Mag-log inEMBER'S POV
Knox doesn't try to stop them. He just holds me tighter, presses his lips to my hair, and lets me fall apart in his arms."You're safe," he murmurs against my temple. "You're free. He can never touch you again."The words break something open inside me. Something that's been locked away for so long I forgot it existed.Hope.I'm actually allowed to hope now."Ember."A quiet voice interrupts my breakdown. I pull back from KEMBER’S POVHe stops.And he’s grinning down at me, both of us breathing hard, my wrists still caught loose and warm in the cage of his hand above my head, my whole body gone soft and shaking with the last aftershocks of the laughter.And something in his face shifts as he looks down at me, the grin easing into something else, something that changes the air in the room, thickens it.“There,” he says, low. “Was that so hard?”“I confessed under torture. It won’t hold up.”“You looked happy under torture.” His thumb strokes once, slowly, over the frantic pulse in my wrist. “You’ve looked happy all day. I noticed the second you walked through that door.” His eyes travel my face — the flush still high in my cheeks, the wreck of my hair fanned across the pillow, the smile I can’t get rid of. “I’ve never seen you like that. Not once, in all the time I’ve known you. You came home lit up. You walked past a council elder laughing so hard you didn’t even see her.” His voice drops another regist
EMBER’S POVKnox finds me a couple of hours later, after Queenie’s left and the light’s gone gold across the mountains.I’m sitting cross-legged in the middle of the enormous bed we share, pretending to sort the day’s spoils and actually just running my palm over the ridiculous soft weight of a coat I absolutely did not need, feeling that dangerous, unfamiliar thing again.The one I keep waiting to be punished for. Peace.He stops in the doorway.“Ember.”“Mm?”“We need to discuss the gate.”“Do we, though?” I don’t look up. “Or could the gate simply be a beautiful, unspoken mystery between us, a thing we never—”“It’s six feet tall.”“It’s abstract.”“Ember.” He comes into the room, and there’s a slow, deliberate danger to the way he moves, and I finally look up, and his face is fighting very hard to be stern and losing at every seam. “A council elder photographed my front gate. She is going to show people. She told me to my face — I want you to understand she said this directly to m
EMBER’S POVKnox goes still. The King comes up behind his eyes.“Catherine.”“You didn’t hear it from me.” She folds her hands. “But you’ve a right to it, and there are those on the council who’d very much prefer you didn’t have it, which is exactly why I’m the one giving it to you.” Her pale gaze locks onto his. “Elder James has been busy.”And just like that, the warmth drains out of the room like water out of a cracked glass, and I feel Knox change beside me.“Busy how?” he asks.“Alphas.” Catherine’s voice has gone flat and precise. “They are moving. Quietly. From packs that have no earthly business speaking to one another — the northern territories, the western coast, and some from a great deal further afield than that. They’ve been coming and going for weeks, meeting in places that appear on no official record, and every one of those meetings has James’s fingerprints somewhere close by, though never quite on it. He’s careful. He’s always been careful, that man. It’s his one real
EMBER’S POVCatherine doesn’t so much as glance at him. She’s looking at me.“When I met you,” she says, slower now, “you were a woman being taken apart by procedure. You stood in that chamber, and you told the truth, and they very nearly buried you alive for it. And by the end you had the look of someone who’d already given up on being saved.” Her voice gentles, and it’s worse than if she’d been cruel. “I know that look, Ember. I’ve seen it on more women than I could ever count. It’s the look of someone who stopped expecting good things a long, long time ago — because in her experience, every good thing was only ever the quiet part before the next bad one.”I can’t speak. The bag is crushed flat against my chest.“And now.” She spreads one hand, taking in the whole absurd scene — the bags, the ribbon, me. “Now I walk into this house, and there is an abomination at the front gate, and I was informed by a staff member that there are five hundred rubber ducks somewhere in this building—
EMBER’S POV“So, funny story—”“Ember.”“Do you want it right now, or should we save it for a moment when there isn’t an elder present to—”Catherine makes a noise.It begins as a wheeze.And my very first thought is I have killed her; I have killed the only elder who ever liked me, felled by a marble penis; that’s my whole legacy; that’s what they’ll carve on my headstone — and then her narrow shoulders start to shake.And the wheeze cracks wide open, and she turns from the window with genuine tears streaking her weathered face, laughing so hard she has to seize the windowsill to stay upright.“A sundial,” she gasps out, clutching her ribs. “You looked me in the eye and called it a sundial! I am just picturing the High Council arriving soon and trying to politely check the time on a six-foot, veiny schlong!”There is nothing left of me. I am a shell. I am officially dead.“The high council will arrive next week for the annual gala.” She’s mopping at her eyes with one hand, entirely g
EMBER’S POV“He’s going to divorce me.”“You’re not married.”“He’s going to divorce me preemptively.” I’m losing a war with six shopping bags in the back of the car while Daxon and Reyes unload the rest in a haunted silence that says they’ve seen more today than they have in their entire jobs. “He’s going to invent a brand-new kind of divorce specifically for this.”“Ember, breathe,” Queenie says, practically vibrating with glee. “The damage is already done. It’s set in stone. Literally.”She clutches a spool of ribbon to her chest like a religious artefact.“Do you understand the sheer poetry of this? Just picture it. The most terrifying Lycan on the continent is going to walk out his front door in a perfectly tailored suit to survey his estate, and he is going to make direct eye contact with six feet of—”“Don’t.”“—premium, monumental yard-penis—”“Queenie, I swear—”“—and I want front-row seats.” She’s radiant. “I want to see the exact moment his soul leaves his body. I’d pay a f
KNOX’S POVHe blinks, the picture of innocence. “I’m not sure I understand. I explained the purpose quite clearly at the beginning of the evening. Conflict resolution. Closure. An opportunity for all parties to—”“Bullshit.”The word is deadpan, and I see Logan’s head snap up, see Gale’s sobbing st
EMBER’S POVI slump back into my seat unconsciously, not realizing how rigidly I’d been holding myself until the tension drains away.Knox lifts our entwined hands to his lips and presses a kiss to my knuckles, his eyes on me.It slows the tightening in my chest. Loosens the knot that Harrison’s qu
EMBER’S POV“Because I saw you on the news.” His voice cracks again. “During a press conference. I saw you standing up there, speaking to the camera, saying five words they have haunted me every night. You are dead to me. And though it wasn’t directed at me, I felt it so much. I felt it down to my
EMBER’S POVThe mattress dips sometime after three in the morning.I’ve been lying here for hours, staring at the ceiling, my mind running circles around the photo of Queenie still burning a hole in my phone.Sleep feels impossible. Every time I close my eyes, I see Rayana bleeding on the marble. S







