My fingers did not relax.
They stayed locked into the armchair’s leather hide, knuckles bleached bone-white, nails sinking faint half-moon indentations into the expensive grain. The tremor rippling through my bones was no longer rooted in fear. It was a residual, thrumming aftershock—lingering static from the Bloodstone’s detonation, the low hum of a power I’d spent a lifetime suppressing, finally unchained at the edges.
I’d hit a wall tonight. Not a physical one. A existential one.
For months, I’d existed as a passenger in my own life: manipulated by my ex-fiancé, bartered by my own family, confined by a contractual marriage, reduced to a fragile human pawn in the wolves’ ancient power games.
That passive version of me was dead. Buried in the council chamber’s stone floors, incinerate
