Darkness swallows the cell whole, and for one suspended second, nobody moves.
Then chaos breaks loose in every direction at once.
Steel rings against stone.
A guard shouts, cut off halfway through the word.
Riven’s snarl tears through the black, low and vicious, and something heavy hits the floor hard enough that I feel the impact through my bare feet.
“April, don’t move,” Jodan’s voice, close to my ear, steady despite everything.
“Stay against the wall.”
“I can’t see anything—”
“Neither can they.” Eryx’s hand finds my shoulder in the dark, grounding, certain.
“Wolves don’t need torchlight.
Trust the bond.
Trust us.”
A blade whistles past close enough that I feel the air shift against my cheek, and I press myself flatter against the stone, heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat.
Around me, the fight rages on by sound alone, grunts and snarls and the wet, ugly noise of contact, none of it distinguishable as mine or theirs.
Then a small, cold hand closes around my wrist.
“This way.” Selene’s voice, barely a whisper, right against my ear.
“Now, before they regroup.”
“Selene, I don’t know if I can trust—”
“You don’t have time to decide that,” she hisses, already pulling me sideways, away from the fighting, toward a gap in the wall I never would have found on my own.
“I bought you thirty seconds of darkness.
Don’t waste them arguing with me.”
I go.
What else is there to do.
She pulls me through a narrow service passage, so tight my shoulders brush both walls at once, the sounds of the fight fading fast behind us.
My bare feet catch on uneven stone, and twice I nearly fall, but her grip on my wrist doesn’t loosen.
“Where are we going?” I gasp.
“Somewhere they won’t think to look first.” Her voice is tight, focused, none of her usual nervous chatter.
“I’ve used this passage before.
It comes out near the old chapel.”
“You knew about this the whole time?”
“I know a lot of things I was never supposed to tell you,” she says.
“That’s the whole problem, isn’t it.”
The passage opens into a small, disused chapel, moonlight spilling through a shattered stained-glass window high above, casting broken color across dust-thick pews.
Selene finally releases my wrist and turns to face me, chest heaving, and in the moonlight I can see her properly for the first time since the doorway. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
Her eyes are red-rimmed.
Her hands are shaking.
“You said you reported to the Council,” I say slowly.
“Then you pulled me out from under their guards.
Which is it, Selene?
Who do you actually work for?”
“Both,” she admits, voice breaking.
“Neither.
I don’t know anymore.
The Council owns my family’s safety.
The rebellion offered to buy it back if I helped smuggle you out before the Queen’s real enforcers arrived.
I took both deals because I couldn’t afford to lose either bet.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only true one I have.” She swipes angrily at her eyes.
“I’ve been lying to everyone for so long I’m not sure which version of me is the real one anymore.
But I do know this.
Whatever’s coming for you tonight is worse than a squad of Council guards.
That captain back there was a decoy, meant to slow you down long enough for the actual threat to arrive.”
My stomach drops.
“What actual threat?”
Before Selene can answer, the chapel doors groan open at the far end, moonlight fracturing across the floor as they swing wide.
A single figure steps through, unhurried, silver robes catching the broken light, silver hair falling loose over one shoulder in a way I’ve never once seen it worn.
Queen Maerwen.
Alone.
No guards.
No escort.
“Clever girl,” she says, echoing the exact words my aunt used in the tunnel, and something about hearing them twice in one night makes the hair on my arms stand up.
“I did wonder whether Selene’s loyalty would bend toward you or toward her family.
It seems the answer is both, which is precisely why I let her walk out of that cell with you.”
Selene goes rigid beside me.
“You let us go.”
“I permitted an outcome I had already accounted for,” the Queen says calmly.
“The guards in that cell were never meant to catch you, April. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
They were meant to be loud enough, and frightening enough, that you would run somewhere quiet to catch your breath.” Her gaze sweeps the chapel, deliberate, unhurried.
“Somewhere exactly like this.”
“Why,” I ask, my voice shaking despite every effort to steady it, “would you want that?”
“Because some conversations require privacy your alphas would never permit if they were standing beside you.” The Queen moves closer, robes whispering against stone, and stops just short of the shattered light falling from the window.
“I know what my sister-in-law gave you tonight.
I felt the seal wake the moment you touched it.
Rings like that do not stay quiet once a royal hand closes around them.”
My fingers close instinctively around the ring in my palm.
“Sister-in-law,” I repeat.
“You knew her.
My aunt.”
“I knew both of them,” the Queen says, and for the first time all night, something almost like grief moves behind her composed features.
“Your mother stood exactly where you’re standing now, twenty years ago, wearing that same ring, believing the same thing you’re likely believing at this very moment.
That she had found someone willing to help her.”
A cold, creeping dread spreads through my chest.
“What happened to her?”
“She trusted the wrong ally in the dark,” the Queen says softly, “and paid for it with her life.
I have spent two decades making certain no one repeats that mistake.
Which is why I need you to understand something before this night goes any further.”
She reaches into her robes, and for one heart-stopping second I think she means to draw a weapon.
Instead, she withdraws a second ring, identical to the one now clutched in my fist, except this one gleams gold instead of silver.
“I am not your enemy, April,” the Queen says quietly.
“I am the only person left alive who knows exactly what killed your mother.
And it is standing considerably closer to you tonight than you realize.”
Behind me, Selene inhales sharply.
I turn.
And find her staring, not at the Queen, but directly at the chapel doorway behind me, where a second figure has stepped silently into the moonlight, features finally visible.
My own aunt.
Except now, standing this close, in this light, I can see clearly what the tunnel’s darkness hid from me before.
The split-crescent mark on her wrist isn’t old ink at all.
It’s still healing