Elara POV
The hooded figure with the purple blade didn't linger after Kael threw a heavy stone bench at its head, and the shadow dissolved into the floorboards like ink in water, but the message was clear enough that Kael didn't even let me go back to the archives the next morning. Instead, he dragged me out to a private stone courtyard tucked behind the Alpha’s wing, where the walls were high, and the ground was covered in a thin layer of sand, and he stood there in nothing but his training trousers with his chest bare and his muscles glowing under the early sun.
"If you're going to live in my shadow, you're going to learn how to keep your neck from being snapped the next time one of those shadow-walkers decides to crawl out of the rug," Kael said, his voice sounding like a low rumbl
