POV: Kael
⸻
I hadn’t slept in days.
Not real sleep—not the kind where your body rests and your mind stops racing. My dreams weren’t dreams anymore. They were warnings. Echoes of footsteps I couldn’t follow and voices I wasn’t sure were mine.
And now… they were songs.
A lullaby.
Soft. Familiar.
Wrong.
It played in fragments, but always at the same time: just after moonrise, as the wind swept through the pines outside the packhouse. And every night, the pull to follow it grew stronger.
At first, I resisted.
Then I broke.
⸻
It was the third night after Aria collapsed in the ruins, and we still hadn’t figured out how to quiet the storm inside her. Her wolf hadn’t spoken—not to her, not to anyone—but I felt the change in her.
She moved like someone who was both newly born and painf
