Novels by Manuel

Selene’s POVI look at the phone in Lucian’s hand.Southern territories prefix. Unknown number. Friday evening, after an assembly and a complaint and an access log and Bowen telling us about page seventy-one and everything else this day has contained.The day is not finished apparently.“Pick up,” I say.He picks up.I watch his face while he listens and I have gotten good at reading it, the specific language of what happens underneath the composure when something arrives that he was not expecting. Right now it is doing the careful recalibration, the fast arithmetic of someone receiving information and sorting it simultaneously.He says very little.Yes. When. I see. He asks one question I cannot hear the answer to. Then he says, I will call you back in the morning, and hangs up.He looks at the phone for a moment.Then at me.“That was a territory administrator from the southern pack council,” he says. “A man named Fenn.” He pauses. “He was calling because the southern council has be

Lucian’s POVThe room looks at me.Selene. Halsey. Bowen, with his tea and his expression of a man who has just passed a significant weight to someone else and is monitoring how they are carrying it.I come into the room and sit in the remaining chair because standing in the doorway while three people look at me is not a position I intend to maintain.“Since January,” I say. “Bowen told me in January.”Selene is looking at me with the specific quality she has when she is deciding whether something is a breach of honesty or a decision made for reasons she has not yet heard. She does not speak. She waits. This is one of the things I have learned about her — she gives space for the explanation before she decides what to do with the action.“He came to me because he needed to tell someone,” I say. “And because he wanted to understand it before he told you.” I look at her steadily. “He was not certain how you would receive it and he wanted to think it through with someone who was already i

Selene’s POVI look at the doorway.Bowen is standing in it with his tea and his dressing gown and the specific expression of a man who has been listening from the corridor for longer than is strictly appropriate and has decided the conversation has reached the point where his presence is more useful than his pretending not to be there.“Sit down,” I say.“I am fine standing,” he says.“Bowen.”He comes in and sits in the chair beside the desk.Halsey looks at him with the expression she uses for people she has decided to respect, which is not a large category but which apparently includes Bowen, which I find entirely appropriate.“You have been deciding for three months,” I say. “Tell me.”He wraps both hands around his tea.“The historical documentation on fullbonds is not extensive,” he says. “It was not well understood when it occurred and the territories where it happened were small and their records are incomplete.” He pauses. “What was documented consistently, across all three

Selene’s POV“Ms. Avery.”Male voice. Older than middle-aged, carrying the specific weight of someone who has been in authority long enough that it has become his natural register rather than something he puts on. Calm. Deliberate.“Yes,” I say. “Who is this.”“My name is Director Crane,” he says. “I chair the Northern Council’s internal affairs committee.” A pause. “I apologise for the hour. I would not call on a Friday evening unless the matter was time sensitive.”I look at Lucian.He is already watching my face.“What is the matter,” I say.“The complaint filed against Observer Halsey,” Crane says. “I am calling because the administrative flag filed this afternoon by Senior Officer Reth has triggered an expedited review of the complaint’s origins.” He pauses. “We move quickly when there is evidence of a process breach, Ms. Avery. Whatever else the council’s reputation may suggest.”“I appreciate that,” I say. “What do you need from me.”“Nothing tonight,” he says. “I am calling as

Selene’s POVNara.I say the name in my head on the way to the kitchen and it sits the way names sit when they belong to someone you have not met but already have a feeling about. Caden has been careful with his messages over the months since he left. Occasional, brief, always warm without pressing. He has mentioned his territory, his council, the eastern documentation as it progressed. He has not mentioned a person before tonight.The fact that he mentioned her in response to the installation news tells me something.He wanted to share something good on a day that was already good.That is a Caden thing to do.I file it and go to the kitchen.Dinner that evening is the fullest the table has been since the solstice.Talia and Wren. Lena. Halsey, who has been absorbed into the house the way most people who come here eventually get absorbed, practically and without drama. Bowen, who has been told twice to sit down and has complied both times without the usual argument, which means he is

Lucian’s POVReth has not left yet.He is standing in the entrance hall with his coat on and his phone in his hand when I come downstairs, and the expression on his face is the one I have seen on people who have just received information they were not expecting and are deciding what to do with it before anyone else sees their reaction.I called Selene’s name because she was the one who spoke to Reth and she needs to hear this before it spreads further than the two of us, which it will, given enough time.She appears from the corridor with Halsey two steps behind her.She reads my face the way she reads things, immediately and without requiring it explained.“Reth,” she says. Not a question.“He went to the administrative office,” I say. “He called me because you told him to call you directly and I was closer.”She looks at Reth.“Tell me,” she says.Reth looks between us both.“The access log,” he says. “For Halsey’s commendation filing.” He pauses. “It was accessed four times within

Sandra’s POVI read it a third time.You were never safe.The handwriting was neat. Controlled. The kind you develop when you’ve been taught to write properly rather than the kind that just happens naturally. No signature. No indication of who’d sent it or why or what exactly it was supposed to mean.I folded it back along its crease and stood in my doorway and looked at the empty corridor where the man had been and thought about what kind of person sends a warning through someone else’s hands. Someone who wanted distance between themselves and the message. Someone who needed me to know something without being able to be connected to the knowing.Someone who was afraid.I went back inside and sat at my desk and put the note flat in front of me and the wolfbane casing beside it and looked at both of them together.In the first life I’d died believing the dagger was about Zadok. Someone wanted him dead, I’d gotten in the way, simple brutal arithmetic. I’d spent my last conscious minutes

Sandra’s POVI closed my hand around the casing and stood there in the doorway for a moment just breathing.Wolfbane. In my room. Before the Blood Ceremony, before the dagger, before any of it — someone was already moving pieces around a board I hadn’t known I was sitting on the first time. I’d spent six years in this house thinking I was invisible and apparently I’d been wrong about that too.“When,” I said.“This morning. Between breakfast and when you came back from the grounds.” Dara’s voice was steady but her hands weren’t. She had them folded together in that specific way she did when she was holding herself in. “I went in to change the linen and I could tell. The things on your desk were a quarter inch from where you leave them. Your trunk was unlocked. Whoever it was, was careful. Just not careful enough.”I looked down at the casing in my palm. Small. Professional. Not something you picked up at a market stall — this was made for precision, for carrying a concentrated amount

Sandra’s POVI turned around slowly.Not quickly — quickly would’ve looked guilty and I had nothing to be guilty about. I was standing in a corridor. People stood in corridors. I turned at a pace that said I heard my name and responded to it, nothing more.Zadok was maybe six feet away. Close enough that I could see the slight tension around his eyes that meant he was working something out and hadn’t finished yet. He was still in his training clothes — dark, fitted, the kind of effortless that probably wasn’t effortless at all — and he was looking at me with that expression I still didn’t have a name for.Behind me the door was still slightly open. I didn’t look back at it.“You’re not training,” he said.“I finished early.”“I watched you leave mid-session.”So he’d been at the grounds. I hadn’t seen him and I’d been watching the whole time, which meant he’d arrived after I’d left, or he’d been somewhere I hadn’t thought to look. Both options were annoying in different ways.“I neede

Sandra’s POVI didn’t sleep well.That wasn’t new exactly I’d had years of bad sleep in the first life, most of it self-inflicted, most of it involving lying awake turning Zadok-shaped thoughts over and over until they were smooth and useless. But this was different. This wasn’t longing keeping me up.It was Vanessa’s hand on his arm.The specific relaxation of it. The absence of performance. I kept turning it over and it kept meaning the same thing no matter which angle I looked at it from she was comfortable with him in private in a way that didn’t match what she showed the pack publicly. And in six years of watching both of them I had somehow missed that distinction entirely because I’d been looking at the wrong person.I’d always watched him. I should have been watching her.I got up before dawn and sat at the window and thought about what I actually knew versus what I’d assumed. In the first life I’d understood their relationship as straightforward — Zadok loved Vanessa, Vanessa

Sandra’s POVHe didn’t follow me back inside.I sat on that bench for another ten minutes after he left, hands folded in my lap, watching the tree line like it owed me something. My heart was doing that thing again — that slow unsteady thing I had no patience for — and I waited until it stopped before I moved.The expression on his face when I’d said should there be kept coming back to me. I’d catalogued every version of Zadok’s face over six years and that particular one didn’t exist anywhere in my inventory. It wasn’t confusion exactly. It wasn’t irritation. It was something closer to — recalibration. Like I’d said something that didn’t fit the model he was working from and he was quietly adjusting.Good. Let him adjust.I went back inside and spent the rest of the morning doing what eighteen year old Sandra would do — helped Dara with the linen inventory, stayed out of my father’s way, kept my head down and my mouth useful. I was good at invisible. I’d been practicing it my whole l

Sandra’s POVNobody told me he’d be at breakfast.That sounds ridiculous. He was the Alpha. He went where he wanted, showed up when he felt like it, and nobody scheduled around him everyone else just adjusted. I knew that. I’d spent six years adjusting.But I’d had maybe forty minutes of being back in this body and I wasn’t ready. That was the honest truth. I’d stood at that window and made my decisions and felt solid about them and then he walked through that door and something in my chest did this slow, horrible recognition thing that I had absolutely no control over.Six years of loving someone leaves marks. Apparently dying doesn’t remove them.I looked down at my plate.“Zadok.” My father’s voice, pulling into something respectful and eager the way it always did around pack authority. “We weren’t expecting you this morning.”“I wanted to check on the household.” Zadok’s voice. Same as I remembered — low, even, the kind of voice that didn’t need volume to fill a room. “After last