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trembling as I touched the hea
ting, I was finally preg
s were as cold as river stones. He
tern Estate and t
bond. He was rejecting me to marry R
ocked me as a discarded stray, and Rosalind's follow
safehouse, I held my
him from a rain-slicked alley. He had cried into
icly abandon me, yet secretly threaten his new Lun
t text and saw the terrifying
my unborn child and I woul
y life, and now he was marching into the rogue lands
s suddenly snapped taut. I am the White Wolf, and I wi
pte
lyn
he heavy stone walls, usually a source of warmth, seemed to radiate
in my sleeve. The pack healer's note. A secret I had held for mere hours. I wa
nce, and a draft, sharp with the scent of pine from t
r between us. His jaw was a line of granite. His dark eyes-which I was accustomed to seeing burn for me-were vacant, like polished
l of parchment, its weight making a dull thud upon the wood. He did
l in his throat, stripped of th
k script was stark against the vellum. I
osed around my lungs, sque
ed on some point beyond my shoulder. "And sufficient gold to en
on could form, a searing white light ignited behind my eyes. T
k of blood on my inner thighs as the life within me slipped away. Then, the walls of a dungeon, cold and sweating stone; the bite of silver manacles as they
gainst my skin. Across from me, Lucius stood rigid, his own hands clenched into fists at his sides, watching my collapse. His e
g his life from the pack guards. Of the devotion he swore, which I had mistaken for the unbreakable tie the Go
ay. The healer's note felt like a hot coal against my skin.
g the last vestiges of the
he rite catching in his throat, a tremor running thro
along my spine-the spiritual cord that bound us, now stretched taut and sin
nd outstretched. "Evelyn, read the term
l cold that seemed to draw the warmth from my very blood. The cold was wrong. It did not feel like the a
y into his dark,
lear and steady in the still ch
g severance deep within my being, a feeling akin to some vital root being drawn, inch by painful inch, from my flesh. Th
been, and deep inside, my wolf let out a silent, desolate
sk of grey stone. He staggered back a pace, one hand
" I commanded, my voice scarcely a whisper,
was his true, prophesied match. Her scent struck me first-an over-sweet perfume failing to mask a cloying, funereal smell, like ga
a study in feigned innocence, but her eyes
a confection of saccharine sympathy.
his arm. Her fingers, I noticed, bore a ring of blackan aura, but the dormant authority of my bloodline,
the words carried a chilling, resonant weight that w
us, in a swift, almost unconscious movement, shifted his body to stand slightly b
his voice strained. "This is fo
far from gentle and pulled her from the roo
desperate, familiar rapping at the edges of my consciousness. The
agged with a panic he had not shown in pe
rier in my mind, not of stone, but of ice-smooth, seamless, and absolute. I felt his frantic
I would not break. Not with the life I now carried. Whatever da
urned in my mind with the cold fire of my Oracle's gift: What kind of t
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