ANMELDENJuneSophia and Aurora are debating my hair with the particular conviction of two people who both know they are right and have no intention of conceding, their hands moving expressively while they talk over each other.Anastasia is sitting near the window watching them with the calm amusement of someone who has seen this exact dynamic before and already knows how it ends. Rose has decided that today she is my personal assistant, which currently means she is standing very close to me holding a bud of rose she selected herself and waiting for someone to tell her where it goes.Reed has wedged himself into the corner of the settee with a very serious expression, something that seems foreign on a four years old yet on him it seems natural, having appointed himself guardian of the room like he believes he needs to protect everyone. Kane and Astrid, are just being themselves and completely unbothered playing their own made up game, sitting on the floor near Elise, one on each side of her.E
CalebThe sky above us is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen.Not blue exactly. Not any single color. It shifts between shades that do not have names, moving the way the surface of water moves when light hits it from an angle, and I can look directly at it without it hurting my eyes. That is the strangest part. There is no squinting, no burning, no need to look away. Just this vast brilliant canopy above us that seems to go on forever and somehow feels like it is only for us.June's head is on my shoulder.I can feel the weight of it, the particular way she settles against me when she has decided she is comfortable and has no intention of moving, and my arm is around her and the grass beneath us is not quite grass, softer than grass, more like the idea of grass, like someone described it perfectly without ever having touched it. Everything here is like that. The right feeling of things without the exact substance of them.Everything feels the way things are supposed to feel
CalebAwareness comes back slowly, in layers, the way it does when the body has been somewhere very far away and is not entirely sure it made it back.The first thing I feel is her hand.I do not know how long I have been holding it. My fingers are wrapped around hers and I feel it before I feel anything else, before I feel the floor under me or the sounds in the room or the weight of my own body, I feel her hand in mine and I feel how cold it is. How clammy. The pulse underneath her skin is barely there, a faint flicker that I have to press my fingers close to catch at all, and her chest is rising and falling in the particular slow shallow way that tells me every breath is costing her something she does not have left to spend.June.The thought arrives before I am fully conscious and it is the only thought there is.I open my eyes.The room rushes in all at once, light and sound and the faces of people I love arranged around me with expressions I do not want to read too carefully bec
SohpiaI hold Caleb's hand in both of mine and I take a breath that I try to make slow and even, and then I close my eyes and I call my darkness forward.It comes the way it always comes, not rushing, not violent, just rising, the way water rises in a room with no drain, filling the space inside me from the bottom up until I can feel it pressing against the inside of my ribs and the back of my eyes and the palms of my hands where they are wrapped around my brother's. It is cold. It is always cold. I have never found a way to make that part different and I stopped trying a long time ago. The cold is part of it. The cold is how I know it is real.I do not hate this part of myself.This is also mine. It grew inside me the same way my healing did, without asking permission, and I cannot hate something that is simply part of the shape of me. I have made peace with it.What I have not made peace with is the price.There is always a price. That is the one constant of every blessing I have ev
Third Person POVNeither of them speaks on the way back.There is nothing to say. Jake has June and Lucas has Caleb, and the forest moves around them in the dark while both brothers run with everything they have, and the silence between them is not comfortable or familiar the way their silences usually are. It is the kind that comes when words would make something more real than either person is ready for it to be. They had felt him forty minutes ago. There is no better word for what happens when Caleb's wolf reaches through the bond between the three of them. It is not a howl. It is not a call. It is more like a hand thrown out in the dark, desperate and without direction, just reaching, just broadcasting existence the way an animal does when it is too far gone for strategy. Jake is mid-sentence when it hits him, standing in the packhouse with a map spread across the table, studying the surrounding territories for any clue about where his brother might be. He does not finish the
CalebI have never believed I could lose.That is not arrogance exactly, or maybe it is, but it has never felt like arrogance from the inside. It has always felt like fact. I have been the strongest person in every room I have walked into since I was seventeen years old. I have fought things that should have broken me and walked away from every single one of them, and somewhere along the way that stopped feeling like luck and started feeling like the natural order of things. Like the world had simply agreed that Caleb does not go down.I believed that completely.I still believe it.But something shifted when I found her.My vision blurs at the edges and I blink it back, pressing my palm harder against the wound in her chest, and I keep talking because talking means I am still here and she is still here and this is not over."I used to think it was just me," I say quietly into her hair. "That the reason I never quit, never stayed down, never let anything finish me off, was because of
MikhailSophia's grip on my hand tightens the closer we get to the house. Her steps pick up, her breathing shifts, and I can feel the energy rolling off her in waves. It’s a mix of excitement and something raw, something untamed. Her wolf is on edge, not out of fear but out of that deep, instinctual
LucasIt’s like a fog’s lifting in my head, and everything about Sophia starts to click into place. Her blessing as a protector, the way she heals—it’s not just some random gift.It’s tied to something bigger, something deeper. She doesn’t just take pain because she’s selfless, even though she is.
MikhailThe cave is like a pitch-black void that seems to swallow the faint light from outside. The darkness doesn’t faze me, though.It can try to intimidate me all it wants, but I am not someone who is going to be scared.The air shifts as if something unseen stirs, carrying a faint metallic scen
SophiaSelena keeps stroking my hair, her fingers moving slow, almost tender, like she’s comforting me. But her eyes give her away. There’s no kindness there, only malice. It’s sharp and cold, the kind of look that causes a shiver to run down my spine.With her other hand, she dips her fingers into







