The dark had teeth tonight.
It wasn't the soft kind of dark you could fold over a tired body and sleep beneath. It bit, and it curled, and it dug little hollows through my ribs until breathing felt like working through wool. Each inhale came with the sticky tang of iron; each exhale was a small surrender. I kept slipping — into dreams, into a place where memory and fever stitched themselves together and I could no longer tell which was which.
Then, light, the slow, drowning light of the sea peeled back and poured across me. It moved in liquid ribbons, blue-to-amber, like a tide that remembered to be kind.
She was there before I could form a name.
Naia.
Her hair was the color of midnight salt — black with an impossible gleam as if the ocean had threaded starlight into each strand. When she moved, her hair moved like a blade of water, and the air smelled of that old, briny calm that lives only where surf meets stone. Her eyes—my God, her eyes—were silver and deep, a moon trapped in a river. They knew me in a way the world rarely did. They came for me and found me hollowed out and hungry and somehow still whole.
"Ma Tempête," she breathed, and the way she said it made me young again — made me remember cliffs and the first time I'd tasted salt on her lips and how her laughter had once steadied the storms in my chest. The nickname she gave me when the world was new between us. The one she used when she wanted to fold me up and keep me safe.
"Naia," I managed. My voice was small, threadbare. My hand reached — a useless gesture that felt like proof, like if I touched her, I could tether the dream to the skin. My fingers found her cheek and it was warm and impossibly real, like dipping my hand into summer tide water.
She smiled that dangerous, holy smile of hers. "You always look at me like you've been starved," she said, and the sea slid between her words.
"Because I have." The confession came out ragged, true. The dark had taken so much already. Every day she'd been gone had been a small robbery: of laughter, of sunlight, of the confidence that used to sit like armor over my shoulders.
Her fingers threaded through my hair, and some old, fierce part of me straightened as if memory could be posture. "You were always my calm," I told her, because it was the only thing I could find that felt honest. "I've been trying to be the alpha you believed I could be."
"You were my anchor," she said, and there it was — that blunt, impossible truth. Her palm pressed over the mark at my chest, right where the pack's sign and my blood made a map I had learned to follow. "But anchors can be shared."
The words sank like a tide pulling at cliffs. My breath caught. "Tell her," she said. Simple. Sharp. The sentence dropped into my bones and set there like a stone.
"How?" The question was a small, stupid thing. The poison had knotted my courage into ropes. The council had bent their heads toward custom and fear. Dwyn — my daughter — carried more than one bloodline. She carried both of us. If she knew, if the world aligned the way it was meant to, she would stand with a truth that would either steady her or break her.
Naia's thumb stroked my jaw. The touch unmade me and put me back together at the same time. "She is our daughter," she said, voice a hush that belonged to the sea at dawn. "Not just the name that comes with your blood. She has my voice in her lungs. She has both songs. She will need to be told so she can choose the kind of strength she becomes."
My mind was a glass half-cracked. "If I tell her, the pack will—"
"They will listen because it is true," Naia interrupted, fierce now, tide-splintered. "If you do not tell her, the truth will eat her from the inside. Give her the map, Storm. Let her carry it."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that duty made men keep their mouths shut, that the pack needed stability, not whispered legacies and fragile crowns. I wanted to bargain for time, for certainty, for the false comfort that comes with pretending everything is as it was.
She kissed me then — slow, not an urgent talon of hunger but a soft thing that was both balm and command. The touch anchored me in a thousand ways. "You promised to keep her safe," Naia whispered. "Part of that promise is truth."
I remembered the promise. I remembered the nights when I had thought the world could be bent with enough good intention and steady hands. I remembered the feel of Dwyn's small hand in mine the day Naia left us, the stubbornness in her, the way she had always answered challenge not with retreat. She would not fold at knowledge. She would stand. But the truth—God—would land like a ledge she would have to climb alone unless I handed her the rope.
She pressed her forehead to mine, and for a beat the ocean held its breath beside us. "Tell her, Storm," she said, and there was that hard, soft firmness that made everything inside me answer. "Tell her before someone else frames her destiny for her."
Darkness tried to swallow the edges of her again. Her form shimmered, then thinned like spray, like something slipped between fingers. "Naia—" My voice broke.
"Tell her who she is." Her lips brushed my forehead. "So she does not have to guess."
Then the tide took her. The light waned like a slow blink. The dream shivered and folded back into the corridor's fluorescent hum. I was left with the hot aftertaste of salt and the iron ache in my lungs, Anubis' soft rasp at the edge of waking, a low animal sound that folded around me like a question.
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Hey Lovelies, I've decided to change the book update schedule to 2 chapters twice a week, every Tuesday and Fridays.....Happy reading, Love you guys<3