POV: Sylra
Three surges since morning.
The first hit in the corridor outside the council chamber. Heat through both palms, fast and sharp. I pressed them against the stone wall and counted to four. A guard at the far end of the hall glanced my way. I dropped my hands and kept walking.
The second came during the council session itself. Mid-sentence — Torvaine's replacement was reading a trade amendment aloud and the golden wolf slammed through my arms like a current. My fingers locked around the arm of the chair. My knuckles went white.
Sera, sitting to my left, shifted her gaze toward my hands and then away. She didn't ask. The council continued around me — voices, papers, the mechanical rhythm of governance that didn't pause because the queen's body was doing something it shouldn't.
I held the chair until the surge passed. Loosened my grip one finger at a time. Picked up my pen. Wrote a note I didn't need to write, just to prove my hand was steady.
It wasn't. But the pen moved and the ink dried and nobody looked twice.
The third was worse.
Alone in my room. Standing at the mirror, unfastening the council collar, when the heat climbed past my hands, past my arms, past my chest — and reached my eyes.
Gold. In the mirror. My own eyes staring back at me, ringed in gold that burned bright and steady for two full seconds.
I grabbed it. Pulled it back. Dragged the wolf down through my chest and my arms and my hands and pressed it flat the way I pressed my palms against stone. The gold faded. My eyes went dark again.
My hands were shaking. My pulse was slamming against my throat.
Each time Vedran's wolf dropped another degree on the monitors — each quiet, incremental fade — the golden wolf got louder. As if something was shifting inside me to fill the space his signal used to occupy. Every degree he lost cost me control I couldn't afford.
I changed my clothes. Washed my face. Looked at myself in the mirror and made sure there was nothing visible.
Then I went to Caelen's room.
I didn't announce myself. I knocked. He opened the door — shirtless, hair damp, a towel over one shoulder. He'd been washing the road off himself in stages all week.
I walked in and put my arms around him before he could speak.
His body stiffened for half a second. Surprise, not resistance. Then his arms came around me and he held on. Solid. Warm. His chest against my cheek, his heartbeat steady under my ear.
"I spent every night you were gone sitting in the corridor outside the medical wing," I said. My voice was muffled against his skin. "Listening for riders. Every sound of hooves on the road — I'd stand up. Every time it wasn't you, I'd sit back down and start counting again."
His arms tightened. His chin settled on top of my head.
"I rode the last stretch without stopping," he said. His voice was low. Close. I could feel it in his chest before I heard it in the air. "The guards wanted to rest the horses at the final checkpoint. I told them no."
His hand moved to the back of my head. Fingers in my hair. Gentle.
"Because I could feel you waiting," he said. "Not through anything I can name. I just knew you were sitting somewhere in this palace counting hours and I couldn't add another one."
I pulled back enough to see his face. The tiredness was still there — the ride lived in the lines around his eyes and the healing cuts on his hands. But underneath it was something I hadn't seen in weeks. Steadiness. The particular calm of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
I kissed him.
Slow. Deliberate. My hands on either side of his face, his jaw rough under my palms. I took my time with it — the first unhurried thing either of us had done since before the poisoning, before the ride, before any of it. His mouth was warm. His hands settled on my waist and stayed there. Not pulling. Not pushing. Just present.
The wolf pushed during the kiss.
Heat through my palms where they held his face. A deep, rolling pressure that started in my chest and expanded outward. The golden wolf surging toward the contact, toward the warmth of his skin, toward the closeness.
I absorbed it. Let the pressure pass through me instead of building — channeled it into the kiss, into the heat between us, gave it somewhere to go that wasn't my eyes or my hands or the visible surface of my body. The surge crested. Passed through. Settled.
He didn't notice. I made sure of it.
When I pulled back, his eyes were half-closed. His thumbs traced slow circles on my waist.
"I want to stay tonight," I said.
"Yes." He said it before I finished the sentence. No hesitation. No question about whether it was appropriate or wise or what the palace would think. Just yes.
I pressed my face into his neck. Held on.
Partly because I wanted to. Because the smell of his skin and the weight of his arms and the sound of his breathing were the most real things in my world right now, and I needed real.
Partly because the golden wolf had just surged again — a hard, fast pulse that shot up my spine and pressed against the base of my skull — and I needed something to anchor against while I fought it down.
I breathed into his neck. Counted. One. Two. Three. The surge peaked and dropped. My fingers unclenched from his shoulders.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I'm tired," I said. Not a lie. Not the whole truth.
He didn't push. He walked me to the bed and pulled the blanket back and lay down beside me. His arm came around my waist. His chest pressed warm against my back.
"Sleep," he said.
I closed my eyes. The wolf hummed low in my chest — quiet for now, but not gone. Never gone. Growing louder every day, filling the space that Vedran's fading signal left behind.
I pressed back against Caelen's chest and held on to the one thing I was sure of — that he was here, that he was solid, that for the next few hours I didn't have to carry this alone.
The wolf stirred once more before I slept, I barely held it.