LOGINChapter Sixty Four
POV: Sera Ashwood
The 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
Chapter Sixty SixPOV: DamienI had been watching from the outer settlement for three days when the news reached me and I sat with it for a long time before I let myself react to it.Reuel and Sera. A contract bonding. The announcement had moved through the territory faster than any announcement I had seen since the night of the shift ceremony and I sat in the hollow of the outer tree where I had been keeping everything since I came back and I read the intelligence twice and then I put it down and I looked at the sky through the branches above me and I thought, there it is, there is the move I would have made.Kelvin found me twenty minutes later.I had been expecting him. Kelvin was too good at his job not to find me eventually and I had been leaving just enough of a trail for him to follow because being found by Kelvin was considerably more useful than being invisib
Chapter 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 Thirty Five## POV: Sera AshwoodI was at my desk going through the elder's latest communication about the ceremony preparations when Mira brought in my evening meal and I thanked her without looking up and reached for the cup and then stopped.I stopped because something in the way she s
Chapter Thirty ThreePOV: Sera AshwoodHe came back the next morning exactly when he said he would which was the first thing that told me this was a man who did not make empty statements, and I was already downstairs and seated in the front room when Mira showed him in because I was not going to be
Chapter Twenty Seven POV: Sera AshwoodI got home and the first thing I saw was the delegation lined up outside my front gate like they had been there for hours and had collectively decided that patience was a personality trait they were going to perform until I appeared, and I sat in the back of t
Chapter Twenty SixPOV: Kael DravonI had given Zara exactly one hour after the pack priest left Sera's room before I went to find her and when I did I closed the door behind me and looked at her standing by the window with her composed face and her folded hands and I thought about Sera unconscious







