LOGINI saw her sit down before I fully registered the movement. That was the thing about watching someone recover from something that had nearly killed them. Your body developed its own early warning system, cataloguing every small deviation from normal with a thoroughness that had nothing to do with choice.She sat carefully, the way she had for the past few days. Economical. Controlled. Managing something that was taking more of her attention than she wanted to admit. Her hand went to her stomach. She probably did not notice she had done it.“Do you still feel unwell?” I asked.She looked up from the map, and I caught the flicker of calculation in her expression: the half-second assessment of whether to deflect. “A bit,” she said, which from Amelia translated to considerably more than that. We both knew it.“Perhaps you should go back to bed,” I said, and knew even as the words formed that they were a mistake.She t
The palace knew what day it was.It was the only explanation I had for the quality of the silence that had settled over the corridors since dawn. Not the comfortable quiet of a building at rest, but something held, like a breath taken and not yet released. On the morning of a full moon, the kitchens would usually have been running since before light. The distant thud of preparations would carry through the stone floors. Celebrations. The elaborate joy of a pack marking the moon’s fullness with ceremony and excess. Those sounds were absent today, replaced by something more careful. The guards at their posts moved with controlled economy. The household staff kept their eyes down and their steps quick. Everyone was doing what the royal city did when the palace asked them to trust it: they kept their heads down and waited.I understood that instinct. I had lived most of my life inside it.By ten in the morning, the four of us were standing in Lukas’s off
Elara locked the door behind us. The sound was small in the quiet of the medical suite, but I understood the gesture without being told. This was contained here, in this room, between us, until we decided otherwise.The medical suite felt different from the ward where Amelia had spent the days after the cave. It was smaller and more private, Elara’s own space rather than the clinical neutrality of a shared room. The equipment was arranged with the precision of a woman who had spent centuries knowing exactly where everything belonged. The lamps were lower, the air cooler, and the whole room carried the atmosphere of a place used to holding difficult conversations.Amelia moved to the narrow bed without being asked. She sat on the edge and pulled up her sweater in one practical motion, with the efficiency of someone who had endured enough medical examinations to stop finding them awkward. Then she lay back, copper hair spreading across the pillow. Her eyes fixed on
Dr Thornwood crossed the room wearing the expression she used when she had walked into something unexpected and was already cataloguing it. Her amber eyes moved from my face to Lukas’s, then to the space between us in a rapid, professional assessment.“My Queen,” she said, stepping toward me. “What happened?”“Amelia is suddenly able to hear thoughts,” Lukas said. His voice was low and even, the tone he used when facts needed to be received calmly and he was modelling calm as a form of suggestion.Elara stopped moving for a full two seconds. For Elara, that was significant.“Well,” she said, precisely. And then, after a brief pause during which she appeared to be reviewing her options and finding them all equally inadequate: “Fuck.”I felt the laugh come up without entirely meaning to let it. “Well, fuck covers it indeed, Elara,” I said.She collected herself with
I crossed the office as soon as I saw Amelia’s face in her hands. Her shoulders were drawn in, and her stillness had the quality I had learned to read as contained rather than composed.Elara was already moving. She produced her equipment with the efficiency I had come to rely on over the past weeks: blood pressure cuff, small torch for checking pupils, fresh vial, and a needle drawn from her coat pocket with practised ease. She carried them the way other people carried keys. She worked without commentary, moving around Amelia with the calm of someone who had seen worse and was actively deciding whether this qualified.Amelia submitted with the patience of a woman who had decided resistance was energy she did not have to spare this morning.“I’ll be back shortly,” Elara said, capping the vial and tucking it into her pocket. “I want to run these now.”Amelia nodded once.Elara left. The door closed behind her with
The tiles were cold through my palms. I had been sitting on the bathroom floor for too long to measure, my back against the side of the bath. The tap was still running because the sound of water seemed like the one thing that might help.It had not helped much. I kept it running anyway.Forty-eight hours. The number sat in my chest beside the nausea. Both occupied the same hollow space, keeping company like unwelcome things. I had written it on the whiteboard less than two hours ago, using the same careful script I had used for seventy-two. Replacing the old number with the new one felt like changing a bandage while the wound waited underneath. Nico had watched from his chair without saying anything. I had appreciated that.Then the nausea started. Quiet at first, the kind that sits at the back of the throat like a warning. I reached for my tea with the specific stupidity of someone hoping warmth might settle it. Instead, I spilled it down the front of my sweate
I dropped to the bed beside her, my chest heaving with exertion. Even after decades as Alpha King, the intensity of mating with my true match left me breathless. Amelia lay beside me, her copper hair spread across my pillows like flame, her skin flushed with satisfaction. Mine. The word echoed th
I strode through the palace corridors, my footsteps echoing against marble as servants and guards flattened themselves against walls in my wake. The rage that had simmered since Amelia mentioned her public whipping threatened to boil over with each step. This Gamma Julian—this dog who had d
I woke to the sensation of hands sliding down my stomach, warm palms skimming over my hips with deliberate slowness. My mind floated in that hazy place between dreams and wakefulness, body responding before consciousness fully returned. Those hands parted my thighs with gentle insistence, and som
I left Amelia on the balcony, the taste of victory still fresh in my mouth. Victoria's execution had sealed what the claiming bite had started – my mate had witnessed wolf justice delivered in her name and hadn't flinched. When I returned to our chambers at ten, the scent of bath oils and warm wa







