The word leaves my mouth before I’ve even decided to say it.
“My sister.”
The girl in the doorway doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, just stares at me with eyes the exact same shade of gray as mine, as my father’s, as the woman who supposedly died bearing only one child, not two.
I search her face the way I searched my father’s minutes ago, looking for something undeniable, something that would let me believe this without having to ask a single question first.
I find it almost immediately.
The same slight tilt to her chin when she’s bracing herself.
The same habit of pressing her lips together instead of letting her mouth shake.
“That’s not possible,” Selene says again, quieter this time.
“Apparently,” my father says, and there’s something in his voice I haven’t heard from him yet tonight, something close to shame, “a great many things I allowed to be possible without ever telling April the truth of them.”
“You knew,” I say, turning on him, all the fragile trust I’d started building in the last ten minutes curdling instantly into fury.
“You knew I had a sister, and you let me believe I was alone my entire life.”
“I knew she survived,” my father says.
“I didn’t know where.
The Council separated you the night your mother died, before I could reach either of you.
I spent years searching for both of you separately, believing I might only ever find one.”
The girl finally steps fully into the chapel, chains dragging loose behind her, and up close I can see the resemblance more clearly, the same set of the jaw, the same restless energy in her stance that I recognize from every mirror I’ve avoided since arriving at Mooncrest.
There’s a hollowness to her though, something I don’t share, a leanness that comes from years of rationed meals and rationed hope in equal measure.
Her wrists, where the chains have finally fallen away, are ringed with old scars layered over newer ones, the kind that come from testing the same restraints too many times to count.
“You can call me Wren,” she says, voice rough, like she hasn’t used it much in recent memory.
“It’s not the name they gave me at birth.
I stopped answering to that one a long time ago.”
“Where have you been?” I ask, the question tumbling out before I can stop it.
“All this time.
Where were you?”
“In a cell very similar to the one you found Jax in tonight,” Wren says.
“Except mine’s been occupied for twenty years instead of one night.” Her gaze flicks toward the Queen, sharp and unforgiving.
“Ask her why.”
Every head in the chapel turns toward Queen Maerwen.
“I didn’t know,” the Queen says, and for the first time all night, her composure fully abandons her, something raw and horrified breaking through.
“I swear to you, April, I had no knowledge that a second child survived, let alone that she was held captive on Council orders.”
“Convenient,” Wren says, “that you didn’t know something that happened directly beneath the very throne you’ve occupied for two decades.”
“The Council operates cells and holdings I am not always permitted to inspect,” the Queen says, her voice tightening.
“There are protections built into the old laws specifically to prevent a reigning monarch from interfering with certain classified detentions.
I have spent years fighting to have those protections repealed, and been blocked at every turn.”
“By who?” I ask.
The Queen’s eyes flick, slow and deliberate, toward Selene’s mother.
“By the same Council members who now claim my throne has been suspended,” she says.
I have spent years petitioning for those cells to be opened, for every classified holding to be reviewed under my own authority, and been told each time that the old protections were sacrosanct, untouchable, older than my own reign and therefore beyond my power to overturn.
I believed that.
I actually believed that.” Her voice catches, just slightly, on the last words, the closest thing to genuine grief I’ve heard from her all night.
Selene’s mother’s jaw tightens.
“I had nothing to do with your niece’s imprisonment.”
“Didn’t you,” my aunt says quietly, finally speaking after minutes of stunned silence.
“You knew both girls survived the night of the execution.
You told me so yourself, years ago, before you disappeared entirely from every circle I still had access to.”
“I told you one survived,” Selene’s mother corrects.
“I never confirmed which.”
“Because you didn’t know,” Wren says, stepping further into the chapel’s torchlight, “or because you decided it was safer for your own plans if the two of us never found each other.”
The accusation hangs heavy in the air, and Selene’s mother doesn’t answer it, which feels like answer enough.
Outside, the ground trembles, faint but unmistakable, and every alpha in the room stiffens at once.
“That’s not one squad,” Riven says, jaw tight.
“That’s a full assault formation.”
“The real Council forces,” Jax confirms grimly.
“The ones that decoy captain was buying time for.
They breached the outer wall about ninety seconds ago.
I gave you as much warning as I could.”
“How many?” Jodan asks.
“Enough that running isn’t really an option anymore,” Jax says.
“Not without a plan better than the one we currently have, which is, as far as I can tell, no plan at all.”
“We have a plan,” Eryx says.
“Selene showed us a passage.
It’s still there, behind the altar.”
“It leads outside Mooncrest’s boundary,” Selene says.
“Past the wards.
But if the Council’s already breached the outer wall, they may have people stationed at the exit point too.
I don’t know if it’s still safe.”
“Nothing about tonight has been safe,” Lucien says.
“I don’t see why that should stop us now.”
Wren steps forward, chains clinking softly with every movement.
“There’s another option,” she says.
“One the Council never accounted for, because they never accounted for me surviving at all.”
“What option?” I ask.
“The old law,” Wren says.
“The one that governs contested succession when more than one heir to a royal house is confirmed living at the same time.” Her eyes hold mine, steady, unflinching.
“It requires both heirs to stand together, under moonlight, and let the bond decide which of us the crown truly answers to.
I used to think it was a story someone made up to pass the time.
I didn’t understand until tonight that they might have been trying to warn me.”
The chapel goes very still.
“That’s a duel,” Jodan says slowly.
“Dressed up in older language, but that’s exactly what that is.”
“It doesn’t have to end in bloodshed,” Wren says.
“The old law only requires a decision, not a death.
But it does require both of us to choose, publicly, which one of us the fifth house’s power belongs to.”
“I don’t want the crown,” I say, my voice shaking.
“I never asked for any of this.
Not the bond, not the throne, not a twin sister I didn’t know existed until an hour ago.”
“Neither did I,” Wren says, something raw finally cracking through her composed exterior.
“I spent twenty years in a cell believing I was the only one left of our mother’s bloodline, believing every choice I made in there was in service of eventually avenging a death I couldn’t even properly grieve because no one would confirm it happened.
And then tonight, the wall of my cell simply opened, and I walked out to find you standing in a chapel with four alphas and two rings and a father I thought was as dead as our mother.” Her voice breaks slightly on the last word.
“I don’t want to fight you for a crown neither of us asked for either, April.
But I don’t think anyone in this kingdom is going to let us simply put this down and walk away.”
The ground trembles again, closer now, and the sound of shouting voices carries faintly through the broken window, sharp commands, the clash of steel beginning somewhere beyond the chapel’s outer walls.
“Whatever this old law requires,” Riven says, positioning himself protectively at my side, “it’s not happening tonight.
Not with an army bearing down on this chapel.”
“It might have to,” Wren says.
“The law states that once both heirs stand together under an open moon, the choosing begins automatically.
It isn’t something either of us can simply choose to delay.” She glances up, toward the shattered window, toward the moon still visible beyond the chapel’s broken roof.
“And we’re already standing beneath it.”
As if summoned by her words, the rings in my palm flare suddenly hot, and across the chamber, Wren gasps, clutching at her own wrist, where a faint silver mark has begun to bloom beneath her skin, identical to the one that once lit up my own arms in the arena.
“It’s already started,” she breathes, horror and wonder tangled together in her voice.
“April, it’s already choosing.”
The bond in my chest lurches violently, four familiar heartbeats suddenly joined by a fifth, not Selene’s mother’s, not the mysterious threat still darkening the sky outside, but Wren’s own pulse, hammering in perfect, terrible rhythm alongside mine.
And beneath that, faint but unmistakable, I feel something new begin to stir, something that doesn’t match any rhythm I’ve felt tonight, not Jodan’s steady control, not Riven’s restless fury, not Lucien’s quicksilver energy, not Eryx’s calm, not even Wren’s frightened, hopeful pulse now tangled with mine.
A sixth heartbeat.
Belonging to someone standing directly outside the chapel’s shattered doors, close enough now that I can hear the distinct, deliberate cadence of footsteps crossing the threshold behind Jax and Wren, unhurried despite the chaos erupting across the rest of the campus.
“Wren,” I whisper, my voice barely audible over the pounding in my own chest.
“Who else did they let out of that cell with you?”
Wren’s face goes pale, and for the first time since she stepped into the chapel, real fear breaks through her carefully guarded composure.
“No one,” she says.
“I was alone.
I’ve been alone the entire time.”
The footsteps stop just beyond the doorway, and a shadow falls across the threshold, tall and still and utterly silent, waiting, patient in a way that feels far more unsettling than if it had simply rushed the room the way the Council guards had.
“Then who,” Jodan asks quietly, every alpha in the room going rigid at once, “is that?”