Chapter 5: The Prime's Wrath
The morning run was supposed to clear her head. Five miles through the dense woods behind the pack lands, the only sounds were the pounding of her feet on the pine-needle carpet, the rasp of her own breath, and the waking chorus of birds. It was the one time of day the pressure lifted. No furtive looks from the new, extra guards. No weight of Ithan’s silent, searching suspicion from across the dinner table. No phantom ache between her thighs that had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with the memory of linen closets and the desperate, quiet aftershocks that still haunted her dreams. For an hour, she could just be a wolf running, muscles burning, lungs pumping.
She was on the final loop, the training grounds coming into view through a break in the trees, when the air changed.
A shift in the scent trail. Not just wolf. A specific wolf. Ithan.
She slowed, her heart jolting from a runner’s rhythm to something jagged and scared. He hadn’t joined her on a morning run in years, not since before Conner died. He was waiting for her where the tree line broke into the open field, a dark, broad-shouldered silhouette against the grey morning light.
Aria forced her pace back to a jog, trying to regulate her breathing, to look normal. As she drew closer, the details of him resolved. He wasn’t in running gear. He wore black sweatpants and a tight grey t-shirt, his arms crossed over his chest. His expression wasn't the quiet sadness she’d grown used to. It was a flat, cold plate of controlled fury.
“Morning,” she panted, slowing to a walk a few feet from him, bending to put her hands on her knees as if catching her breath. It was a good excuse to avoid his eyes.
He didn’t answer. The silence stretched, thick and threatening. The birdsong in the woods suddenly felt very far away.
“Good run?” he finally asked. His voice was too casual. It was the quiet before the detonation.
“Yeah. Hard. Need to shower.” She straightened, swiping a hand over her sweaty forehead, and made to move past him toward the house.
His hand shot out, his fingers wrapping around her upper arm. The grip wasn't brotherly. It was an iron clamp, designed to stop and to hurt.
“Ithan—“
“Look at me.”
She did. His green eyes were like chips of frozen jade. They raked over her face, then dropped, deliberately, to the side of her neck. She’d tied her hair up in a high ponytail for the run. There was nothing to hide the skin there.
“What is that?” he asked, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous register.
Her blood turned to ice. She knew what he was seeing. Daemian had a habit of claiming that particular spot with his mouth, his teeth. The marks never broke the skin—not quite—but they bloomed in faint, petal-like bruises that lasted for days, tinged with the peculiar, ozone-spark scent of his fae magic. To a human, they might look like a weird rash. To a Prime wolf shifter standing two feet away, they were a screaming brand.
“It’s nothing,” she said, trying to pull her arm back. His grip tightened, digging into her muscle. She gasped.
“‘Nothing’ doesn’t smell like a fucking Avallen palace garden, Aria.” He leaned in, nostrils flaring, his face a mask of disgust and dawning horror. “That’s him. That’s the prince. That’s his scent on your skin.”
The truth was a trapped animal, clawing up her throat. Her mind raced, searching for any lie that could possibly stick. A training accident. An allergic reaction to some new soap. He’d smell through it in a second. He already had.
“Is that where you’ve been going?” he snarled, shaking her arm once, a sharp, rattling motion. “When you slip the guards? To get yourself marked up by that fae bastard?” His eyes were wide now, the fury giving way to a kind of sick, bewildered betrayal. “He’s using you. Don’t you get that? He’s playing some long game against the wolves, and he’s using my little sister as the fucking pawn!”
“He’s not!” The denial tore out of her, raw and immediate. “You don’t know him!”
“I know his kind! I know his family! Cruel, manipulative assholes who think the sun rises out of their own royal asses!” He released her arm as if her skin had burned him, taking a step back. His chest heaved. “Conner would be sick. He’d be fucking sick to see this.”
The invocation of Conner’s name was a low blow, a targeted strike at the deepest part of her guilt. It hit its mark. Aria flinched, tears springing to her eyes. “Don’t. Don’t you dare bring him into this.”
“Why not?” Ithan roared, the sound echoing across the empty field. A few crows burst from a nearby tree, cawing in alarm. “He died for this pack! He died because of games played by people like him! And you’re rolling around with the enemy’s heir? Letting him put his hands on you?” His voice cracked. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The shame was a hot flood, but underneath it, a harder, angrier core began to form. She was tired. Tired of being the grieving girl, the little sister, the problem to be managed. The look on his face—the pure revulsion—ignited something defensive and fierce.
“Maybe I’m not just something for you to protect!” she shouted back, her voice trembling but loud. “Maybe I’m not a piece of pack property that you get to lock up and guard! He sees me, Ithan. He doesn’t just see Conner’s ghost or your weak little sister!”
“Sees you?” Ithan let out a bitter, hollow laugh. “He sees a target. A soft spot. A way to get under my skin and into our business. You think this is about you?” He gestured wildly at her neck. “That mark isn’t affection, Aria. It’s a fucking territorial claim. He’s pissing on a fencepost. My fencepost.”
The crudeness of it made her nauseous. It reduced what was happening—the terrifying, overwhelming bond, the stolen moments of understanding, the sheer need—to something primal and ugly. And maybe part of it was that. But not all of it. It couldn't be.
“It’s more than that,” she whispered, the fight draining out of her, leaving her cold and exhausted.
Ithan saw the shift. He moved in again, his anger cooling back into that frightening, analytical control. “How long?” he asked, each word precise.
She didn’t answer.
“How. Long.”
“A few weeks,” she murmured, looking at the ground.
“Since the Quarter.”
It wasn’t a question. He was putting the timeline together.The bookstore. Her furtiveness. The panic he’d witnessed at the border. The bond he couldn’t comprehend but instinctively distrusted.
“Is that what this is?” His voice was deadly quiet. “Some fucked-up grief thing? You lose Conner so you attach yourself to the first dangerous pretty boy who looks at you?”
“Stop it.”
“Or is it the magic?” he pressed, relentless. “Fae have glamours.Charms. They can make you feel things that aren’t real. He’s got his hooks in your mind.”
“He hasn’t glamoured me!” she snapped, looking up. “I would know!”
“Would you?” Ithan’s gaze was pitiless. “You’re eighteen. You’re grieving. You’re the most vulnerable person in this entire city, and you’re walking right into the arms of a professional court manipulator.” He ran a hand over his face, the weariness sudden and profound. “Gods, Aria. Do you sleep with him?”
The question hung in the damp morning air, obscene and direct.
Her silence was answer enough.
Ithan closed his eyes. For a long moment, he just stood there, breathing slowly, as if trying to physically master a rage that wanted to shift him, to send him running for the Avallen gates. When he opened them again, the decision was made, etched in stone.
“You’re not leaving this property,” he said, his tone flat and final. “Not for class. Not for a run. Not for anything.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I’m your Prime. I’m your brother. Watch me.” He started listing off dictates, each one a new bar on the cage. “Your phone stays in the kitchen when you’re home. Perry checks it. You have a guard in the hallway outside your room at night. If you try to bolt, they have my permission to restrain you. Physically.”
“Ithan, please—”
“This is for your own safety,” he cut in, but the words were ash in his mouth. They both knew this was about control, about quarantine. “You are untethered. You’re a liability to yourself and to this pack. Until you can prove you’re thinking clearly, this is how it’s going to be.”
He turned to walk back toward the house, his back a rigid wall.
The injustice of it, the absolute dismissal, broke the last of her composure. “You went to see a ghost!” she yelled after him, her voice breaking. “You got your peace! You got your answers and your blessing! What did I get? I got a secret that could get me killed! I got a brother who treats me like a grenade with the pin pulled! He’s the only one who knows! He’s in it with me!”
Ithan stopped. He didn’t turn around. His shoulders were impossibly tight. “Then he’s using that, too,” he said, without looking back. “He’s using your loneliness. And I’m not going to let him use you to destroy what’s left of this family. Or this pack.”
He walked away, leaving her standing alone on the edge of the training grounds, the taste of iron and salt in her mouth, the faint, fading scent of Daemian on her skin now feeling less like a secret and more like a sentence. She looked down at her arm. The places where his fingers had gripped were already blooming into dark, unmistakable bruises. They matched the ones on her neck.
Two sets of marks. Two brothers claiming her. One alive, one dead. Both holding on so tight they were crushing her in the process. She turned and walked slowly, leadenly, toward the house. The morning sun had crested the trees, but she felt no warmth. The run was over. The cage door had just slammed shut. The only sound was the faint, frantic buzzing of her phone in her pocket—a trapped, insectile hum from the other side of the world—before it, too, fell silent as she crossed the threshold and Perry, his face a mask of grim apology, stepped forward with an outstretched hand.
“I wish you have died instead!” She screamed at his back.
The universe didn't crack. The earth didn't tremble. The only reaction was a minute, almost imperceptible stiffening of the muscles between his shoulder blades, as if he'd taken a low-voltage shock straight to the spine. He froze mid-step on the worn path back to the house.
He didn't turn around. He just stopped breathing for a moment that stretched into a small, forever. Then he lowered his head, his broad shoulders curving inwards slightly, and walked on without a word, without a look, leaving her with the echo of her own words rotting in the morning air.
Their poison coated her tongue, metallic and sour. The force of them had torn something vital inside her chest, a raw, bleeding rupture. She saw it again: his back receding. Conner’s smile from the temple steps. The two images superimposed, a sickening blur of love and loss and this new, violent severing. Her own scream seemed to vibrate in her teeth.
Perry still stood in the doorway, his hand now hanging limp and useless at his side. His eyes were wide, the apology replaced by pure, unvarnished horror. He’d heard it.
Aria walked past him into the cool, dim foyer, her movements mechanical. She didn't look at him. She pulled the silent, still-buzzing phone from her pocket and placed it in his waiting palm, her fingers numb. The transfer felt ceremonial. A surrender.
“Aria—“ Perry began, his voice hushed.
“It’s fine,” she mumbled, the words ash. She didn’t wait for an escort. She climbed the stairs to her room, each step an effort. The air in the hallway outside her door was already occupied by a large, silent wolf named Griff, who leaned against the wall. He gave her a single, solemn nod. The new reality.
She shut the door behind her and stood in the center of her room. The silence was a physical pressure. It pulsed with the ghost of her scream.
She felt it then, not with her mind, but with her blood—a violent, discordant jangle through the bond, a shockwave of pure, unadulterated agony. It wasn't her pain. It was his. It was Daemian, feeling the tectonic crash of her emotions from miles away. There was no curiosity in it, no fae calculation. It was a raw, resonant howl of shared anguish, followed by a terrifying surge of protectiveness that felt like a blade being unsheathed.
Her phone, now in Perry’s possession, would be lighting up. Daemian would be messaging, calling, his own control shredding as he rode the tsunami of her despair. He would know something catastrophic had happened. The bond told him that much. But he wouldn’t know the words. He wouldn’t know the specific, crafted evil of them.
She sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her hands. The bruises from Ithan’s grip were vivid now, a necklace of betrayal in purple and blue around her upper arm. She traced them. Ithan’s marks. Daemian’s marks. Her skin was a parchment of other people's claims.
Downstairs, a door slammed with enough force to shake the old house. Muffled voices rose—Ithan’s, a low, dangerous rumble, and Perry’s, placating. Then silence again, deeper than before.
He wouldn’t come up. He wouldn’t confront her about the scream. That was the worst of it. Her ultimate weapon had been a dud, met with a retreat so complete it felt like annihilation. He was simply enacting the sentence. The prison was operational. She was a problem to be contained, not a sister to be reasoned with.
A soft knock came at her door hours later. It wasn't Ithan. It was Sasha, a beta from Conner’s generation, holding a tray of food. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “Ithan said to bring this up,” she said quietly, not meeting Aria’s gaze. She set the tray on the desk and left quickly, as if the room itself were contaminated.
Aria didn’t touch the food. The afternoon bled into evening, the light in her room turning thick and syrupy. She listened to the sounds of the pack house below—the normal comings and goings, the murmur of voices, a burst of laughter that was quickly stifled. News traveled fast. The Prime’s sister was under house arrest. The Prime’s sister had wished him dead. She was a ghost in the attic, a bad-luck charm they were all avoiding.
Night fell.
Lying in the dark, the bond was a live wire, humming with a sustained, frantic anxiety from Daemian’s end. It was a constant, silent scream in her veins. He was trying to reach her, to find a crack in the new walls. She could feel his desperation like a second heartbeat, wild and scared.
A different sound pierced the dark. Not a voice. Not a knock.
It was the distinct, soft scrape of claws on the aged wood of her balcony.
Her breath caught. She sat up slowly, the sheets pooling around her waist. The french doors leading to her small, ivy-choked balcony were closed, the curtains drawn. The scraping came again.Deliberate. Insistent.
It wasn't a bird. It wasn't a squirrel.
Wolves didn't visit second-floor balconies.Not normally.
She slipped out of bed, her bare feet silent on the rug. She approached the doors, her heart a trapped, fluttering thing against her ribs. She didn't open them. She simply put her palm flat against the cool glass, peering through the narrow gap between the curtains.
Two points of reflected city light shone back at her from the darkness.Eyes.
A massive, dark-furred wolf stood on her balcony, its muzzle close to the glass. It wasn't a Vanir wolf. She knew every pelt, every scent. This one was stranger, wilder, carrying the faint, electric tang of mountains and deep, old magic.Avallen.
It was him. It had to be.
The wolf—Daemian—lowered its head and butted it softly, once, against the glass. A quiet, solid thump. I’m here.
She looked over her shoulder at her bedroom door. Griff was on the other side. The house was silent. She turned back to the wolf. His eyes held hers, an intelligence in them that was utterly, terrifyingly fae.
Slowly, carefully, she reached for the door’s latch. Her fingers trembled. The lock turned with a click that sounded like a gunshot in the quiet room. She slid the door open just a few inches, the night air rushing in, cool and smelling of distant rain and his wild, foreign scent.
The wolf didn't try to enter. It sat back on its haunches, staring up at her. Then it lowered its head and nudged something forward with its nose—a small, smooth river stone, perfectly oval. It rolled to a stop against her bare foot.
She bent and picked it up. It was warm from his mouth. As her fingers closed around it, a spark of magic—not a glamour, but a simple, gentle compulsion—unfolded in her mind. It was an image, clear as a memory: the service entrance to the Greenwich Hotel. The fourth floor.Tomorrow night. Midnight.
The stone wasn't a message. It was a key. The compulsion would guide her, would give her the focus to slip the guards, to find the path. He was offering her an escape route, meticulously planned, powered by his own will.
The wolf waited, watching her understand. Then it turned, a fluid movement of muscle and shadow, and leapt soundlessly from the balcony railing, disappearing into the web of nearby oak branches and then the night.
She closed the door, locking it, the stone a burning secret in her hand. Down the hall, she heard Griff shift his weight, cough softly. He’d heard nothing.
She climbed back into bed, clutching the stone to her chest. The bond was calm now, a steady, purposeful thrum. He had seen her walls. He had assessed the enemy fortifications. And he had just slipped a map through the bars. The conflict was no longer just emotional. It was operational.
The choice was a cold, hard weight in her palm. Stay in this silent house with the brother who now walked through its halls as a stranger, a ghost haunted by her curse. Or run toward the dangerous, desperate prince who moved through shadows like they belonged to him, who felt her pain in his own blood, and who was, right now, the only person in the world who knew she was drowning.
She closed her fingers tightly around the stone. Its edges bit into her skin, a sharp and perfect promise.
Its edges bit into her skin, a sharp and perfect promise.
She must have slept, because she was woken by a feeling as precise as a touch. The pressure of a stare. The air in her room had thickened, grown still. She didn't open her eyes. She knew who stood in the doorway, monitoring his captive.
"Go away," she muttered into her pillow, the words muffled by cotton and exhaustion.
"Thought I'd get a better greeting than that, but okay."
The voice was not Ithan's.
It was layered with distance and echoes, soft as remembered rain. Her eyes flew open. She twisted in bed, the sheets tangling around her legs. He sat on the edge of her mattress, a faint silver outline in the deep navy pre-dawn gloom. He glowed just enough to cast ghost-light on her rumpled duvet.
Conner.
Her lungs seized. He was here. In her room. Not in the grim, official temple yard, but here, in the soft, personal space she’d retreated to after screaming at their brother. The sight was so violently incongruous it felt like a hallucination. "I thought… I thought we couldn’t see you again," she whispered, pushing herself up to sit. Her voice shook.
"Technically, that visit was by request from Ithan, 'cuz the Underking has this…unfortunate issue with wolves," Conner said, his spectral face twisting into a familiar, wry grimace. "This one's on the Fae Prince’s tab. Dude has some serious cash, gotta say." He gave a soft, echoey sigh. "Paid for enough time for me to hear his side of things, then paid again for me to come here."
Hearing Dae’s name from Conner’s ghostly lips sent a jolt through her system. It connected two impossible worlds. She swallowed hard, the taste of last night’s unshed tears still in her throat. "I… I said some things to Ithan. I shouldn’t have."
Conner’s translucent gaze dropped to her arm, where the bruises from Ithan’s grip stood in stark, mottled relief against her skin in the faint glow he cast. "Well, judging by the mark he left on you, I’m assuming he said some shitty things as well."
The simple acknowledgment of the injury, the quiet condemnation of it, broke something loose. A fresh tear escaped, tracing a hot path down her cheek. She wiped it away with a furious swipe. "He told me you would be sick. Absolutely sick if you were here and knew about Dae."
Connor’s ghostly eyebrows lifted. A flicker of something that might have been amusement touched his mouth. "I’m not, but okay." He leaned forward slightly, his form wavering. "What did you say to him, Arie?"
The question hung there. She looked down at her hands, at the pale outline of the river stone she’d hidden under her pillow. The confession was a shard of glass she had to cough up. "I told him that I wish that… he had died instead." The words were a bare, whispered scratch in the quiet.
Conner didn’t gasp. He didn’t rage. He sat back, a mournful understanding settling into the lines of his faint face. "Yeah," he said softly, the word heavy with an old, tired sadness."That tracks." He ran a hand down his face, the motion stirring the silvery motes around him.
She dared to look at him then. "You're not… angry?"
"At you?" He shook his head. "I'm heartbroken. For both of you. You’re drowning, and instead of pulling you out, he’s holding your head under, thinking it'll teach you to swim." His gaze was piercing, even in death. "He’s terrified. It makes him cruel."
"He thinks Dae is using me. Manipulating me with magic."
"Is he?" Conner asked it plainly, without judgment. A question, not an accusation.
The bond hummed in her blood, a low, steady chord of shared desperation from the prince currently pacing a hotel suite somewhere across the city. She thought of the feeling of being known, of the weight of a shared, lethal secret. She remembered the wild, frantic panic Dae had felt through the bond after her fight with Ithan—a panic that had nothing to do with strategy.
"No," she said, and the certainty of it was an anchor. "He’s just as lost as I am. This… thing between us… it’s not either of our designs."
Conner nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something."He talked. A lot. It wasn’t courtly speech. It was messy. It was about this pull he can’t explain, about feeling your grief like it’s his own, about wanting to set you on fire and wrap you in blankets at the same time." A ghost of a smile. "Sounded familiar, honestly. Like something a certain older brother might feel, if he wasn't so busy being Prime."
The comparison was startling. She’d never equated Ithan’s smothering protectiveness with Dae’s ferocious, consuming intensity. They felt like opposites.
"They’re two sides of the same coin, Arie," Conner said, as if reading her thoughts. The dead probably could. "Love that thinks it owns you. Love that would burn the world down for you. Not a lot of room for breathing in between." He looked toward her bedroom door, his expression turning solemn. "Ithan’s way has built you a very comfortable cage. Daemian’s way might just get you killed."
He turned back to her, his form beginning to thin at the edges, silver particles drifting away like smoke. "My time’s almost up. The Avallen credit card is maxed." He reached out a hand, a gesture to touch her knee. His fingers passed through the duvet, a wash of cold air. "You have to choose a path. Not between them. Between what you want and what they want for you."
"What do I want?" The question was a plea.
"You’ve spent your whole life being what we needed you to be. My little shadow. Ithan’s charge. The pack’s mascot." His voice grew fainter, the whispers rising. "I think you want to be a person. One who holds dangerous secrets and makes messy choices and doesn’t ask for permission.Even from ghosts."
He was dissolving. Panic lanced through her. "Don’t go."
"I have to.But listen." He leaned in, his voice dropping to a final, intimate echo. "The male who visited me tonight? He’s a storm. He’ll break things. But I believe him when he says he’d let the storm break him before it breaks you. Ithan… Ithan would just build a thicker wall." He gave her one last, devastating smile. "Walls are safe, Arie. But you can’t breathe in a tomb. Be brave, little wolf. You already are."
His form shimmered, a kaleidoscope of silver light, and then collapsed inward. There was no sound. Just a sudden, profound absence, a void where his presence had been. The room was dark again, and cold, and terribly, terribly quiet.
Down the hall, she heard Griff clear his throat and shift his weight. The living world.
Aria sat in the dark, Conner’s words settling into her bones. The guilt over her screamed curse was still there, a deep bruise on her soul. But atop it now lay a clear, cold layer of understanding. Ithan’s prison wasn’t born of malice, but of a love that had calcified into control. Daemian’s chaos wasn’t manipulation, but a reflection of her own trapped, wild desperation. They were both offering versions of salvation that required her surrender.
She slipped her hand under her pillow. Her fingers closed around the smooth, now-warm river stone. The compulsion within it pulsed gently, a sleeping signal waiting for midnight.
Conner hadn’t told her what to choose. He had simply laid the choices bare, removed the ghosts from the equation. He had absolved her of his own hypothetical disgust, leaving her accountable only to herself.
A strange calm descended upon her. The hysterical panic of yesterday was gone. In its place was a grim, focused resolve. She was not a grenade. She was not a pawn. She was the holder of secrets, the sister of a Prime, the anchor for a prince’s storm.
And tonight, she would walk out of her brother’s tomb.
She swung her legs out of bed. The floorboards were cool beneath her feet. She moved to her closet, not turning on the light. She dressed in layers of dark, soft clothing. She laced her running shoes tightly. She was not running away in a nightgown. She was departing with intention.
The day passed in a suffocating pantomime of compliance. She ate the breakfast Sasha brought. She sat in her window seat with a textbook open on her lap, turning pages at regular intervals. She felt Ithan’s presence in the house like a low-grade fever—a constant, oppressive awareness. He did not come to her door. The silence between them was a solid, finished thing.
The bond, however, was a live wire. Daemian’s end vibrated with a tense, coiled readiness. He was waiting.Planning. His anxiety was a metronome counting down the hours, syncing with her own heartbeat. It was no longer a confusing intrusion. It was tactical data. He was her external nervous system, her early warning of his own movements.
When the deep, true dark of midnight settled, she was ready.
Griff was a silhouette against the hall light seeping under her door. She could hear his slow, even breathing. She moved to her balcony door, the stone clenched in her fist. She didn’t need to look at it. The compulsion activated with her intent, unfolding a clear, step-by-step navigation in her mind’s eye. It was like seeing a glowing path only she could follow.
The route was not the obvious one. It did not lead past Griff.
It directed her to open the balcony doors, to climb onto the wrought-iron railing slick with night dew. It showed her the leap—not down, but across, to the thick, gnarled limb of the ancient oak tree whose branches fingered the side of the house. It was a ten-foot gap over darkness.
A wolf’s leap.
She didn’t hesitate. She stuffed the stone in her pocket, gripped the cold iron, and pushed off. The night air rushed past her. For a heart-stopping second, she was flying, untethered. Then her hands slapped against rough, wet bark. She scrambled, her shoes finding purchase, and pulled herself onto the broad limb.
She looked back. Her balcony was empty, the curtains still. No alarm sounded. Griff had heard nothing but the wind.
She descended the tree like she had as a child, limb by shadowy limb, until she dropped the last few feet into a bed of mulch at the property’s edge. The compulsion pushed her forward, a gentle pressure behind her eyes. It guided her along a blind spot between two motion-sensor lights, through a gap in the hedge where the wrought-iron was subtly warped, and onto the quiet, sleeping street.
She ran. Not in panic, but with a steady, distance-eating stride her morning runs had built. The magical guide in her mind routed her through back alleys, across forgotten parks, down service lanes. She saw the occasional patrol car, the rare late-night walker. She became a shadow among shadows, her path pre-ordained by a prince’s furious, meticulous magic.
She arrived at the Greenwich service entrance precisely as the compulsion shimmered and faded, its purpose spent. The heavy door was unlocked. She slipped inside, into the familiar smell of lemon and dust. The service stairwell was silent. She took the steps two at a time, her body humming with adrenaline and purpose.
The door to the fourth-floor landing was slightly ajar. She pushed it open.
He was there, leaning against the wall, dressed in black. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His sandy hair was chaos, his hazel eyes shadowed and fierce. He straightened as she emerged, his gaze consuming her in one swift, assessing sweep. He didn't move toward her. He just waited, his entire body taut.
She stopped a few feet away, breathing hard from the run. The silence stretched, charged with everything that had happened since the training grounds.The bruises. The scream. The ghost’s visitation.
“You’re here,” he finally said, his voice rough.
“You paid my brother’s toll,” she answered. It wasn’t a thank you. It was an acknowledgment of the monumental, unsettling thing he had done.
“I needed a witness he’d trust.” Dae’s jaw tightened. “I felt it. What you said to him. I felt the crater it left in you.”
She didn’t deny it. She took a step closer. “Conner came. He talked to me.”
Dae went very still. “And?”
“He said you were a storm. That you’d break things.” Another step. “He also said you’d let the storm break you first.”
He closed his eyes, a muscle flickering in his cheek. When he opened them, the raw vulnerability there was almost too much to bear. “It already is,” he whispered.
This time, she closed the distance. She didn't kiss him. She placed her palm flat against his chest, over his heart. It hammered against her hand, a frantic, living rhythm. “My brother has guards on me. He took my phone. I am a prisoner in that house.”
Dae covered her hand with his, pressing it harder against him. “Then don’t go back.”
The offer hung in the stale stairwell air. It was the storm speaking. The reckless, all-consuming solution.
“It’s not that simple,” she said, but her fingers curled into his shirt. “If I disappear, he’ll declare war.On you. On Avallen. He’ll tear this city apart looking for me.”
“Let him try.” The words were pure, feral defiance. But then his other hand came up to cradle her face, his thumb stroking her cheek with a sudden, shocking tenderness. “Aria, I can’t feel you in that kind of pain again. I can’t sit in a fucking hotel room and feel you… eroding. It’s like dying by inches.”
The confession cracked the last of her composure. She leaned into his touch. “I can’t stay there. But I can’t vanish either. Not yet.”
“Then what?” The question was a plea.
She looked up at him, the path becoming clear, carved by Conner’s words and her own resolve. “We don’t hide. We negotiate.”
Dae blinked. “Negotiate.” He said the word like it was foreign, a useless, pedestrian tool.
“You’re the Crown Prince of the Avallen Fae. I’m the sister of the Vanir Prime. We are a political problem.” She drew a steadying breath. “So we act like one. In the open. On our terms.”
A slow, dangerous light dawned in his eyes.Understanding. And a predator’s appreciation for a better strategy. “You want to force his hand. To make him deal with me as an equal, not a kidnapper.”
“I want him to see that locking me away won’t make this go away. That I’m not a child to be disciplined.” Her voice grew stronger. “I want a truce. A… a courtship. A public one.With rules. With boundaries he agrees to. So I can breathe.”
Dae was silent for a long moment, studying her. The frantic, helpless energy around him shifted, coalescing into something sharp and calculating. This was a language he understood. Courts.Rules. Games of power. But the way he looked at her—it wasn't like a piece on a board. It was with a awe that this was her solution.
“He’ll never agree,” Dae said, but he was already working through it.
“He will if the alternative is a scandal that weakens his position with the pack,” Aria countered. “If his sister is just secretly sneaking around, it’s a personal failure. If his sister is formally, publicly involved with a Fae Prince in a recognized arrangement? That’s an alliance. Or a potential one. It’s politics. He can sell that to the pack elders. It gives him a way to save face.”
A grim smile touched Dae’s mouth. “You’ve been thinking.”
“I’ve been in a room with nothing else to do.” She finally pulled her hand from his chest, but only to take his. “Will you do it? Will you come with me? Not to kidnap me. To ask him. Formally.”
Daemian looked at their joined hands, then back up at her. The storm was still there in his eyes, but now it had direction. It had a target. “When?”
“Now.” She said it without flinching. “He’s awake. He’s always awake. We go back together, and we propose the terms.”
He laughed then, a short, sharp sound of pure astonishment. “You are the bravest and most insane person I have ever met.” He lifted her hand, pressed a kiss to her knuckles. His lips were warm, real. “Alright, little wolf. Let’s go negotiate your freedom from your brother’s tomb.” His gaze hardened. “But if he lays a hand on you again, the negotiations end. My way begins.”
She nodded. It was a fair bargain.
They didn't take the service stairs. They walked out through the grand, silent lobby of the Greenwich, past the sleeping night clerk, and into the cool night. Daemian did not call for a car. They walked, side by side, through the sleeping streets toward the pack lands. It was a deliberate, unhurried approach. A procession.
The bond between them was quiet now, a unified hum of shared purpose. It felt less like a tether and more like a rallying point. As they turned onto her street, she saw the lights were on in the pack house. Every window blazed. They had found her empty room.
Ithan stood on the front porch, flanked by Perry and two other senior wolves. He was barefoot, wearing only sweatpants, his hair standing on end. He looked like he’d been ripped from a nightmare.