The wind had shifted.
Zara noticed it first—how the morning air, once sharp with frost, now carried a heaviness that clung to the skin. A pressure. Like the earth had drawn a breath and refused to let it out.
She didn’t say anything as she stood at the nursery window, watching the courtyard below where guards began their rotations. Instead, she ran a blade over a whetstone with steady, deliberate strokes. The sound—scrape, scrape, scrape—was the only rhythm in the room, save for Elara’s soft breathing in the bassinet behind her.
Aria had barely slept.
The full-moon gathering was tomorrow. The prophecy would be read. Evelyn’s influence had crumbled, but her loyalists remained. Silent, scattered, watching.
Kael had not spoken to her since the letter.
And yet it wasn’t his silence that gnawed at her—it was something deeper. Instinct. The wolf’s sense of being watched. Of danger circling.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, scrolls and treaties spread around her like a paper nest. One hand rested on her belly without thinking. The other clutched a pendant—her mother’s. She turned it between her fingers over and over again.
A knock at the door.
Zara moved before Aria could answer.
It was Tomas, one of the junior guards.
His face was pale. “You need to see this.”
He held out a scrap of parchment, small and crudely folded. No seal. Just four words scrawled in black ink.
The heir dies tonight.
Zara snatched it from his hands, eyes already scanning the corridor behind him.
“Where did this come from?” she asked.
“Left in the training yard. Pinned to a post with a blade.”
Aria stood slowly. Her vision had narrowed. Her hands didn’t tremble, but something inside her stilled, like a lake gone silent before a storm.
“Double the guards,” she said.
“Done.”
“Seal the nursery,” she added. “And don’t let word spread.”
Zara nodded, already moving.
Aria crossed to Elara’s bassinet and lifted her daughter into her arms. The child blinked up at her, oblivious. Trusting.
“I will not lose you,” Aria whispered. “Not to cowards. Not to shadows.”
By nightfall, the entire east wing had shifted. Silent changes. Guards repositioned. Entry points reinforced. Magic laced into the air itself—warding sigils etched above door frames, wolfbane dust sprinkled in window cracks.
Zara stayed close. Blades strapped to each thigh, a shortbow across her back.
They didn’t know who sent the threat.
That was the terrifying part.
It could be one of Evelyn’s loyalists, driven mad by desperation. A rogue pack trying to destabilize SilverCrest. Even someone within the council still clinging to old laws.
But whoever it was, they had dared.
And Aria had no intention of hiding.
She fed Elara herself that evening. Held her longer than usual. Hummed the lullaby her mother used to sing before bed. The one about silver wolves and quiet stars.
By midnight, she stood watch beside the crib while Zara dozed lightly in a chair, arms crossed, blade within reach.
That’s when she heard it.
Not footsteps.
Not the creak of a door.
But breathing.
Inside the room.
Aria turned slowly, heart pounding. The shadows near the wardrobe thickened.
Then moved.
She grabbed the iron poker from the hearth in one hand, the pendant in the other. The scent hit her nose first—sour, bitter, unfamiliar. Not wolf. Not pack.
A cloaked figure lunged from the darkness, a dagger in hand.
Aria didn’t flinch.
She moved.
The poker met bone with a sickening crack. The attacker staggered, but didn’t fall. He swung the blade wide—
Zara was already on him.
Steel hissed.
Blood spattered.
The man dropped.
Zara stood over him, breathing hard. “He’s not from here. No pack mark.”
Aria kicked the dagger away and pulled back the hood.
A young man. Maybe twenty. Hollow eyes. A tattoo burned into his neck—one Aria had only seen once, years ago.
“Greenwood,” she breathed.
Zara’s face paled. “That’s impossible.”
“No. They wanted me once. When I refused to mate with their heir, they called it betrayal. Said no woman of my bloodline should reject a pact. They haven’t forgotten.”
Zara looked at the crib. “Then this isn’t about Evelyn.”
“It’s about power,” Aria said. “And prophecy. They believe killing Elara will kill the future.”
Zara spit on the floor. “Then they’ve miscalculated.”
Guards flooded the room moments later, alerted by the blood wards flaring on the threshold. The body was removed. The room sealed. The entire SilverCrest compound thrown into lockdown.
Aria didn’t sleep.
She sat beside her daughter’s crib until dawn, the poker still in her hand, her pendant pressed to her heart.
The prophecy had begun to echo.
And someone, somewhere, was terrified enough to try and stop it before it bloomed.
