolf forced its way through the darkness. He had covered the same ground twice now, looping back through the thicker parts of the forest where the trees grew so close together that moonlight barely reached the floor. Still nothing, there was no trace of Vivienne or her scent.Every instinct within him screamed that he should be able to find her. Her scent should have been fresh, impossible to miss for him. His eyes scanned the darkness between the trunks with a desperation he could not entirely mask even in this form. A wolf's face was not built for the kind of worry that was written all over his, but somehow it was there anyway. In the rigid set of his shoulders, in the low sound that escaped him every so often, something between a growl and a whine, too restless to be either.She had simply vanished.He pushed forward again, deeper this time, fol