MasukEmber's POVHe had not answered my question."How much do you already know," I said again. More directly this time. Because I needed to understand what I was walking into before I said anything further, and a doctor who had been thinking about a file for several weeks was a different conversation from a doctor who had simply recognized a name.He looked at me."Enough to know that what the young man told me about the hereditary condition was not false," he said. "And not complete." He leaned forward slightly. "The readings from your episode were unusual in very specific ways. Not random unusual — patterned unusual. The kind of unusual that points somewhere." He paused. "I have been looking into what it points to."I held his gaze."And what is it pointing to?" I said.He was quiet for a moment."Something I did not have a framework for when I trained," he said. "Something that is not in the standard medical literature." He held my gaze. "Something that appears in other literature. Old
Ember's POVThe nurse led me down a corridor that went away from the waiting room and the emergency ward and toward the quieter section of the hospital where the offices were — the administrative side, the doors with names on them, the part that felt more like a building than a medical facility.She stopped at a door near the end of the corridor.Knocked twice.A voice from inside said to come in.She opened the door and stepped back and I went through.The office was the standard size — desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a window that looked out onto a car park. A bookshelf with medical texts organized by something I could not immediately identify. The desk had papers on it but arranged, not scattered.The doctor was behind the desk.He was standing when I came in, which was unusual — most people were sitting when you were brought to their office. He was standing with his hands in his coat pockets and he was looking at me with an expression that was not the standard doctor expressio
Ember's POVThe ambulance was faster than I expected.Four minutes from Claire's call to the gate. They came with the specific efficient urgency of people who did this regularly and had learned to move without drama. They assessed Rebecca where she was, got her onto the stretcher, asked us questions we answered as quickly and accurately as we could, and then she was in the ambulance and moving.Claire and I ran back to the school for a moment — grabbed bags, told the security officer at the gate what had happened, got the name of the hospital from the paramedic who stayed behind to take our details. Then we got a taxi and followed.The hospital was not far.The waiting room was the waiting room. Plastic chairs and fluorescent light and a desk where someone took our information and told us the doctor would update us when there was something to update. We sat down. Claire had her coat still on. I had one hand on my phone and one hand in my lap and I looked at the door that Rebecca had g
Ember's POVClaire had found me after the last lecture.She appeared at the door of the lecture hall as students were filing out, which meant she had come specifically to find me rather than just happening to be passing, and her expression had the particular quality of someone who had decided to do something they had been working up to."I am sorry," she said. "For this morning. In the corridor."I looked at her."I should not have walked away like that," she said. "I left you with him and I left Rebecca with a situation that was mine to be part of too." She held my gaze in the direct way she held everything. "That was wrong.""You do not have to—""I know I do not have to," she said. "I am doing it because it is accurate." She paused. "Are we fine?""We are fine," I said.She nodded once. Done. Claire did not extend apologies beyond their necessary length.We found Rebecca at the library exit and the three of us walked out together — Rebecca slightly quieter than normal, the morning
Ember's POVI heard him behind me before the door had fully closed.Not footsteps following me — just his voice, carrying through the gap before the door shut, the last of it reaching me in the corridor."I will destroy it."The door closed.I kept walking."Whatever it is," he said, muffled now through the door, the words reaching me anyway the way sounds reached me differently since the wolf had started waking. "I do not care what it takes. I do not care how long it takes." A pause. "I will destroy it."I turned a corner.The cafeteria was behind me and the corridor ahead was the ordinary busy corridor of a school between periods and I walked through it at a normal pace and told myself the coldness sitting in my chest was just the air conditioning.It was not just the air conditioning.---The facilities office was on the ground floor of the main building.I reported the writing on the cafeteria walls to a man who looked like he had heard many things in this office and was adding th
Ember's POVI was three steps from the cafeteria door when I heard his chair scrape.I did not stop walking."You have made a mistake," Ethan said.His voice carried across the room. Not shouting — he knew better than to shout in a room this full of people with phones. Just loud enough to reach me, loud enough that the people between us could hear it, loud enough to be a public statement rather than a private one.I stopped.Not because I was afraid.Because some conversations needed to be finished properly and walking away from an unfinished one in front of sixty people left the ending to the person who kept talking, and Ethan was not the person I wanted to leave with the ending.I turned around.He was on his feet beside the table we had shared. He had his hands at his sides and his jaw was set and the expression on his face had moved through the devastation and arrived somewhere harder."Rejecting me," he said, "is a mistake."The cafeteria was quiet again. It kept doing that — fin
Ember's POVTraining had become the fixed point of my day.Everything else moved around it — classes, meals, texts from Knox, the low-level watchfulness I had been carrying since the note under his door. But six o'clock, James's room, the tea and the biscuit and the quiet work of learning to manage
Ember's POVKnox showed me the note the next morning.He came to my room before breakfast, which he did not usually do, and I knew from the fact that he was there before eight that whatever he had to show me was not something he wanted to carry through a full day without telling me first.I opened
Knox's POV I almost didn't go to the party. Parties were not really my thing, not in the way people thought they were. Everyone assumed that because I was the team captain and because girls always wanted to talk to me and because I had a reputation that followed me everywhere I went, I must love
Ember's POVTonight was supposed to be the best night of my life.I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and carefully lined my lips, taking my time the way I never usually did. I was the kind of girl who rushed through getting ready because there was always something more important waiting — a le







