LOGINChapter Sixty Five POV: ZaraThe guard outside my door fell asleep at two in the morning and I had been watching him do it for four nights in a row so when it finally happened I was ready and I was out of the guest quarters and through the eastern passage before he had finished slumping in his chair.I moved through the settlement the way I had learned to move through it in the months I had spent studying it, knowing which paths the night patrol covered and which ones they left for last, and I was outside the settlement boundary and into the outer tree line before the first patrol rotation completed and nobody saw me go because nobody had ever thought to watch me as carefully as they should have.That was always the mistake people made with me. They underestimated what I was willing to do once I had decided to do it.I sat in the dark of the outer trees and let the cold air settle around me and thought about everything that had brought me to sitting in the dark of a foreign settlement
Chapter Sixty FourPOV: Sera AshwoodThe moment we turned the corner and Kael's presence disappeared from my back I burst out laughing.Not the polite kind. Not the kind I performed for rooms. The real kind, the kind that came from somewhere genuine and deep and had been sitting in my chest since the moment I reached out and took Reuel's hand and watched Kael's face do that thing, that specific thing, that cold shocked stillness of a man who had just understood something he did not want to understand.So that was what it felt like from his side.Interesting. Genuinely interesting. I filed it away in the place where I kept the things I was going to use later and composed my face back into something appropriate and pulled my hand out of Reuel's grip because I had used it for its purpose and I was done with it now."You can let go," I said.
Chapter Sixty ThreePOV: Kael DravonI came to her door that morning because I had spent the entire night telling myself I was not going to and had failed completely at convincing myself of that, and I stood there and knocked and when she opened it the first thing I noticed was that something in her face had changed since the campaign ended.Not dramatically. Not in a way that announced itself. But I had been studying Seraphine Ashwood's face since we were children and I knew every version of it and what was on it right now was a version I had not seen before, something composed and deliberate and pointed inward in a way that gave nothing away and was doing so on purpose."I thought we could train together," I said. "The border sentries are reporting unusual activity three miles east. I want to run the outer perimeter."She looked at me for a moment and then she smiled.Not the warm real smile. The other one. The one that sat perfectly on her face and reached absolutely nowhere near he
Chapter Sixty Two POV: Sera AshwoodI walked away from the campaign site with my wolf settled and my power fully present and my chest carrying something that felt dangerously close to hope, and I killed it before it could breathe properly because hope was the thing that had gotten me into every single situation I was currently in and I was done letting it make my decisions.Kael had fought beside me for six days. Six days of him keeping the line between me and everything trying to reach me, six days of his wolf warm and certain at my left side, six days of the mate bond doing things I had spent months trying not to feel and finally stopped pretending I was not feeling. Six days of him being exactly what I had always known he was capable of being when he stopped converting everything into strategy and just let himself show up.And I was going to do absolutely nothing with any of it. Yet.I sat in my room that first night back in Pack Ironveil and I looked at the ceiling and I thought a
Chapter Sixty OnePOV: Sera AshwoodThe first tear closed under my hands like a wound sealing and I stood in the middle of the borderlands with my wolf fully forward and my chest heaving and thought, I can do this, I can actually do this, and then I turned northwest because the second tear was pulling at me the way the first one had pulled and it was bigger and I could feel the difference in the pull the way you feel the difference between a stream and a river when you are standing in both."We are moving northwest," I said to the two guards Kael had assigned me, and they moved without asking questions because they were good wolves and good wolves did not ask questions when the Veilborn had that expression on her face.The borderlands were loud around us. The sound of the campaign, eight hundred wolves and the specific chaos of a rogue force being hit from three directions simultaneously, pressed in from every side and I moved through it with my wolf pointing me northwest and my Veilb
Chapter SixtyPOV: Kael DravonEight hundred wolves behind me and Sera to my left and the borderlands ahead of us and I thought that was the first time since the night of the shift ceremony that everything I needed was arranged exactly right and the only thing left to do was move.Kelvin appeared at my right shoulder with the tactical map and that focused expression he wore when something important was about to happen and he had already thought through every angle of it twice. "Columns are ready," he said. "Waiting on your signal.""Walk me through the final formation," I said."Left flank through the lower borderlands to cut the eastern supply lines," he said. "Right flank takes the ridge approach to block the retreat path. Center column goes directly through the main approach to the command structure. The moment we breach the outer perimeter the rogue force will have two options, fight on our terms or scatter, and we are positioned to make scattering impossible.""Sera," I said.Sh
Chapter FourteenPOV: Sera AshwoodI forgot my wrap and went back for it and I wish for every single thing holy that I had just let the cold night take me instead because nothing, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for what I walked into when I pushed that door open.I stood there and stared
Chapter SixPOV: Sera AshwoodI got to Damien's house and knocked three times and got absolutely nothing back.I stood there for a moment and looked at the door and knocked again because maybe he did not hear me the first time and still nothing, but the door was not fully closed, it was sitting slig
Chapter FivePOV: Sera AshwoodI had not slept a single minute and I was not even going to pretend otherwise.I was lying on this bed staring at this ceiling with Damien's proposal sitting on my chest and Kael's rejection sitting right beside it and the two of them together were doing absolutely not
Chapter ElevenPOV: Sera Ashwood"Go and fetch the pack herbalist right now," I told Mira, and my voice came out sharper than I intended it to because Lyra's face was still doing that thing that scared me, that pinched pale look she got when something was genuinely wrong and she was trying to minimi







