LOGINSoren asked me to hold still while he worked through a grounding exercise with me, something about anchoring the witch energy to my own heartbeat so it stopped firing at random, and I was trying to do what he said when his hand covered mine on the table.
It was just to correct my position. My fingers had been curling inward when they needed to be flat and open. He reached across and laid his palm over the back of my hand to show me the difference and the moment his skin made contactSoren found it on the fourth day and came to find me immediately, which I knew because I could feel him moving through the house before I heard his footsteps, my witch side already tracking the energy he carried when he was focused on something that mattered.He laid the scroll on the table between us and I could see it right away, the thing he had seen, because once you knew it was there you couldn't unsee it. The edges where the paper had been cut. Precise, clean cuts, not tearing, not age damage, someone had taken a blade to this thing and removed sections deliberately and then rebound the scroll so carefully that unless you were looking for it you would never notice."How many pages," I said."I can't say for certain without knowing the original length." Soren's voice was controlled but the thing underneath the control was not controlled at all. "At minimum three. Possibly five. The cuts are at different points in the text, not consecutive, which means
I noticed all of it and I hated every single part of it.That was the honest truth. I noticed all four of them and I didn't want to and I couldn't stop doing it no matter how much I tried, because my body was not consulting my brain about any of this and hadn't been for weeks.Brecken had taken the chair nearest the door. He always did that. Put himself between me and whatever exit I might need to use in an emergency, and I knew it was the wolf doing it, the same instinct that made him reach for me before he reached for anything else, but knowing that didn't stop it from landing the way it landed, warm and steady and right under my ribs.He had also been watching Cade since Cade sat down and I could feel through the mate bond exactly what that watching felt like, tight and alert and not hostile exactly but not relaxed either, the specific feeling of someone marking new territory.Lucian was quieter than usual. He stood by the window the way he alw
Brecken did not take the news well. That's a polite way of saying he heard the words Tribunal elimination order and his eyes went fully gold before Cade finished the sentence, and I had to put my hand on his arm just to remind him that breaking the kitchen table wasn't going to change the information on it.Lucian, who had appeared by the time we moved the conversation to the main room, received it the way he received everything, quietly, already calculating.Soren listened without moving and his expression went to something careful and still.Cade said it all again plainly, the way he said everything, no extras, just the shape of it. The Tribunal had issued a full elimination order two days ago. Not just for me but for my known associates and anyone sheltering me. Three separate hunter teams had been activated. The modified mercenaries from yesterday were the test wave. What came next would not be testing anything."How many," Brecken said.
I saw him in the hallway. I had come downstairs at night for water because I couldn't sleep and the house was quiet and I was trying not to think about the attack or the vision or Soren's face when the woman with my face had looked at him. I turned the corner into the kitchen and there was a man sitting at the kitchen table that I had never seen inside this house before.He looked up the same second I saw him.And I knew.I didn't know how I knew. My vampire side had flagged him before I consciously recognized anything, that specific kind of alert she threw when something was nearby that wasn't wolf or vampire or witch but was still something, and my wolf had gone still in the way she went still around things that hadn't decided yet whether to be a threat.He was in his late twenties maybe. Dark hair. A face that looked like it had spent a lot of time outdoors and didn't apologize for it. Clothes that were built for moving in, not for anything els
The attack happened on the third day while we were outside.Soren had suggested we try training in open air because some of the witch energy worked better without walls around it, so we were in the back garden of Lucian's estate when my vampire side snapped awake so fast I stopped mid-sentence and grabbed Soren's arm."Someone's here," I said. "Over the wall."Soren didn't question it. He turned immediately, hands coming up, and I felt the magic shift in the air around him, something quiet and building, the way weather builds before a storm you can't see yet.They came over the wall in three places at once.Not wolves. Not vampires. Something in between, something with too many joints moving wrong and eyes that were flat and empty, and they moved fast, so fast I barely registered the first one before it was already across half the garden.Brecken came out of the back door at a sprint.I didn't know he'd been watching fro
Soren asked me to hold still while he worked through a grounding exercise with me, something about anchoring the witch energy to my own heartbeat so it stopped firing at random, and I was trying to do what he said when his hand covered mine on the table.It was just to correct my position. My fingers had been curling inward when they needed to be flat and open. He reached across and laid his palm over the back of my hand to show me the difference and the moment his skin made contact with mine the room disappeared.Not the way Lucian's visions took me. Not cold and dark and deliberate. This one hit both of us the same way and at the same time, because Soren's grip on my hand went tight the exact second I felt the floor drop out from under me.We landed somewhere old.Stone floor. High ceiling. The smell of something burning that wasn't wood or candle, something older, something natural, like the earth itself had caught fire somewhere far beneath us
He didn't sleep after that. I could tell because every time I opened my eyes Brecken was still awake. Sitting in the chair. Standing by the window. Pacing the length of the room quietly so he wouldn't wake me. His eyes were gold the whole night. His wolf was right at the surface and not going back d
I fell asleep on the couch. I didn't mean to. One minute I was staring at the city lights outside and the next the room was gone and I was somewhere else entirely. The place had no walls. Just darkness and the sound of my own breathing and a cold that settled into my skin without hurting. Like stan
I did not think it through. I did not even put on shoes. I just stood up from the couch and walked to the door like my body had somewhere to be and forgot to tell my brain about it. It started around noon. A pull. Low in my chest. Not painful. Not exactly. More like pressure. Like something on the
The elders came in the morning. Three of them. Old men in dark coats who smelled like burnt wood and authority. They walked into the penthouse like they owned it and stood in the middle of the living room waiting for Brecken to come out of his study. Sarah had brought me breakfast. I was sitting at







