39. Damon
Circle of Love:
Hold hands under moonlight. Whisper the word…home.
They arrive just after dark.
I’m on Caroline’s porch when Silas’s car turns onto the street, followed by a black sedan I don’t recognize. Two cars. Two people. He wasn’t lying about bringing his sister.
Helena Thorn gets out of the sedan, and my first thought is that she doesn’t look like a Council representative.
She looks like a woman who hasn’t slept in days.
Her hair is pulled back in a messy knot.
She’s wearing jeans and a sweater instead of the tailored blazer I’ve seen in Council briefings, and she’s carrying a duffel bag like she’s running from something.
Maybe she is.
Silas comes around the rental and meets my eye across the lawn. One nod. That’s all I get. I nod back.
Caroline is behind me in the doorway. Griffin is in the living room, and Amara is on her way—she didn’t need much convincing when I told her it was important.
June is already inside, setting up tea things on the coffee table because that’s what June does when the world is falling apart. She makes tea.
“Who’s the woman?” Caroline asks.
“His sister. Helena.”
“The Council one?”
“The same.”
“Why is she here?”
I turn to look at her. “Because she knows things. And because Silas asked her to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Us or them.”
Caroline is quiet for a moment. Then she steps past me and walks down the porch steps to meet them.
I watch her approach Helena. The two women are nothing alike—Caroline in her oversized sweater and bare feet, Helena in her traveling clothes with shadows under her eyes. But something passes between them when they’re close enough to see each other clearly. Recognition, maybe.
“You must be Caroline,” Helena says.
“You must be the one who’s been lying to my town for years.”
“Not by choice.”
“They never are.”
Helena almost smiles. “I think I’m going to like you.”
We gather in the living room. It’s crowded—me, Caroline, Griffin, Silas, Helena, Amara, and June, all crammed into a space designed for four. Thistle has retreated to the top of the bookshelf and is watching the proceedings with the detached judgment that only cats can achieve.
June pours tea for everyone. No one drinks it.
Helena stands by the fireplace because there aren’t enough seats, and she talks.
She starts with the Rift—not the official story, but the real one.
The pool of magic that Willowbrook sits on isn’t just a natural phenomenon.
It’s a reservoir. Raw magical energy that collects in certain places around the world, concentrated and powerful and useful in ways that most people have forgotten.
“Or been made to forget,” Helena says.
She talks about Marcus Deveraux. His family was one of the original keeper lineages, removed from the records in the 1940s by the Council.
The official reason was dereliction of duty.
The real reason was that the Deverauxs understood what the Rift actually was—a source of energy that could be harvested—and the Council wanted that understanding for themselves.
“The monitoring equipment Deveraux funded three years ago,” Helena continues, “it’s not monitoring.
It’s collection. The sensors pull energy from the Rift flares and feed it into a centralized system.
That energy powers the Council’s infrastructure—the communication wards, the database networks, the tracking systems that keep every registered Omega in the Midwest on a leash. ”
June sets her teacup down. “You’re telling me the Council is running on stolen magic.”
“I’m telling you the Council doesn’t see it as stolen. They see it as resource management. Willowbrook has an abundance of raw magical energy. The Council has a use for it. From their perspective, it’s no different than mining coal or tapping oil.”
“Except it’s not coal,” I say. “It’s people’s lives. Their biology. Their bonds.”
“Yes.” Helena’s voice is flat. “It is.”
She talks about Victor Ash. He was a regional representative—the same rank as our father—and the one who built the secondary ward structure.
His job was to increase the Rift’s output, to make the flares more frequent and more powerful so the collection systems had more to harvest. He did it for twenty years before he died in a car accident that probably wasn’t an accident.
“Why are we only learning about this now?” Amara asks.
“Because Victor Ash was good at his job. The wards were hidden, the records were sealed, and the effects were explained away as natural instability. No one thought to look harder because the official narrative made sense. Too many unbonded Omegas, unstable magic, a Rift that feeds on chaos. It’s a clean story. Easy to believe.”
“And the bonding failures?” June’s voice is tight. “Every Omega in this town who’s tried to bond and couldn’t—”
“Was collateral. The Rift’s energy output interferes with the bond-forming process. It’s not an accident. It’s a feature. Unbonded Omegas produce more unstable magic, which feeds the Rift, which produces more energy for the Council. The system is self-sustaining.”
“Damn,” Griffin mutters.
Helena pauses. She looks at Caroline, then at me, then at the floor. Whatever comes next is harder than everything that came before.
“There’s something else. Something personal.”
“Tell them,” Silas says from beside her. His voice is quiet but firm.
“I’m an Omega.”
The room goes still.
“I’ve been on suppressants since I was sixteen.
My father put me on them the day after my mother’s funeral.
He told me it was the only way I could have the career I wanted.
He said the Council would never accept an Omega in a position of power, and he was right.
So I hid. I became what they needed me to be—a regional representative, my father’s successor, the perfect Alpha.
And I’ve been doing it for eighteen years. ”
Caroline is staring at her. So is Amara. June has her hands wrapped around her teacup, her knuckles white.
“The suppressants,” Caroline says slowly. “They’re degrading. Because of the Rift.”
“Yes. Whatever is disrupting bonds in Willowbrook is affecting all Omega biology. My suppressants are failing. If it continues, I’ll be exposed. Every hidden Omega in Chicago will be exposed.”
“That’s why they’re pushing TrueBond so hard,” I say, the final piece clicking into place.
“Deveraux’s app. It’s not just about bonding rates.
It’s about control. If the suppressants fail and hidden Omegas are exposed, the Council needs a system in place to manage them.
TrueBond is that system. Forced compatibility matching, tracked bonds, regulated packs.
They’re building a cage and dressing it up as a matchmaking service. ”
Helena nods. “Marcus Deveraux isn’t just a contractor. He’s an architect. He’s been designing the infrastructure for a post-suppressant world—a world where Omegas can’t hide, where every bond is registered and monitored, where the Council has total control over who pairs with whom.”
“Gideon’s father,” I say. “Victor Ash. He was killed because he knew too much?”
“We think so. The car accident happened during a minor flare, on a road he drove every night. The official report said magical interference caused the loss of control. But my father was a regional representative at the time. He had access to blood witches. Memory alteration is within their capability, and Silas has evidence that his own memories were altered as a child.”
“Your father erased your memories?” Caroline looks at Silas.
“Not personally. But he ordered it. My mother’s death—I can’t remember it. There’s a wall where the memory should be. The only people who could build a wall like that are blood witches operating under Council sanction.”
The room absorbs this. Thistle shifts on the bookshelf and knocks a paperback to the floor. No one moves to pick it up.
“So what do we do?” Griffin asks.
It’s the simplest question and the hardest one. I look around the room—at Caroline’s face, at Amara’s clenched jaw, at June’s steady hands, at Helena’s exhausted resolve, at Silas’s grim determination.
“We don’t have enough to go public,” I say. “Not yet. Victor Ash’s wards are the smoking gun, but we need more. We need to understand the full scope of the collection system, identify everyone involved, and figure out how to dismantle it without blowing the Rift wide open.”
“Because if the Rift destabilizes completely—” June starts.
“Then we’re looking at something much worse than flares and failed bonds. The legend says the last catastrophic event killed almost everyone in town. The Council dismisses it as folklore, but Berrick didn’t think so, and neither do I.”
“So we’re sitting on a weapon,” Amara says. “And the people who built it are still out there.”
“Deveraux is still out there,” Silas says. “My father is still out there. The High Chancellor is still out there. And none of them know that we know.”
“Yet,” Helena adds.
“Yet.”
Caroline stands. She’s been quiet through most of this, listening, absorbing. But now she’s on her feet, and there’s something on her face I recognize—the same look she gets when she’s mixing a complicated potion, when the pieces start coming together, and she can see the shape of the solution.
“We protect the town,” she says. “That’s step one. Damon, you reinforce the wards. Make them stronger than they’ve ever been. If the Council comes sniffing around, I want them to hit a wall.”
I nod. “I can do that.”
“June, you keep doing what you’re doing. Aftercare for the Omegas, suppressant alternatives, whatever you can find. If the bonding failures are caused by the Rift, then reducing the flare impact should help.”
“I’ve been working on it. The potion I gave you during your heat—it’s crude, but it’s a start. If I can get access to more texts, more ingredients—”
“Aunt Etta’s library,” I say. “You’ll have full access.”
June nods, her mind already racing ahead.