LOGINAria's POVThe silence stretched so long that I could hear my own breathing, every face in the room was turned toward me. Every pair of eyes waited not for the truth, but for my explanation. My gaze remained fixed on the tablet resting on the table, my own voice still echoing inside my head."If Dam
Aria’s POVThe silence after Kade’s mother spoke didn’t break immediately. It settled instead, thick and suffocating, like the room itself had decided it was finished listening to me.My hands were still hovering over the table when the voice note began to play and at first, it sounded like static,
Aria’s POVThe air in the sitting room felt wrong the moment I stepped inside, it wasn’t just the silence, it was the kind of silence that carried weight, like everyone inside had already agreed on a version of events I hadn’t even been told yet. My hand was still on the door handle when I noticed
The door opened before I realized I had stopped moving entirely.Thorne stepped aside without speaking. “She’s here,” he said quietly.I looked up to see Aria standing in the doorway.Real. Present. Unaware of what had already been decided in the room she was about to step into and for the first tim
Damon’s POVThe first sign that something was wrong was the silence that settled over the Packhouse, the kind that felt deliberate rather than natural, as though the building itself was holding its breath. Thorne entered my office without his usual confidence, placing a sealed file on my desk but re
Aria's POVThe waiting was worse than the test itself and I had imagined the bloodline spell would somehow give me answers immediately, that the healers would wave glowing hands over a crystal and tell me whether the child growing inside me belonged to Damon or Kade.Instead, I had spent nearly an h
Aria’s POVThe moment his lips claimed mine, everything inside me unraveled.There was no hesitation left, no space to think, no room for doubt. The tension that had been building between us for weeks, no months, snapped all at once, and I felt it in the way my breath caught, in the way my fingers c
“Stay there,” I snapped, running a hand through my hair as I turned away from her.The room felt smaller now.The air felt thicker.I walked a few steps toward the window, bracing my hands against the cold stone wall beside it as I stared out into the city lights below, forcing my breathing to slow.
Damon’s POVFive minutes… that was all she had asked for.Five minutes to sit still. Five minutes to breathe. Five minutes to stop thinking like a man preparing for war and just exist like everything wasn’t hanging by a thread.I had agreed.That was my first mistake because the moment those five mi
Aria’s POVThe doors shut behind us with a finality that settled deep in my chest.I didn’t turn around to look at them. I didn’t want to see how completely sealed they were, how cut off we had just become from everything familiar. Instead, I kept walking beside Damon, matching his stride as Elder M







