Kael – three weeks ealier
They were the words he’d spent a lifetime longing to hear, until he’d met Nadia. And maybe even then. Yet he’d never expected to actually hear them. Never thought he’d look down at a photograph and have even the faintest suspicion that it was Her.
That’s how he’d always thought of the lost princess, deep down – Her. She was the invisible presence that had shaped all of his life, the emblem of everything the werewolf world had lost from the war, and the yoke around his heart placed there by the Fates themselves. She was nameless, faceless, maybe not even alive, and yet the mere idea of her was more real and important than anything Kael wanted or did.
He’d loved the idea of Her for years, dutifully, just as much as he’d resented what Her absence did to his li
