[POV: Evan]
Dominic had chosen the location well: a natural depression in the hills south of Midnight Crest's border, ringed by dense pine and shielded by a canopy so thick that even the midday sun barely reached the forest floor.
Midnight Crest wolves moved through the camp in disciplined silence, sharpening weapons and reinforcing wards.
Nightmaw soldiers occupied the eastern edge in separate clusters, their scarred bodies and predatory stillness marking them as something harder than anything our pack had produced.
I sat on a fallen log near the northern fire pit, staring at my hands.
The knuckles were still bruised from the shift three days ago. Beneath the bruising, dark veins threaded through my skin like cracks in porcelain, visible evidence of the magic Dominic's ritual had fused into my blood.
The veins pulsed faintly, rhythmically, in time with something that was no longer entirely my own heartbeat.
Rau stirred inside me, restless and hungry.
"Blood," he growled, the word reverberating through my skull like a drumbeat in an empty room. "I can smell them from here: the wolves on patrol, the young ones sparring near the creek. Let me hunt. Let me feed."
"Shut up," I muttered under my breath.
"You're weakening. Every hour you resist me, the fusion degrades. You need to let me in fully, or the magic will tear us both apart."
I pressed my palms against my temples and squeezed. He was louder now than ever—a constant roar beneath every thought, drowning out the parts of me that still remembered what silence felt like.
The blood ritual Dominic had performed weeks ago was supposed to stabilize the bond between Rau and me, turn us into a seamless weapon. Instead, it had cracked something open.
The crack had started when my teeth sank into Atlas's ribs.
I could still feel it—
The exact moment the sigil transferred through my bite and burrowed into his flesh. The jolt of dark magic leaving my body and entering his.
The way Atlas had yelped, a sound so raw and shocked that it bypassed every wall Rau had built inside me and struck something underneath that I'd thought was dead.
His eyes were what haunted me. Pale, wide, flooded with a betrayal so profound it had no anger in it—the shattering recognition that someone he'd once trusted had become the instrument of his destruction.
Rau had flinched. I'd felt it: the demon wolf recoiling from that look as though it had burned him. For one fraction of a second, the fusion had stuttered, and I'd been myself again.
Just Evan. Just the boy who'd grown up three doors down from Atlas in Midnight Crest, who'd watched him take beatings from their father and done nothing, who'd loved him so quietly that the silence had become its own kind of cruelty.
Then Rau had surged back, and the moment vanished like smoke.
But the crack remained. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Atlas's face, not the wolf, not the warrior Crimson Fang had forged, but the boy.
Silver-white hair falling across frightened pale eyes, hands raised in a gesture that wasn't defense but pleading, his voice cracking on my name like it still meant something to him.
"Stop," Rau snarled. "That memory is poison. He chose the Alpha. He abandoned you. He—"
"I abandoned him first." The words left my mouth before I could stop them. "I let Dominic into my head, let you consume everything I was, and turned myself into a weapon aimed at the only person who ever looked at me without fear."
Rau went quiet. The silence was worse than the roaring.
Dominic materialized from the tree line, his black coat immaculate, the obsidian dagger glinting at his hip. His dark eyes found me immediately, and what lived behind them was colder than anything Rau had ever produced.
"You're brooding again," he said, stopping three paces away, arms folded across his chest.
"I'm resting."
"You're hesitating. I can see it in your posture, hear it in your heartbeat." He tilted his head, studying me the way he studied maps, looking for vulnerabilities, calculating angles of attack.
"Something shifted after the mission. You delivered the curse, but you came back different. Fractured."
"The curse is planted, and Atlas is dying. What more do you want from me?"
Dominic's expression didn't change. He stepped closer, lowering his voice to something intimate and dangerous.
"Commitment, Evan. The blood pact you swore binds more than your word. It binds your blood, your wolf, your life force to this cause. If you break faith with me, the magic won't simply release you."
He leaned in, close enough that I could smell the cedarwood oil at his throat.
"It will consume you from the inside. Every vein, every organ, every cell—burned from within by the same dark energy that's currently keeping you alive. You'll die screaming, Evan, and Rau won't be able to save you."
The words landed with the precision of a blade between ribs. I held his gaze and let nothing show on my face: a skill I'd learned from watching him do it for years.
"I understand the terms," I said flatly.
"Do you? The wolf I sent into Crimson Fang three days ago would have torn Atlas apart without hesitation. The wolf sitting in front of me now looks like he's mourning someone."
Dominic straightened, his lip curling with barely concealed disgust.
"Sentiment is a disease, Evan. Atlas was never going to choose you. He chose the Alpha who could give him power, protection, status—everything you couldn't. Your grief is misplaced, and your guilt is a liability I won't tolerate."
"I said I understand."
"Then act like it." He turned away, dismissing me the way he'd always dismissed anything he considered beneath his attention.
I sat motionless on the log, hands gripping the bark until splinters bit into my palms. Rau churned inside me: confused, agitated, the crack in our fusion widening with every memory I refused to bury.
I remembered who I was before all of this. Before Rau, the blood pact, and Dominic twisted my heartbreak into a weapon. I was the boy who walked Atlas home from school when the other wolves threw stones.
That boy left water outside his bedroom door after their father's worst nights, never knocking, never speaking, just making sure he knew someone was there.
He loved him so completely and so silently that it had calcified into something indistinguishable from cowardice.
That boy was still in here. Buried, half-suffocated, clinging to the wreckage of what Rau hadn't yet consumed.
A scout emerged from the southern tree line at a run, skidding to a halt before Dominic's command tent. I watched as the wolf dropped to one knee.
"Report," Dominic said, emerging from the tent flap.
"Alpha Draven has left Crimson Fang territory with a small party. Four wolves moving north toward the Withered Pines. Our trackers confirmed it an hour ago—he took the silver wolf, two warriors, and an elder."
Dominic went very still. Then a smile spread across his face—slow, precise, the kind of smile that preceded devastation.
"He left the packhouse undefended," he murmured, more to himself than to anyone. "Draven actually left his pack to chase a fairy tale in the wilderness."
The smile widened, and his eyes found mine across the camp with a gleam that made my stomach turn to ice.
"Perfect. Now we take the packhouse."