POV of Seraphina

Liora's scream tore through the east wing before the ceremony bells stopped ringing.

"I can't stop wanting him!"

Cassian stood behind me in the corridor, every muscle rigid. His breathing had gone ragged, his wolf answering the call from her room.

"Stay here," I said.

"Seraphina—"

"Let me see her first."

Servants flattened themselves against the walls as I entered Liora's chamber. Thalia and two medics were holding her on the bed. Her nightgown had torn at the collar. She had clawed bloody furrows around the new mark on her throat.

Her pupils were solid gold.

"Please," she gasped when she saw me. "I can feel him inside my head. I hate it. I hate that my body doesn't care who he is to you."

Her back arched. Her wolf howled beneath her skin.

Thalia looked at me. "We need the Alpha. Her wolf is destabilizing."

Liora seized my wrist. Her fingers were ice.

"I would rather die than hurt you."

"No one dies tonight."

"But he feels like air. Like if he leaves, I stop breathing."

I knew that sensation. Fifteen years ago, bleeding in smoke and ash, Cassian's bond had struck me like drowning and rescue at once.

Now my sister was drowning, and my husband was the air.

"Bring him in," I ordered.

Cassian filled the doorway seconds later. His ceremonial shirt hung open, exposing my flickering mark. He looked at Liora, and gold swallowed his eyes.

"Mine is hurting," his wolf said.

He crossed the room in three strides and dropped beside the bed. His hand closed around Liora's wrist, over my own.

The effect was immediate.

Her body went still. Her breathing slowed. Grey returned to her eyes. Cassian's wolf settled with a wave of relief so powerful I felt it through our original bond.

My husband's soul had calmed because he was touching another woman.

Cassian realized it at the same moment. He released her as if burned.

"I didn't choose that."

"I know," I said, though the words felt hollow.

Thalia checked Liora's pulse. "The second bond is unstable. She will need brief contact every day until we find another treatment."

"No," Cassian said.

"Without it, her wolf may tear itself apart. Distance could kill her within hours."

I forced myself to think like a Luna instead of a wife.

"How much contact?"

"A wrist. A shoulder. A few minutes at most. Longer contact will strengthen the bond."

"Holding her?"

"Too intimate."

"Lying beside her?"

Thalia's expression tightened. "Absolutely not. Brief, clinical contact only."

Liora began to cry. "Send me north. Lock me in a silver cell. Do anything except make her watch this."

"You would die before reaching the gate," Thalia said.

"Then let me."

"No." The word cracked through the room. "I did not spend twelve years keeping you alive so you could sacrifice yourself for my dignity. We will manage this."

Cassian watched me with the same helpless fury he had worn after our miscarriage. He wanted me to scream at him, to accuse him, to do anything except turn pain into policy.

I asked everyone to leave except him.

The door closed. The silver thread pulsed faintly between his chest and Liora's sleeping body.

Cassian crossed the room and reached for my hips.

"Look at me."

I did.

"Nothing has changed."

"Everything has changed. Your wolf called her mine in front of the pack. Her body will fail without your touch. You just calmed her the way you have calmed me for fifteen years."

"I love you."

"Love is not the problem. Biology is."

His hands tightened. "Then I won't touch her."

"She will die."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Touch her exactly as long as necessary. Never alone. Never in your bedroom. Never at night unless Thalia confirms an emergency. You sleep beside me. You tell me the moment your thoughts stop feeling like your own."

"I will not fall in love with her."

"Gareth said that too."

Cassian recoiled.

I hated myself for using Evelyn's husband against him, but fear had sharpened every word.

"The bond will begin with duty," I said. "Her wrist, then her shoulder, then comfort when she cries. One day you will hold her because it is medically necessary, and the next day you may not remember when necessity became tenderness."

"Stop."

"Pretending you are immune will not protect me. It only means I will not see the change coming."

His eyes shone. "I carried you through a burning forest. I killed men who suggested replacing you after we lost our child. I have loved you with every breath for fifteen years."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"Yes. That is why this terrifies me. If I believed you were faithless, this would be simple."

The anger went out of him.

From the bed, Liora whimpered. The half-formed thread brightened, and Cassian's body turned toward her before his mind stopped it.

He looked sick.

"Tell me what you need," he said.

"I need a public statement before dawn. The elders must hear that I remain Luna and that no second ceremony will happen without my consent. I need guards on this wing and Thalia present for every contact. I need the archives opened."

"And from me?"

I swallowed.

"Tonight, I need you in our bed. I need your hands to remember me."

His eyes darkened, but I held up a hand.

"After we stabilize her. After we secure the pack. After we survive the politics. Then I fall apart, and you hold me together."

A broken laugh escaped him. "Fifteen years, and you still turn disaster into battle plans."

"Someone has to."

His thumb brushed my jaw. "I will break this bond. Whatever it costs."

Before we left the room, I wrote the rules myself on a sheet from Thalia's case. No closed doors. No contact longer than sixty heartbeats. No visits without a witness. Every symptom recorded. Every vial tested by two physicians. Cassian signed beneath my name without asking to soften a single condition.

Liora signed last. Her hand shook so badly the ink blotted.

"If I break one of these rules?" she asked.

"We treat it as a medical emergency, not a moral failure," I said. "But we do not hide it."

Cassian looked at me then, understanding the other promise buried in the page. No more secret mercy. No private decisions made to spare someone pain. Whatever came next, we would all have to see it.

Liora cried out again.

Cassian did not move, but his hand trembled against my face.

He was fighting.

I believed him.

I only did not know how long a man could fight his own soul before something inside him surrendered.

POV of Seraphina

Liora's sketchbook opened beneath my hands like a confession.

The first pages showed harmless dreams: a black wolf running through winter woods, drinking from a stream, sleeping beneath a crescent moon. Then the drawings changed.

The wolf bled from silver wounds identical to Cassian's scars. It stood over a grave. It lowered its muzzle to a white wolf's throat in a mate's caress.

The last three pages were worse.

A white wolf lay in a nest of moonflowers with a swollen belly. Beside her stood a black wolf with gold eyes. On the final page, a silver-haired boy stood between them beneath a shattered moon.

"You dreamed of carrying his child," I said.

Liora's bandaged hands shook in her lap. "I didn't want the dreams. I woke up sick. I scrubbed my skin until it bled."

"For six months?"

"The first one came after I returned from the border clinic. I thought it was fever. Then I started smelling the Alpha wing in my sleep. Smoke, pine, the oil Cassian uses on his weapons." Her voice broke. "I prayed every full moon for it to stop."

"Did you know it was him?"

"Not at first. The dreams only showed the wolf."

"But you suspected."

Her silence answered.

I turned another page. The boy's eyes had been painted gold with unusual care.

"Does Cassian know?"

"No. No one does."

"Why hide it from me?"

"Because part of me liked how the dreams felt." Shame bent her shoulders. "The wolf made me feel safe. Chosen. I hated myself for wanting to go back to sleep."

I forced myself to ask the question that mattered.

"If there were no silver thread, no drug, no wolf compulsion—only you and Cassian—would you still want him?"

Liora opened her mouth. Closed it.

Tears gathered, but she did not lie.

"Yes."

The room seemed to tilt.

I had raised her to tell the truth even when it cost her. I had never imagined the truth would be my husband.

"When did it begin?"

"I don't know. Maybe when he sat with me in the garden last spring. You were at the border negotiations. I was crying, and he never asked me to explain. He just stayed until I could breathe again." She twisted her fingers. "He remembered I hated cinnamon. He made the kitchen prepare a separate plate. Small things. I told myself it was gratitude."

"He is kind to everyone in this house."

"I know."

That was the cruelest part. She had not invented a false version of him. She had fallen for the same quiet attentiveness that had first undone me.

I closed the sketchbook.

"You should have told me."

"I was afraid you would look at me exactly as you are now."

I saw my reflection in the dark window: expressionless, controlled, the Luna's face I wore when pain had no useful place to go.

"I love you," Liora whispered. "You are the only mother I remember. I would cut out my wolf before I took him from you."

"You cannot remove your wolf without dying."

"I know."

I left before either of us said something we could not survive.

The corridor to the Alpha wing ran past tapestries of legendary mates, every story embroidered as if fate had always been clean and glorious. My wolf curled beneath my ribs and made the same broken sound she had made after the miscarriage.

Cassian was awake when I entered our chamber. He sat on the edge of the bed, shirtless, his head in his hands.

"You went to her."

"Yes."

"How is she?"

"Stable."

Relief crossed his face too quickly. He saw me notice and looked ashamed.

I sat beside him without touching.

"Did you dream about her before the ceremony?"

He went still.

"Once," he said. "Three months ago, after the border raid. I woke with the scent of laurel and berries in my lungs. I thought it was you until I realized it wasn't."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because it was a scent in a dream. I did not know it was Liora."

"She has been dreaming about your wolf for six months. She drew your scars before she knew the bond existed. She dreamed of your child."

Cassian stood and drove his fist into the stone wall. Blood ran over his knuckles.

"That is not my child."

"I know."

"I never touched her."

"I know that too."

He turned, fury and terror stripped bare on his face. "Then why do you sound as if I have already betrayed you?"

"Because the Moon planted your wolf in her dreams before either of you knew enough to resist. Because she wanted you before the thread appeared. Because you dreamed her scent and buried it. I am trying to understand where manipulation ends and desire begins."

He crossed the room and knelt before me.

"Tell me what you want."

I looked at the bed we had shared for fifteen years, the cracked wall, the blood on his hand.

"I want to burn every Moon altar in Black Ridge. I want to drag Liora backward through time. I want my husband to have never smelled her."

His eyes closed.

"But I cannot do any of that," I continued. "So I am going to fight what I can touch. The elders. The law. The bond. Whoever allowed this plague to become normal."

"And us?"

I took his injured hand and pressed my lips to his knuckles.

"I fight for us too. For this bed. For every winter we survived. For every time you chose me when the pack demanded something easier."

His good hand gripped my hip.

"She will not take you from me," I said.

"No one could."

He kissed me with the desperation of a man who had nearly died. I kissed him back, not because desire erased fear, but because fear had made me hungry for something still ours.

When he pulled me against him, the bond between us flared hot and familiar.

Then, far down the corridor, Liora cried his name in her sleep.

Cassian's body tightened beneath my hands.

He did not turn toward the sound.

But his wolf did.

POV of Seraphina

Cassian kissed me as if the bond could be drowned in heat.

For a few desperate minutes, I let him try.

His hands knew every scar, every place grief had changed my body, every sound I made when fear gave way to need. Nothing about us was new, yet the familiarity felt precious now—a language the Moon had not taught him and could not give to anyone else.

When we finally lay still, his forehead rested between my shoulder blades.

"Fifteen years," he murmured. "I still want you more after every fight."

"That may say something unhealthy about us."

His laugh shook against my skin.

The door burst open.

Thalia stood in the threshold, pale and breathless. "Luna, you need to come to the medical wing."

I reached for my robe. Cassian rose with me.

"Stay here," I said.

"No."

"Your wolf is calm because you are with me. I need it to remain calm while I examine whatever she found."

His jaw tightened, but he nodded. "Call if you need me."

The medical wing smelled of antiseptic, silver, and fear.

Liora lay on an examination table with her face turned toward the wall. Thalia handed me a chart.

Moon-womb hormone: twelve times normal.

Uterine lining: thickened and vascular.

Fertility cycle: forcibly activated.

"Explain," I said.

"Her body is preparing for pregnancy," Thalia answered. "Not naturally. Her wolf is behaving as if conception is imminent."

Liora curled tighter. "There is no baby."

"No embryo," Thalia confirmed. "But if Cassian completed the mating bond, conception would likely occur within the first cycle."

The words made the room feel airless.

I sat beside Liora and touched her shoulder. She flinched before forcing herself still.

"What's wrong with me?" she whispered.

"Nothing that you chose."

Thalia placed a second record in my hand. The parchment was six months old, pulled from the border clinic archives.

At the bottom, beneath a forged physician's signature, were three words.

Alpha blood infusion.

"Whose blood?"

"The signature has degraded, but the injection was administered three days before Liora's first dream."

I read it again.

Someone had injected my sister with Alpha blood. Someone had forced her fertility to align with Cassian before the Moon's silver thread ever appeared.

This was not fate.

It was design.

The medical doors slammed open.

Cassian stood there barefoot and shirtless, gold burning through his eyes.

"Something is wrong with the bond."

Liora screamed.

Silver light tore from her skin, forming the outline of her wolf above the table. The spectral animal bared its teeth at Thalia, then saw Cassian and rolled onto its back, exposing throat and belly in submission.

Cassian's wolf surged.

Protect the mate. Protect the pup.

The command flooded our bond so violently that my knees nearly gave.

I stepped between them and pressed my palm to his chest.

"Look at me. She is not pregnant."

"I know," he rasped.

"Your wolf does not."

His eyes dragged toward mine. The gold flickered.

"I almost marked her in my head," he said. "For one second, I wanted to protect what was never there."

"Go back to our room. Lock the door."

"Seraphina—"

"That is an order from your Luna."

He went because I had asked, and because some part of him still obeyed me before instinct.

Thalia sedated Liora. Then we descended to the medical archives beneath the eastern tower.

Dust coated shelves of sealed treatment records. Thalia spread the border clinic files across a worktable.

"The prescription was signed by Galen," she said.

"Galen died eight months ago."

"Two months before this treatment was ordered. Someone used his seal."

The listed drug was L-Bond, a black-market fertility enhancer outlawed across the northern packs. It used Alpha blood to prime a female wolf for conception with one specific male.

"Who has access to Cassian's blood stores?"

"The chief physician, the Alpha, and the Elder Council."

A cold certainty settled over me.

"Find the injection kit. Any remaining vials. Every inventory record from the blood vault."

Thalia moved toward the storage shelves.

I studied the formula. Cassian's blood signature had been woven into the catalyst, but another line of symbols appeared beneath it—older, written in a dialect used before Black Ridge was founded.

"This is not standard L-Bond."

Thalia leaned closer. "No. Something was added."

"What?"

"I cannot tell yet. But it was designed to do more than prepare a womb. It was designed to wake something dormant."

Thalia opened the blood-vault ledger to the week of the infusion. Three pages had been cut out with a blade, but the binding thread retained a smear of sealing wax. Black, not the red used by physicians. Council wax.

"Malric changed the council seals last winter," I said. "The older stamp carried a crescent split by a spear."

Thalia angled the ledger toward the candle. A faint crescent appeared in the residue.

"Then whoever altered this record has held council authority for at least six months."

I took the page containing Galen's forged signature. The pressure marks beneath it showed another name had first been written and scraped away. We dusted the paper with ash. Four letters emerged.

M-A-L-R.

Not proof. Not yet. But enough to turn suspicion into a direction.

"Lock the vault," I ordered. "No one enters without my blood seal. Send two guards for every attendant who treated Liora at the border clinic. Quietly. If Malric knows we found this, he will destroy the rest."

Thalia closed the ledger. "And Cassian?"

"He hears it from me before any elder can shape the story."

Before we could leave, Thalia found one more entry hidden in the binding: twenty-seven doses distributed to six packs under different names. Black Ridge was not the first test. It was the largest.

I copied the destinations and sealed the list inside my dress. If Malric controlled the castle, the evidence had to survive outside it.

A crash sounded above us.

Then the warning bells began to toll.

A guard shouted from the stairwell.

"Luna! The Alpha is in the east wing. Liora attacked him."

I was already running when he added the words that turned my blood to ice.

"She bit his throat."