The healer's hands were gentle when she pressed the cold compress to my wrist,
but her eyes told me everything her mouth refused to say.
"Nadia." Her voice was soft, the kind of soft people use when they are about to
destroy you carefully. "The Ashveil Curse has fully taken root. The dark meridian lines are spreading faster than we anticipated."
I already knew. I had been watching them bloom across my ribs for five days-
thin, ink-black branches curling beneath my skin like a dying tree etched in reverse.
Every morning I stood before the mirror and traced them with one finger, cataloguing how far they had grown overnight.
"How long?" I asked.
Healer Maren set down her instruments. She did not look away from me, and I respected her for that. Most people looked away. "Three days. Perhaps four, if you rest and manage the pain.
" Three days. The number settled inside me without drama. I had expected
something larger- a crack of thunder, a collapse, tears at the very least.
But I only felt a strange, hollow stillness, like the moment after a glass shatters before you realize what has broken.
"And the Silver Moon Rite?" I asked. "That would still work, wouldn't it?
If it were performed in time?" Maren hesitated.
That hesitation told me more than her answer. "Yes. Performed on the cursed
individual within the next forty-eight hours, the Rite would purge the Ashveil
completely. But the ritual requires a full Alpha endorsement. Your mate would need to- "
"I understand," I said.
Under the healer's empathetic gaze, I swallowed the herbs to numb the severe pain.
My life was down to it's final three days.
I gathered my coat from the chair and left.
Outside, the Ironstone Pack's territory stretched wide and grey under an overcast
sky.
Late autumn had stripped the trees bare. The grounds were familiar to me in the
way that a place is familiar when you have poured years of yourself into it- the training
rings I had helped design, the northern watchtowers I had funded with the earnings
from my runework studio, the boundary wards I had reinforced with my own blood
three winters ago when the eastern rogue packs tested our borders.
I knew every stone here. I had built things here.
I pressed my hand flat against the bark of the old ash tree near the healer's hall.
The dark lines on my inner arm pulsed faintly.
Three days.
I straightened my spine. I pulled my coat closed. I walked.
I did not run. I have never been someone who runs. Even at the end, I would
walk.
By the time I reached the main hall, I had already decided that I would not beg.
I had done enough of that- not in words, because I was never the kind of woman who
begged with words, but in action.
Every quiet sacrifice.
Every time I swallowed my anger
and smiled instead.
Every night I spent alone in our bed because Cassian was "handling pack business" and I understood, always, because that was what a good mate did.
She understood.
I had understood myself into a dangerous corner.
And now the corner had a deadline.
Inside the hall, I heard laughter.
Cassian's laugh was a low, warm sound that used to make me feel anchored.
I paused in the doorway.
He was seated at the long planning table, maps spread before him, and across from him sat Lyra.
My adopted sister, Lyra Ashford.
She was laughing too, leaning forward with her hand hovering near his arm, not
quite touching, performing the almost-touch like an art form. She was beautiful in the
way that a trap is beautiful- all clean lines and inviting warmth until the mechanism
springs.
I had brought her into this pack. I needed to remember that, always. I was the one who had asked my parents to take her in.
I had been seventeen. She had been fourteen and terrified and thin as winter
grass, crouched at the edge of Coldwater Creek with a split lip and no pack scent. I had
seen her and thought: no child should be alone like this.
I had been wrong about what she was. Or maybe I had been right and she had
changed. Either way, it no longer mattered.
They noticed me standing there. Cassian's laugh faded. His expression shifted into something that was almost guilt but wore the mask of impatience.
"Nadia. You're back. How did it go with Maren?"
I walked into the room. I set my bag on the chair beside the door.
"The curse is terminal," I said. "Three days."
The silence that followed was not the silence of grief.
It was the silence of people recalculating.
Lyra pressed her fingers to her lips. Her eyes shimmered immediately.
She had always been extraordinarily fast with tears. "Oh, Nadia. Nadia, no-"
"There's a Rite," I continued. "The Silver Moon Rite. It would cure the curse
entirely. Maren confirmed it. That is my only hope."
I looked at Cassian. Only at Cassian. "It requires your endorsement as Alpha. Your formal declaration before the elder circle. That's all."
Something moved across his face. I watched him. I had spent years learning to read the small geography of his expressions- the way his jaw tightened when he was about to refuse something, the way his eyes shifted left when he was constructing a justification.
His jaw tightened. His eyes shifted left. And in that moment, before he said a single word, I understood that I had already lost. What I did not yet know was the shape of what was coming. The precise architecture of it. How thorough it would be.
"Nadia," Cassian said carefully. "There's something I need to tell you."
Lyra's eyes dropped to the table.
I clasped my hands in my lap. My expression did not change. "Tell me," I said. And I listened. Because that was what I did. I listened, and I processed, and I did
not let them see the exact moment something inside me finally went quiet for good....