The air around us stills.
I blink. “Take it away how?”
Malrik’s gaze darkens, fascinated. “You unmake magic, Rowan. You turn the supernatural…human.”
My throat tightens. “That’s not possible.”
He leans forward, eyes gleaming silver. “It’s already happened. You simply haven’t been paying attention.”
The energy of the castle increases, vibrating under my feet, and I feel it again—something inside me, shifting and awakening.
A flash cuts through my mind violently. The intruder in my room back at NightShade. The way his body went still under my hands from a wound that barely should have taken him down, yet managed to kill him. How the power had poured out of me like a scream.
Holy shit.
That splintered chair leg hadn’t taken his life.
I did the moment he was no longer supernatural.
My stomach twists further as I remember sparring with Liz next. Her expression was sharp with pain when my temper had slipped, and the air around us hadcrackled.She’d recovered—fast, like the predator she is—but there’d been a second where she’d been truly scared. I remember the terror in her eyes, and gods help me, I’d ignored it.
I thought I was losing control.
Instead, I was taking it.
“No,” I whisper, shaking my head hard enough to rock my chair. “You’re lying. I don’t—Ican’tdo that.”
Malrik’s smile is patient, almost gentle. “You can, you have, and you will. It’s why they fear you, young one. Why they’ll never stop hunting you.”
The castle hums again, deeper now, the tremor crawling up my spine like recognition. Fear unfurls in my chest, cold and sharp as glass, rendering me speechless, and in that silence, one truth carves itself deep enough to bleed.
If Malrik’s right, I’m not just dangerous.
I’m the end of what they are.
Chapter 4
CADE
By the time I leave the spelled room, dawn has started bleeding through the high windows of NightShade. It’s the kind of gray light that makes everything look worse, like the world hasn’t quite decided if it’s ready to keep turning.
The manor is quiet, but not calm. The air is filled with restless energy that coils in the walls after too much spilled blood and too little sleep. Every sound, every creak of the floorboards, every sigh of the wind through shattered glass, feels like this place is waiting for me to break.
Except I feel like I already have.
Taren’s words are etched into my mind. The way her voice cracked when she managed to speak his name just once, the blood that slipped from her ears when she pushed too hard. It might have taken hours to have what should have been a ten-minute conversation, but I got what I needed from her.
Information about “The Keep” and the name of the cloaked man who took Rowan.
Malrik Vane.
He’s supposedly somewhere cold in the north, on a mountain within the Glacier Crest Pack territory, surrounded by snow and not much else. I wasn’t surprised to hear that’s where his hideout is. The wolf who’d shown up that first evening at NightShade after Rowan woke was Glacier, and all the wolves we fought last night had silver eyes as well.
Still, with the kind of magic it takes to bind someone’s words and wipe memories, I wouldn’t be surprised if all those wolves weren’t truly Glacier-born. They could have been taken from anywhere and made to look however that monster wanted them to.
It could be a distraction to have us thinking Milo, the alpha over there, is behind all this. But now that he’s dead, thanks to whatever Rowan did, it’s not something I need to investigate. I only need to head into their lands and find my mate.
And I will. No matter how many mountains I have to search.
