LOGINThe hand covering my mouth disappeared as my captors reacted to the intrusion. Julian spun around, his face transforming from predatory pleasure to shock. Before he could speak, a scarred man with one milky eye surged forward, his hand closing around Julian's throat with terrifying speed. Julian clawed at the fingers cutting off his air, his feet barely touching the ground.
"Gamma Julian of Silver Lake Pack," the scarred man said, his voice deceptively calm for someone in the process ofElara 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
The hour passed the way hours passed now – in increments I was aware of only because I was counting them, each minute filed away against the seventy-two that remained on the whiteboard above the map.Nico and Dominic had gone to see to the guard arrangements not long after another scouts’ report had made the blue crosses on the board feel like a kind of cartography of failure. The office had contracted around Lukas and me in their absence, the fire lower now, the lamps holding their own against the afternoon light that had started its slow withdrawal from the windows. I was in the chair beside his desk, not the whiteboard, the marker set down and the thinking portion of the day having reached the particular impasse where more thought produced nothing new.Lukas had his hand on my wrist, resting there without comment. He did that sometimes now – not gripping, not claiming, just the warm weight of his palm as if contact was its own kind of communication.The knock came, and then Elara e
The knock came before the silence had fully settled, the sound sharp enough in the quiet office that I felt Amelia go still at the whiteboard without turning around.“Come in,” I said, though the door was already opening.Elara Thornwood stepped through it with her white coat immaculate and her silver-streaked hair pulling loose from its bun, and it took me half a second to register what was wrong with the picture: she was breathing hard. Not the controlled exertion of a woman who had walked quickly down a long corridor, but the particular, deliberate steadiness of someone who had run and was managing the evidence of it with professional precision. Her amber eyes went immediately to me, then to Amelia, then back to me.“Apologies, my King, my Queen,” she said, already moving to the desk. “The latest results are back from your guards.”Amelia’s hand, which had been hovering near the whiteboard with the red marker still uncapped, came to rest on my shoulder. I felt her go very still bes
I watched, every muscle in my body coiled tight as a spring, as Nico suddenly moved toward Amelia. Three days of knowing she was training with my best fighters had done nothing to ease the knot in my gut. Ares paced within my mind, his golden presence radiating protective fury. 'Stop them,' he ur
I hit the training mat hard enough to knock the air from my lungs, a familiar pain after three days of Nico throwing me around the royal gym. Sweat plastered my copper hair to my forehead and neck, my muscles screaming in protest as I forced myself to stand again. Athena growled her approval with
I stretched languidly in our bed, the morning sun filtering through the gauzy curtains and painting golden patterns across the silk sheets. Three months had passed since the wolf moon attack - three months of heightened security, interrogations, and an uneasy peace that felt more like the stillness
I sat rigid on my throne, the silver filigree of my crown catching the harsh light of the throne room. Three days had passed since we'd liberated Silver Lake, three days of testimonies, evidence collection, and preparation. Now seven wolves knelt before us, their hands bound in silver chains that







