“I’m not talking about you.” Taren looks up at me, eyes red around the rim and wide. “I’m talking abouthim.”
“The—” Liz starts again, but I shake my head.
“Where is he?”
Taren’s chest rises and falls, shuddering with each breath, the faintest tremor of power leaking from her. I sense her wolf clawing at the surface, desperate for release. For a second, I brace for the shift. The crack of bone, the flash of teeth, but it never comes.
When her stare meets mine, there’s no rage in it. Only agony that locks onto me.
It hits like lightning. I can feel the sharp, electric ache of her grief slamming into me so hard it steals my next breath. Her suffering wraps around my thoughts, threading through my skull until I can’t tell where her torment ends and mine begins.
She’s drowning in it. And for one horrifying heartbeat, I think she wants me to hold her under until it stops.
“Enough,” I grit out, trying to pull my mind back from hers, but it’s too late. I see flashes—snow, blood, the hollow echo of betrayal. It’s not power that’s broken her. It’s guilt.
This woman isn’t our enemy, my wolf murmurs, quiet but certain.
And I already know.
“Nobody here is going to hurt you, Taren.” The wordsleave my mouth before I realize I’ve said them. Liz’s hiss cuts the air in response, sharp as razors.
I turn toward her, pulse hammering. “You know how much I need Rowan back,” I growl. “I’ll kill when it’s necessary, but this isn’t that time.”
My mind’s chaos, my heart worse, but somewhere beneath the anger, I still know the truth when I see it. Taren isn’t our target. She’s a casualty—one of many.
Liz doesn’t agree. Her jeer turns to a low snarl, the sound scraping against my nerves before she storms out, rattling the walls in her wake.
Silence follows her, thick and suffocating.
Taren lifts her head, voice trembling. “Thank you, Cade.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” I step closer, the words heavy with threat. “I may not kill you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t make you regret wasting my time. Maybe you can’t say his name, but you’d better find a way to tell me what you know.”
She stares down at her hands twisting in her lap, all that earlier fire gone to ash. “I’ll try,” she whispers. “But you need to know that by the time some of us realized how wrong it had all gone, it was too late. We tried to go back. To undo it. But the magic—his magic—is too strong. Not even you can fight this.”
I lean closer, my voice low enough to rattle bones. “Like hell I can’t.”
Her purple eyes flick up to mine, and something in her expression turns the air to ice. This woman isn’t afraid of me.
She’s afraid of what’s to come.
Chapter 3
ROWAN
The castle hums before I’m even awake. A low, melodic vibration that ripples through the stone walls and settles right into my bones. It’s like snuggling with a cat the size of a mountain lion, if that cat was also possibly plotting my murder.
A knock—if you can call the deepthunkagainst stone a knock—draws my attention to the far wall. A section of it slides open with awhoosh, and a figure steps through. Not Malrik, thankfully.
This one’s shorter, dressed in plain gray robes that manage to look ominous. “You’ve been summoned,” they say, voice clipped and genderless. “For dinner.”
I blink, having no sense of day or night within these walls. “Dinner?”
They nod once, then hold up a folded bundle of fabric like it might bite. “You’re to wear this. The Lord requests you look…presentable.”
There’s a pause, long enough for me tofully absorb the insult. “Presentable,” I repeat flatly. “Is that a polite way of saying I look like I got into a fight with a wild animal?”
The robed figure, with their face concealed by shadows, doesn’t flinch or even make a sound. They simply step closer and place the outfit on the bed beside me, then walk to a vanity that wasn’t in this room five seconds ago to lay out a neat array of accessories—hairbrush, small compact, a few glass pots filled with what looks suspiciously like makeup.
