I stared at the cracked screen.
The name attached to the financial records leak wasn't a contact of mine. Wasn't Northern intelligence. Wasn't anyone in the underworld network I'd spent three years building.
It was a human girl with a journalism minor. Chloe Raines. Wren's roommate.
She hadn't published it herself — she'd passed the financial records to Elias Thorne as an anonymous source, protecting her identity while ensuring the story broke outside the Dean's network jurisdiction. The byline was his. The evidence was hers.
She had done the one thing none of us had been positioned to do. She hadn't fought the system with power or politics or money. She had dragged its worst secret into the light and let the human world do the rest.
The board had changed.
"We're not going to the council," I said.
Chris looked up. His glowing amber eyes met mine across the ruined room.
"We're going to war," I said.
Neither of them argued.
26
WREN
The interior of the tactical transport was dark, soundproofed, and smelled of old iron, cold diesel, and raw fear.
I sat alone in the reinforced holding cell bolted into the back of the armored vehicle, knees pulled to my aching chest, trembling arms wrapped around my legs.
The steel tactical cuffs locked around my small wrists were lined with pure silver, stinging my sensitive skin with a slow, deliberate burn. A wholly unnecessary cruelty for an unbonded omega with no magical strength to speak of.
The transport hit a pothole, the military-grade suspension groaning as the massive vehicle continued its high-speed, illegal trajectory.
North.
Trent Hawthorne was taking me back into the heart of the Northern Dynasty.
Dragging the legendary Pack-Heart back to the exact political system that had broken her in the first place — this time as a verified, priceless magical asset rather than a disappointing 'defective' pawn.
I closed my stinging eyes. The hot, terrified tears were finally spent.
No frantic panic left in my exhausted body. The survival adrenaline had burned out, leaving behind only a terrifyingly cold, desolate clarity.
I had refused the permanent claim.
Refused the protection of the alpha perimeter because I was so terrified of being locked in another gilded cage. And because of my unhealed trauma and my paralyzing fear, Hayes, Tristan, and Chris were bleeding out on the cold floor of a ruined safehouse they had built for me. And I was locked in another cage anyway.
I had lost them.
The realization was a dull, heavy ache in the center of my chest — infinitely worse than the agonizing magical pain of Trent's initial severance.
The first severance had just been the loss of a cold arranged contract. This was something else entirely.
This was the permanent loss of the only three people in the entire world who had ever truly looked at the sharpest, most broken pieces of my soul — and chosen to stay.
I raised my cuffed hands slowly, my bruised fingertips finding the high collar of the ruined velvet dress. I pushed the fabric aside.
On the left side of my neck, at the collarbone junction, the broken bond scar pulsed faintly — not with Trent's toxic, decaying magic anymore. With something rawer. Something new. The faint, unmistakable warmth of an awakened tether.
Hayes's mark. Incomplete. Unsealed. Not enough to protect me.
