The silence after the mysterious figure vanished felt alive—thick and crushing, like the night itself had leaned in to listen.
The group remained clustered near the flickering violet flames of Mary's campfire, their shadows stretching long across the ground, trembling with every snap of burning wood.
Axel sat rigidly, his broad shoulders locked tight, his hands clenched so hard his knuckles turned bone-white. Inside him, his wolf raged—pacing in frantic circles, snarling at the empty space where the figure had stood only moments ago. Axel's mind was a violent storm of territorial fury and suffocating guilt.
A fourth mate.
The thought was a blasphemy.
He had spent weeks treating Mary like a threat, a burden, a danger he didn't want to want. And now—when he was finally ready to stop fighting the bond and start earning her forgiveness—fate demanded he share her.
With a ghost.
A descendant of a dead man.
The rage in his chest wasn't clean. It wasn't noble. It was primal. Jagged. A possessive, blood-deep need to hunt down this fourth pillar and break him before he ever had the chance to touch what Axel was realizing—too late—was becoming his entire world.
Across from him, Dante was unnervingly quiet.
The cocky grin he always wore like armor was gone, replaced by a dark, brooding stare. He kept his gaze fixed on Mary, watching the way the firelight caught the violet glimmer of her eyes, the way shadows curved along her cheekbones like they belonged there.
The bond in his chest wasn't a hum anymore.
It was an ache.
A tether that tightened every time Mary breathed.
The idea of a fourth mate felt like betrayal—not from Mary, but from fate itself. Dante had always moved first, claimed fast, acted without hesitation. He hated uncertainty. He hated waiting.
But worst of all?
He hated the sickening, unfamiliar feeling of not being enough.
Of imagining another man out there—some unseen piece of her destiny—meant to hold what Dante already felt was his.
Beside him, Kieran's expression was carved in cold precision, his mind already slicing through the implications like a blade.
If the fourth mate carried the bloodline of the Seer Alpha—Silas—then Mary's power was still untethered.
Unaligned.
A weapon without a sight.
A queen without a complete circle was vulnerable in ways Mary couldn't even understand yet.
But even with logic running through his veins, Kieran couldn't stop the need rising in him—the deeply human, terrifying desire to mark Mary, to seal her to them so tightly no fourth man could ever find a way inside their bond.
Avery and Jada watched Mary with growing dread, sensing the nervous energy crackling off her like static.
Avery could feel the earth beneath them reacting to Mary's distress—grass wilting and regrowing in chaotic rhythm, roots shifting like they were trying to crawl away from her power.
Jada stood close, shadows curling protectively around her ankles, sensing the thin fractures forming in Mary's composure. To them, Mary wasn't a queen. She wasn't a prophecy.
She was the girl who stayed up late studying beside them.
The girl who worried about her dad.
The girl who deserved a life that didn't come with blood and destiny and chains.
Myles stood just outside the campfire's glow, half in the dark like he belonged there. His chest felt heavy with secrets, with the weight of knowing too much and being able to tell too little.
He understood Aethelgardian politics better than anyone else here.
And he knew what it meant for Mary to be incomplete.
Danger didn't wait for a queen to breathe.
It hunted.
It circled.
And it struck when she was weakest.
He looked at Jada—his mate—and felt a sharp pang of sympathy for Mary, whose heart was being pulled in four directions by a fate she never asked for.
The stillness became unbearable.
Mary stood abruptly, her skin buzzing with unspent mage-power, her breath too fast, her eyes too bright. She ignored her friends' protests and stalked toward the flat stone clearing nearby, her movements sharp and jagged like she was holding herself together by force.
The Alphas rose instantly.
Not by choice.
The bond acted like an invisible leash, dragging them after her.
What followed wasn't training.
It was survival.
A desperate dance of raw power and repressed hunger.
Mary moved with a super-speed that blurred her silhouette, dodging Axel's heavy lunges and meeting Dante's agile strikes with bursts of telekinetic force that snapped the air like lightning.
Every time they came close, the tension turned physical—a thick, crackling pressure that pressed against skin and breath and thought.
Axel caught her by the waist.
Heat poured from him through her clothes, searing her like a brand. For a heartbeat, the world locked still—his breath hitching as his mouth hovered near the pulse point of her neck, as if instinct demanded he claim what he'd already denied for too long.
Inside Mary's mind, Astraea howled.
Her ancient wolf wasn't begging anymore.
She was commanding.
Stop running.
Stop fighting.
Claim them.
The voice was low and seductive, curling through Mary's skull like smoke, urging her to sink her teeth into their shoulders, to mark them with her scent, to surrender to the bond and let it swallow her fear whole.
Mary's control cracked.
Not outwardly—yet.
But inside?
Her resolve was splintering.
Kieran stepped in, catching her wrists with grounding force, his grip firm enough to steady her but careful enough not to bruise. The three of them surrounded her—Axel, Dante, Kieran—closing the space, their scents mixing into something intoxicating: cedar, rain, and spice, overpowering her senses until she could barely think.
For one breathless moment, Mary wanted to give in.
To let the Valkyrie rise fully.
To let instinct win.
To let their arms become the only truth in a world full of prophecy and danger and missing pieces.
But then she saw Marvin in her mind—sitting in his quiet study, glasses low on his nose, a book of history open in his lap like her life hadn't become a war.
And Mary snapped back from the edge.
With a choked cry, she unleashed a telekinetic pulse so violent it threw all three Alphas backward, knocking them off balance. The air roared as power surged out of her, her chest heaving like she'd been drowning.
She stood alone in the clearing, trembling.
Breathing hard.
Denying the wolf again.
While Mary fought the storm tearing through her, Myles and Jada found a moment of quiet at the edge of camp.
They spoke softly about the lives they'd forgotten—Jada confessing her fear that her father might never truly know who she was underneath the Lethe-wipe. Myles held her hand, his thumb tracing her palm as if memorizing her in case the world stole her again.
Their bond wasn't chaos.
It was grounding.
Steady.
A calm anchor in the middle of a raging sea.
Then the air changed.
A low hum rolled through the forest, melodic and haunting, raising goosebumps across every exposed inch of skin.
Ahead, the second gate of the Moon Trials began to manifest.
A shimmering silver portal bloomed into existence like moonlight tearing open the fabric of the world. The sound it produced wasn't a voice—but it felt like one, calling directly into the mind.
The Labyrinth of Echoes.
A trial built to shred mental defenses and drag the deepest regrets into the light.
As they gathered their things and prepared to step forward, Mary felt the weight of the Alphas' stares on her back.
They weren't just her guards anymore.
They were her mates—even if she couldn't bring herself to say the word.
And the mention of the fourth mate had poisoned the air with urgency, sharpening every glance, every movement, every breath into something desperate.
Mary lifted a hand to her face.
Her nose was bleeding—thin streaks of red against her skin from the strain of holding back her mage-fire. Her vision blurred for a moment, but she forced herself to breathe through it.
The Labyrinth would show her what she wasn't ready to see.
Visions of the Fourth Alpha.
The truth about her mother.
Maybe even the face of the man meant to complete her circle—and claim the missing piece of her destiny.
Mary swallowed hard.
Then, with one final breath, she stepped into the silver mist—her hand reaching instinctively for her friends as the world dissolved into echoes of a life she was only just beginning to remember.