But the great head did not turn toward her.
It snapped away from her fingers, toward the empty white behind her, and its lips peeled back from teeth as long as knives.
A growl started deep in its chest and rolled outward until the ground shivered beneath Raven’s bare feet.
The chains began to rattle.
She spun around.
Nothing.
White, level and empty, all the way to nowhere.
“What is it?” The wolf dragged itself forward against its bindings until its body stood between her and the emptiness, and the growl kept building.
It wasn’t threatening her, for some reason she knew this.
It was guarding her — from something she couldn’t see.
“What the hell?” A male’s voice.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, and there was no menace in it, only flat, unguarded surprise.
Raven’s eyes raked the emptiness.
“Who said that?” A pause.
When the voice returned, it had collected itself.
Mostly.
“You shouldn’t be awake.
Nobody’s ever—” It cut off, and the quality of the quiet shifted, as the attention bore on her.
“You’re aware in here.
That’s a first.” Her skin crawled as a thought struck her.
Whoever this was, he’d expected to find her sleeping inside her own sleep.
“Where are you?” The wolf gave no answer.
Its snarl shifted, locking onto one patch of empty air as though something stood there that Raven simply could not see.
Something touched her mind.
Raven flinched.
The sensation was cold and invasive—like unseen fingers slipping between her thoughts, turning them over one by one without permission.
Not searching frantically.
Browsing.
The white flickered.
Stone pushed up through the white ground.
Raven stumbled back as a basin took shape in front of her.
Not just any basin.
The Blackthorn basin.
Gray dishwater filled it, grease spreading across the surface in dull, shining patches.
Walls began forming around it next, drawing themselves out of nothing.
They looked solid at first, then blurred where they met the white expanse, the edges smearing as though the memory could not decide where it ended.
Servants appeared along the walls.
They wore familiar uniforms, but their faces were blank.
Then pages began falling above the basin.
Her pages.
One after another, they drifted into the filthy water.
Ink bled across the surface in dark threads while Celeste’s laughter came from everywhere at once.
Raven spun around, her breath catching.
A doorway stood behind her, opening onto nothing.
Alaric and Kieran waited beside it.
They watched her with the same disgust they had worn at the banquet, every detail exact—from the coldness in their eyes to the cruel set of their mouths.
“Interesting,” the voice said.
Calm now.
Comfortable.
He was reading her.
Pulling her memories out and arranging them like furniture in his own house.
Fear went to fury so fast she felt the switch flip.
“Get out of my head.” He didn’t answer.
The kitchen sharpened instead — Celeste assembled beside the basin, reached for another page, her smile forming— The wolf roared.
The kitchen burst apart around Raven.
The basin split, the walls blew into pieces, Celeste and the twins shattered like reflections in dropped glass — and then there was only white again, ringing with the last edges of the sound.
For a moment, the voice said nothing at all.
The wolf lunged at the empty patch of air.
Its chains hauled it up short, links tearing into its body, and it clawed forward anyway, paws gouging the white ground, fighting the leash for inches.
“What is this?” All the comfort had left the voice.
The edges of the white dimmed.
Pressure closed around Raven’s skull like a slow fist, her vision swam, and her knees dipped before she caught herself, teeth gritted.
The wolf’s jaws snapped at the air— —and closed on something.
For half a second, Raven saw him.
A man-shaped outline writhed between the wolf’s teeth, black as smoke and empty of every feature except the rough shape of a head and shoulders.
He thrashed violently.
“Get your filthy teeth off me!” The shout tore through the white expanse, stripped of all calm now—furious, humiliated and raw.
At the same moment, the invisible grip crushing Raven’s skull sprang open.
The wolf did not let go.
It hauled backward against its own chains with the shadow locked in its jaws, and thin dark cracks spidered out through the white beneath its paws.
The outline twisted, wrenched, folded in on itself — and Raven felt what the stranger felt, bleeding across the space between them.
Disbelief first.
Then humiliation catching fire into rage.
Her chained wolf had caught him in its teeth.
The shadow tore itself loose and vanished, and a growl shook the whole dreamscape — not the wolf’s.
His.
The white bruised gray at every edge.
“What are you?” The pressure came back and brought reinforcements.
All around the shrinking white, her memories forced their way in — the kitchen door reforming, and behind it a treeline, black trunks, shadow wolves flowing between them.
The twins’ voices rose out of the dark, layered over each other, reciting the rejection from every direction.
Two years.
Wolfless.
We would rather— The wolf snarled back into the closing dark, still fighting, blood-dark stains spreading where the links had torn deeper.
It had been bound and silenced her whole life, and it was fighting for her anyway.
Raven was done standing behind it.
She stepped forward, past its shoulder, until she stood beside the wolf with the dark closing in on them both.
The pressure leaned on her, patient and enormous, inviting her to her knees.
She closed her fists and stayed on her feet.
One silver eye turned to her.
For a moment there was no line between them.
Its rage was hers.
Her defiance was its.
The same fury, split into two bodies, finally standing in the same room.
Raven faced the dark.
“Get out.” The dark pushed harder.
The voices multiplied, and the trees crawled closer— The wolf threw back its head and roared, and Raven screamed into the middle of it until the two sounds became one.
“GET OUT!” The dreamscape broke.
White fractured outward from beneath their feet, cracks racing through the dark edges, the trees, the door, the voices — all of it splitting, shearing, coming down.
The intruding presence was ripped loose and flung out of her.
Light burst up through every crack at once, and the whole endless white collapsed in on Raven— Raven snapped upright with a scream caught in her throat.
Darkness swallowed everything.
For one wild second, she had no idea where she was.
The white expanse was gone.
The wolf was gone.
The chains, the faceless servants, the voice inside her head—all of it had vanished so suddenly that her mind could not catch up.
Then her forehead slammed into something hard.
The crack filled the room.
Pain exploded across her skull, and a figure staggered backward from beside the bed, both hands flying to her face.
“Ow!
You fucking bitch!”