The silver-haired woman stepped into the circle of moonlight, her boots clicking with military precision against the cracked basalt.
"Meet Talia," Gideon said, his voice dropping back into its low, emotionless register, though his left arm remained locked like an iron band around Lyra’s waist. "My second-in-command. And the only scout in the Wastes who doesn't sell her reports to the highest bidder."
"Not for lack of offers," Talia retorted, her single pale eye raking over Lyra with calculating appraisal. Her gaze lingered on the raw, weeping brand at the base of Lyra’s throat, where the silver-ash was still hissing faint purple steam. "So the rumors were true. The butcher Conlan didn't drown the Ash Princess in the river nineteen winters ago. He kept her in a cellar like a prized truffle pig."
A dangerous, low vibration rumbled deep in Lyra’s chest—a sound that surprised even her. Her inner wolf, drunk on Gideon’s intoxicating scent of cedar and crushed iron, bared its obsidian fangs at the insolence.
Talia’s eyebrow arched. "Feisty. Good. A timid Morvath wouldn't last through the next hour."
"Explain the Coven," Gideon commanded, his fingers tightening against Lyra’s hip. The possessive grip sent waves of electric heat humming along the silver-red cord anchored between their hearts. "Morgana doesn't leave the Silver Coast for stray wolves. Even an escaped Morvath."
Talia pulled a torn piece of parchment from her vambrace and tossed it onto the obsidian dais.
The paper was saturated with dark, dried blood—not written with ink, but etched in dark ichor that smelled of curdled nightshade and salt. Even from three paces away, Lyra’s ability flared with an oily, sickening heat that made her gorge rise.
"A blood-hunt decree," Talia said grimly. "Signed by the High Matron of the Coven herself. Conlan didn't just lose his pet hound, Gideon. When Lyra fractured Martha’s chest, she broke the warding stone buried beneath the herbalist’s hearth. The stone was tethered directly to the Coven's blood-altar in the coastal spires."
Talia leaned forward, her eyepatch catching the crimson reflection of the lava vents below.
"The moment Martha’s wards failed, the Silver Coast felt the seal destabilize. They know the Fourth Circle is leaking. And Morgana knows that if the Morvath sovereign awakens completely, every false bond forged by the Northern Alliance over the last two decades will unravel like rotten linen."
Lyra’s breath caught. "Every false bond?"
Gideon looked down at her, his amber eyes dark with grim certainty. "How do you think the Five Alphas built their empires, little bird? True fated mates are rare—one in ten thousand among common wolves. The High Coven has been forging artificial bonds for twenty winters using dark blood-sorcery, binding powerful bloodlines together to consolidate wealth, land, and iron."
The puzzle pieces snapped together with sickening, razor-sharp clarity in Lyra’s mind.
Lady Vrena and Lord Matthew.
The treaty that Conlan had been so desperate to force. The marriage that would have given the Blackwood Pack control of the Iron Ridge silver mines.
"They're not just Alphas," Lyra whispered, the horror cold in her veins. "They're a syndicate. A breeding syndicate."
"And your bloodline is the only force capable of severing their counterfeit cords with a single breath," Gideon rumbled, his jaw set in stone. "You are an existential threat to their entire empire. That is why Morgana is in the Wastes."
"How close are they?" Gideon barked at Talia.
"Too close," Talia replied, unhooking one of her silver rapiers and testing its balance with a flick of her wrist. "Her vanguard reached the Red Fissure half an hour ago. Six Void-Hounds. And two dozen Coven Blood-Drinkers on armored drakes."
A distant sound cut through the silence of the caldera.
It was not a wolf’s howl.
It was a wet, unnatural shriek—like a rusted iron hinge dragged across a wet lung. The sound echoed off the basalt pillars of the Great Hall, vibrating through the stone floors beneath their boots.
Lyra’s ability seized.
The air in the caldera, which had finally begun to taste of Gideon’s rich, protective cedar, was violently contaminated.
Riding the sulfur wind from the outer ramparts was the stench of raw rot, burning copper, and hollow marrow. But moving beneath that stench were six distinct, suffocating cords—not silver-red threads of life, but weeping, pitch-black chains that crackled with necrotic lightning, lashing across the outer courtyard.
"They breached the lower gate," Lyra said, her voice dropping into a dead, razor-edged whisper. "Six of them. They’re running on three legs, tracking the smoke from the broken seal."
Talia blinked, her single eye widening in genuine shock. "You can track their lines from inside the citadel?"
"She is the Sovereign," Gideon said, reaching behind his shoulders with both hands.
With twin rasps of singing steel, he drew the two massive obsidian claymores from their scabbards. The dark star-iron blades caught the moonlight, black runes along the fuller igniting into faint, violent purple fire.
"Talia, take the western parapet with the archers," Gideon commanded, his voice shaking the dust from the ceiling rafters. "Drop the iron portcullis behind the second courtyard. Do not let the drakes reach the upper terraces."
"And you?" Talia asked, drawing her second rapier.
Gideon looked down at Lyra, his scarred face illuminated by the eerie violet glow of his twin blades.
"I am going to introduce the High Matron’s pets to the rightful heir of the Ash Throne."
He turned to Lyra, extending his left hand—the hand still stained with the blood that had ignited her world.
"Can you fight, little bird?"
Lyra looked at the dark claymores humming with ancient magic. She looked at the bloody cylinder in her pocket containing the decree that marked her for death.
She remembered nineteen winters of starving in the damp dark, beaten with canes, kicked by enforcers, treated like an abomination by monsters who had stolen her birthright.
The silver-red cord connecting her to Gideon pulsed with sudden, blinding intensity, flooding her veins with a tidal wave of molten strength.
Her hazel eye completely gave way to violet fire.
She reached down to her rope belt, drawing the iron skinning blade, its notched edge gleaming cold in the dark.
"I didn't run six leagues through a blizzard to hide behind your skirts, warlord," Lyra whispered, her fangs lengthening against her lower lip.
A slow, terrifying, feral grin spread across Gideon’s scarred face.
"Good," he rumbled.
From the shattered archway of the Great Hall, the first pair of pitch-black jaws snapped through the gloom, its hollow eye sockets burning with the cold green flames of the Void.
And the hunt began.