LOGINMylaShe had been watching Myla for two days before she asked to speak with her alone.Myla had felt it from the first morning. The observer moved through Crimson River with the quiet methodical patience of someone who had done this many times before, speaking to elders, to junior pack members, to anyone who crossed her path with what appeared to be casual conversation and was clearly nothing of the kind. She was older than Myla had expected, white-haired and precise, with eyes that catalogued everything they landed on and gave nothing back.Her name was Elder Seraphine.And Myla's wolf had not settled once in the forty eight hours since she'd arrived.She watched Seraphine the way Seraphine watched everything else, carefully and from a distance, reading what she could from posture and movement and the particular quality of attention the observer brought to different parts of the pack house. She watched her spend twenty minutes in the eastern corridor where Myla had been on her knees
AlecThe physician found me between the third and fourth course of the formal dinner.She was apologetic about the timing in the way people are apologetic when they are not actually sorry but understand that the information they're carrying requires a particular kind of delivery. She leaned close and spoke quietly and used the words I had known were coming for months without ever fully letting myself hear them until she said them directly.Days. Not weeks.I thanked her. I excused myself from the table with the composure that twenty six years of being the Alpha had built into something close to reflex, said something to the observer about pack duties that she received with a nod that told me she understood exactly what had just happened and was filing it, and walked upstairs.My father's room was dim. He was sleeping when I arrived, and I sat in the chair beside his bed that had become, over these past months, as familiar to me as my own desk, and I looked at him in the low light and
MylaThey told her to wait inside.Not unkindly. Alec had said it with the particular measured calm he used when he was managing something carefully, and Seb had touched her arm briefly as he passed, a small steadying contact that said I'll be back before it said anything else. She understood the reasoning. The Council observer had arrived with Darius at her flank, and Myla walking out to receive them would answer questions the pack was not yet ready to have asked.So she waited.She stood in the corridor off the main entrance hall and listened to the formal sounds of reception drifting through the thick walls. Voices. Footsteps. The particular quality of a pack pulling itself into careful, deliberate order around two visitors who carried the kind of authority that made everyone stand slightly straighter.She counted four minutes before her wolf moved.Not the low settled awareness she had grown accustomed to over the past weeks. Not the directional pull toward one or both twins that
AlecI told myself I would feel it as loss.That had been my quiet assumption for weeks now, ever since the hall, ever since she'd stood between the two of us and refused to choose. I had braced for jealousy the way I braced for anything difficult, methodically, privately, certain that when Seb finally had his moment with her, something in me would have to grieve the version of this where she was only mine.I woke the morning after and found I wasn't grieving anything at all.I found them together in the kitchen before the rest of the pack house had stirred, Seb leaning against the counter with the particular ease he wore like a second skin, Myla beside him laughing at something quiet he'd said, her hand resting on his forearm without either of them seeming to notice it was there. They didn't perform it for me. They didn't stop or shift or grow careful when I entered the room.They simply continued being exactly what they were.I poured myself coffee and sat at the table, and somethin
SebastianHe found her on the eastern terrace two nights later, exactly where he'd first felt her scent shift everything he thought he understood about himself, and something about the symmetry of that wasn't lost on him.She was watching the tree line the way she often did now, some part of her wolf always tuned toward the border since the scout, since the letters, since the fortnight the Council had given them that was already shrinking by the day."You're not sleeping either," he said, coming to stand beside her."There's a lot not to sleep about lately."He was quiet a moment, close enough to feel the particular warmth that always radiated off her, close enough that his wolf had gone still and attentive the way it always did in her presence now, patient in a way it hadn't been for weeks."Alec told you about the observer," he said."He did." She glanced at him sideways. "You didn't come to find me tonight to talk about the Council."It wasn't a question. He huffed something close
AlecThe rider was young, Alec noted immediately, younger than the Council usually sent for anything they considered serious, which told him something before the man had said a single word.They received him in the main hall rather than the study, formal enough to signal Crimson River took the visit seriously, informal enough not to suggest they were afraid of it. Seb stood at Alec's right, arms loosely crossed, the picture of easy confidence that Alec had watched him deploy at pack gatherings a hundred times, the kind of presence that put people at ease before they'd even finished speaking."Alpha," the rider said, inclining his head to Alec, then, after only the faintest hesitation, to Seb as well. "The Council has received a formal petition concerning your pack. I've been sent to inform you directly, and to advise that an observer will arrive within the fortnight.""A petition from whom," Alec said, though he already knew."Alpha Darius of Bloodstone Ridge."Seb's jaw tightened alm







