“Wrong,” he said simply. “Even as a boy, I could smell it. It didn’t smell like us. It smelled like… rot under snow.”
My throat tightened.
“I watched him get worse,” Lucian went on. “More headaches. More lost time. Larger holes in his memory. The pack started to fear him as much as they feared the things outside our borders. He tried to claw it back. Tried to revoke the deal. That only made it dig in deeper.”
“The curse punished him,” I murmured. “Like it does you when you talk about it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Every time he tried to say her name, it burned him. Every time he thought about going north to find her, it whispered. Promised more if he’d only give in all the way. Stop fighting. Stop caring. Just… *let it.*”
The quiet horror in his voice made my skin crawl.
“What happened to him
