LOGINCalebAwareness 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
CalebShe is still smiling.That is the thing that breaks me open completely. June is sitting in my arms with a silver dagger buried in her chest and her eyes half-closed and her heartbeat stuttering under my hands, and she is smiling. That small, real, private smile that I have spent months learning the difference between. The one that means something to her. The one she does not give out easily.It is the most wrong thing I have ever seen in my life.I pull her closer and my eyes tear through the cell looking for anything, anything at all, some solution sitting in the corners of this rotting place that my mind has missed. There is nothing. Stone walls. A dying lantern. Blood on the floor that belongs to too many people now. My gaze keeps moving anyway because stopping means accepting what I am feeling through the bond and I cannot do that. I cannot.Her heartbeat slows by another degree.I feel it the way I feel everything from her now, directly, like it is happening inside my own c
JuneI take a step toward her.And then another.Tanya watches me close the distance between us and something shifts in her expression, the satisfaction flickering, recalibrating, trying to decide what my movement means. She holds her ground. Her chin stays up. She is still operating inside the version of this where she has already won.My fist connects with her jaw before she finishes that thought.The crack of it fills the cell and Tanya's head snaps sideways and she stumbles hard into the stone wall, one hand flying up to her face. She makes a sound that is more surprise than pain, like she genuinely did not expect this, like she thought I would stand there and argue with her about what she deserves and what she does not.I do not argue.I reach for her and she swings back, wild and off-balance, her fist catching my cheekbone hard enough to make my vision blur for half a second. She is not trained. I feel that immediately in the way she moves, all desperation and no form, throwing
JuneWe are halfway to breakfast when the whistle cuts through the morning air.My steps slow with everyone else’s. The sound echoes off the buildings, off the trees, off whatever part of me is still caught on the memory of bare skin and warmth and a hand where it should not have been. That stranger
LucasCaleb rubs the back of his neck like he is smoothing out a bad idea, which is funny because he never regrets his bad ideas. His mouth is already tilted into that familiar smirk, the one that says he enjoyed every second of it. There is sweat drying at his temples, leaving faint salt lines tha
LucasWe sit around a small dining table in the kitchen, close enough that our knees almost touch when someone shifts. The room smells like herbs and heat and something familiar I cannot name, the kind of smell that settles into clothes and memory without asking permission. A large bowl of soup sit
LucasMy eyes keep moving, catching fragments. A shadow shifts where it should not. A space feels wrong before I fully see it.The cell door is open.Anastasia is gone.Ryan turns just as she reaches him. She moves through the narrow light with sharp speed, her boot slamming straight into his chest







