Damien's blade came for my heart, and time did the thing it does in the half-second that decides everything it slowed, and stretched, and showed me the whole of it.
I saw the blade. I saw Cain, a stride too far, the bond spiking with a terror so total it whited out everything, his roar tearing loose behind me. I saw Damien's face, wild and ruined, the golden Alpha who'd stood on a dais and called my bond an inconvenience, now spending the last card he had on killing the girl he'd thrown in the mud. I saw four hundred wolves frozen mid-kneel.
And I saw, with the strange clarity of the moment, that Damien had made the same mistake every man in this war had made.
He thought I was still the girl at the ceremony. The one who went limp when the warriors grabbed her. The one who didn't fight b
