I spent three days after that first unthinkable thought convincing myself I wouldn’t actually do it, and three days failing to find a single alternative that didn’t end with my own exposure and Elara’s ruin alongside it.
The plan needed careful shape before I let myself fully commit to it, and I built that shape the way I built everything that mattered, methodically, without allowing sentiment to interfere with what the situation actually required.
I started with information.
I needed to know exactly where Maeve’s sons lived, how closely they were guarded, what patterns their days followed — details my existing network could gather without raising the kind of alarm that direct inquiry from Hellfang would trigger immediately.
I sent word to contacts along the border towns, framing my questions carefully enough that even they wouldn’t understand what I was actually building toward.
“The Dreadmoon heirs,” I said to my most reliable informant, a woman who’d proven useful precisely because she asked no questions she wasn’t paid to ask.
“I want to understand their daily movements. Training schedules. Who guards them, and how closely. Discreetly, please. This isn’t something I want traced back to Hellfang.”
“May I ask why?”
“No.” I said it without malice, simple fact rather than reprimand, and she nodded and left without further comment, exactly the kind of professional discretion I was paying handsomely to maintain.
The information came back over the following week, piece by piece, and I built a picture from it that confirmed both the difficulty of what I was contemplating and the narrow window in which it might actually succeed.
The boys trained regularly, sometimes separately, sometimes together, under the supervision of various family members whose vigilance varied depending on which uncle happened to be present.
Killian was meticulous.
Bastian was affectionate but occasionally distracted.
Lucian watched everything with a wariness that would make him the hardest to work around.
There was, however, a gap.
Once every few weeks, the twins were taken to a market town near the border for what my informant described as an ordinary family outing, lighter security than the compound itself, the kind of casual visibility that came from five years without a single credible threat ever materializing against them.
Ashford.
The same town where Darius had first laid eyes on them, apparently a regular destination for reasons my informant couldn’t fully explain, though I suspected it had something to do with trade Bastian oversaw there personally. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
I turned the information over for days, examining it from every angle I could construct, searching for a version of the plan that didn’t require doing something I still, some nights, couldn’t quite believe I was actually capable of contemplating.
I didn’t find one.
Every alternative I built collapsed under the same basic problem: Elara’s lack of any wolf sign wasn’t a temporary weakness I could manage my way through with enough time and careful diplomacy.
It was a fact that would only become more glaring the longer she lived, more impossible to explain away the older she grew, and Maeve’s sons — confirmed, legitimate, likely already displaying exactly the traits Elara never would — represented a contrast that would eventually make the truth undeniable to anyone paying attention.
If I could not produce a legitimate heir myself, and could not indefinitely disguise the one I had, the only remaining option was acquiring one already suited to the role.
I made myself think it through in full, methodically, the way I approached everything that mattered.
A single boy, taken quietly during an unguarded moment in Ashford, replaced in Dreadmoon custody by nothing at all — simply gone, presumed lost to whatever danger a border town might present.
Brought to Hellfang under careful circumstances that could be explained, eventually, as a child I’d secretly given birth to and hidden for reasons of political necessity, protected from enemies who might have targeted a true heir.
Elara, meanwhile, quietly repositioned — sent somewhere safe, raised under a different name, spared whatever public reckoning might otherwise destroy her along with me.
It was monstrous.
I understood that clearly, examining the plan in the privacy of my own rooms with nobody left to perform composure for.
I understood it was monstrous and I built it anyway, piece by piece, because the alternative was watching everything I’d built for five years collapse in a single public reckoning that would leave Elara with nothing and me with considerably worse than nothing.
I told myself this was still cataloging, still theoretical, and I told myself that lie for exactly as long as it took to draft the first concrete instructions to the two men I intended to use for the actual taking — men from outside Hellfang entirely, mercenaries with no loyalty to trace back to me, paid enough to ensure their silence regardless of what came after.
*Ashford.
One child only, the smaller of the two if it can be managed cleanly.
No violence unless necessary, and even then, nothing that leaves a mark that raises questions.*
I stopped writing there, my hand steady despite everything churning underneath the careful composure I’d maintained through every step of this planning.
The smaller of the two.
Ronan, most likely, based on my informant’s description of him as the more easily distracted of the twins, the one who wandered from his brother’s side more often during their outings, the one who’d apparently once spent an entire afternoon following a beetle through a garden while his more watchful brother stood guard.
A child who followed beetles.
That was what I was planning to take, reducing an entire small life down to a logistical detail in a scheme designed to save my own.
I finished the instructions anyway.
I told myself, sealing the letter before I could reconsider it, that I would find some way to ensure the boy was treated well once he arrived, that whatever cruelty the taking itself required, the aftermath didn’t need to compound it further.
I told myself this was survival, not malice, the same distinction I’d drawn for myself five years ago when I orchestrated Maeve’s downfall and told myself it was simply the obvious, necessary thing a woman did when she wanted something badly enough and had the tools to take it.
I didn’t fully believe the distinction anymore, sealing that letter.
I understood, with a clarity I usually avoided allowing myself, that whatever justification I built around this plan, it was still exactly what it looked like from the outside — a desperate woman preparing to steal another woman’s child because her own lies had finally run out of room to hide in.
I sent the letter before the understanding could stop me.
Whatever came next, I told myself, walking away from my own study with the weight of the decision settling into my chest like something I’d have to carry regardless of the outcome, I had run out of alternatives that didn’t end in my own ruin.
I chose Elara’s safety over the cost of achieving it.
I told myself that was still a kind of love, even now, even shaped this monstrously.
I wasn’t certain, some hours later, lying awake in the dark, that I actually believed it.