Esther’s POV
Three months sounds like a lifetime when you’re bargaining with an Alpha King. Living it was something else entirely.
I marked the days in the back of my journal with a simple black s***h, each one a tally toward freedom or failure. Now the last square on the page had a circle around it: today. Three months exactly since I’d stood in the courtyard and promised Kevin I’d return, three months since Nicholas’s eyes had glimmered gold in the moonlight and Sharon had flickered awake in my chest.
And still my wolf was only a faint pulse under my ribs, more a phantom heartbeat than a living thing.
I pressed my fingers against the spot above my sternum where Sharon slept.
Wake up, I whispered silently. Please.
Nothing.
Outside the healer’s wing window, the early-autumn sky glo
