14 Avaline #2
“He brought silver needles. Cold black glass. He would sit on the edge of my cot, in his fine Conclave silks, and he would take my chin in his fingers. His skin was always freezing—dead skin, Reed, paper-thin and spotted with decay. He tested the marrow of my arms. He measured the resonance of my Frost-Lock with tuning forks forged of dead-magic, listening to the vibration of my frozen wolf the way an appraiser listens to a cracked bell. He told me my Scribe bloodline made me the finest vessel the Loom had ever spun. Even finer than Mia’s. ”
The bile rose in my throat, hot and bitter.
“He spoke of the Moon Goddess the way a butcher talks about cattle. He called the First Rite a primitive biological defect—said true power wasn’t in honoring the sacred mate bond or running under the moon, but in mastering the flesh.
He told me the Verdant Order was just his harvest crew, gathering the sacred blood of our stolen sisters to feed his failing organs until the true ritual was ready.
He called me his Keystone. And whenever he came, he brought Mia with him. ”
A sharp, violent hitch tore through Reed’s chest.
“I watched your sister stand by the door like a statue,” I whispered.
“Her eyes wide and vacant, staring at nothing, while the ancient thing inside her twitched her fingers. I saw the horror trapped behind Mia’s face—a living, screaming woman imprisoned inside her own meat while a parasite steered her limbs.
Arbiter Gault would look at Mia, then look back at me, smiling his thin, bloodless smile.
He said, “Soon, child. When Severance cuts your beast from the Loom, you won’t feel a thing.
You will simply sleep, and I will wear my new crown. ”
Reed’s fists clenched so hard the scarred skin over his knuckles split, fresh beads of dark red pooling on his skin.
“The wardens and Stewards all thought I was lobotomized,” I continued, meeting his obsidian gaze.
“I let them think it so they would talked openly in front of me. The Order did the dirty work of hunting our kin and dragging young women from their beds, but High Arbiter Gault directed the hunt. And he was careful, Reed. Meticulous. Decades of never signing a transaction. Always proxies. That’s why your Blood-Glass Ledger didn’t have his name. ”
Reed was very still. “Severance,” he said, and the word came out like something he was choking on. “When Sloane pulled that file, we assumed one of the corrupt Arbiters. But it wasn’t a subordinate. It was Gault. The High Arbiter was building a ritual to sever you from the Loom—”
“Arbiter Gault’s body is failing. The well is running dry. He’s aging, Reed. He told me himself—he’s burning through the aurum latens faster than the Order can pump it into him.”
“So he needs a permanent vessel,” Reed said, and his voice had gone somewhere I had never heard it go. Past anger. Past the commander. Down into the tectonic place where the mountain lives.
I met his eyes and held them and did not look away. “He was going to occupy my emptied body the way the First Saint occupies Mia. Untouchable. Immortal.”
Something behind his eyes caught fire—
“He was going to become you,” Reed said, and his voice broke on the last word.
I nodded.
NO.
My wolf erupted in a roar, tearing up through my chest with a force that rocked me forward on the mattress, my fingers digging into the fabric, my teeth baring without my permission. The sound that came out of me was not human.
This body is OURS. No one takes it. No one wears it. We will tear the old man apart with our teeth before we let him touch what is OURS.
I rode the wave of her rage and I did not fight it. For the first time since she had poured up my arm in the Dreamscape, I let my wolf’s fury and my own fury exist in the same breath, and they were the same woman. They had always been the same woman.
“So,” I said, and my voice was something new now. Something with teeth. “You stop petitioning the Conclave. We go to the root of it. And we burn it down.”
Reed growled in assent.
I leaned toward him until the heat pouring off his skin made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
“The release—the mating bite—drives our wolf magic into the deep rock while every ward in the Summit is lit up with our signal, rewriting the continent.” I held his gaze, refusing to let either of us look away from the precipice. “A honeymoon and a trap.”
The air in the cabin went rigid.
My nipples pushed aching and hard against the thin linen of my shirt, my body roaring in answer to the sheer audacity of what I had just suggested.
The thought of it—of his massive body pressing me into the ancient stone of the Caldera’s First Altar, the root of all the wolf shifter bloodlines, of weaponizing the primal bite that would finally bind us, of his teeth sinking into my neck while he filled me to shatter centuries of corruption—sent a starving, dizzying spike of heat straight through my pelvis.
Now, my wolf panted, her claws scraping raw against the base of my throat. Forget the mountain. Forget the old monster. Take him now. The floor. The wall. Anything.
No mercy for monsters. The First Altar. We will make them pay.
My wolf snarled, a low, coiling frustration that set my pulse jumping in my ears, but she held. Barely.
The obsidian in his irises cleared, the black flood pulling back just enough to reveal the molten gold beneath.
There was no hesitation in him. No fear.
The look he turned on me was pure, breathless reverence—the look of a master strategist who had spent years staring at an impossible board, suddenly watching someone walk up and make the one move he hadn’t dared to imagine.
“Only you,” he murmured, the rough timber of his voice vibrating against my breastbone. “Goddess, Avaline. Only your mind would look at the worst wound of our lives and be smart enough to turn it into a weapon to slay our enemies.”
“Wait,” I said. The realization struck like flint on iron. “Down the hall. When you were speaking through the pack link, you said Brann was holding the perimeter.”
Reed inclined his head. “And the witches have the tree line.”
“Brann Torres,” I said, the sacred scrolls I had transcribed in the archives before the dark roaring back through my memory. A Scribe never forgets a lineage. “The Sovereign King.”
Reed remained still, watching me with that fierce, unwavering focus.
“And the rest of them?” I leaned forward on the mattress. “Somehow, I don’t think I’m the only one in this room smart enough to turn a wound into a weapon.” My mouth curled into a smile. “The crew you brought up this mountain. Your pack. Who are they, Reed?”
“You already know,” he said softly, a dark gleam lighting his eyes. “Tell me.”
“The Vanished Court,” I said, my mind sifting through the ancient histories.
Reed nodded once.
“Enforcer caste?”
Reed nodded again.
“And the Midnight line,” I pushed on, my breath catching in my throat.
Reed’s voice dropped into that deep, resonant frequency that made my wolf prick her ears. “And the royal Treaty Court. All five of them.”
I sat back against the headboard, stunned, the breath leaving my lungs in a sharp gasp as the sacred geometry of it locked into place.
“Five royal bloodlines,” I whispered. “Five ancient, hunted lineages... and you. The Founding Alpha.” I looked at the scarred hands resting on his bare knee, his cock still erect.
“You didn’t just build this crew out of guilt.
You arrogant, brilliant, reckless bastard. You assembled the full quorum.”
A low, gravelly chuckle broke from his throat, dark and rich with years of banked vindication.
“The heirs driven into exile, the broken boys with royal blood running through their veins who had nowhere left to hide.” He leaned in until I could smell the old earth and green sap of him clinging to his skin. “I pulled them out of alleys and bar fights and cages—and I put them in yellow Nomex.”
The sheer audacity of Reed’s plans bloomed like a flame behind my ribs. “Where no Conclave magistrate would ever look.”
The gold in his eyes flared bright. “I gave them a pack. I gave them brotherhood. I taught them how to hold a fireline until their instincts stopped being wild and started being lethal. And I waited.”
“For the founding covenant,” I said.
Reed held my gaze without an ounce of apology.
“A quorum of the founding bloodlines could invoke the magic that would strip the Conclave of its authority, and permanently dissolve the Order. I’d get justice for you and Mia.
Five bloodlines minimum to invoke the override.
All six to make the mandate absolute and unbreakable. ”
“Five lines,” I murmured, the sacred covenant humming through my blood. “Sovereign, Vanished Court, Enforcer, Midnight, and Treaty Court. All five lines awake and…” I frowned. “But to awaken the blood—”