Ethan's POV
The walls of my chamber felt too close tonight.
The silence too sharp.
And yet my mind was deafening.
I lay sprawled across the edge of my bed, staring at the ceiling, but I didn't see stone. I didn't see the familiar shadows stretching across my walls. I only saw her.
Soraya.
Every word she had told me clung to me like smoke I couldn't escape. Her story poured into me again and again, refusing to let me rest.
Her mother. Blackwood. The life among humans.
It was a story steeped in sorrow, but it was incomplete. I knew it the moment she finished speaking. She had lived believing grief was her only inheritance—losing her mother to rogues, surviving among humans, convincing herself she was just another wolf stripped of a pack and a future.
But now the veil had been lifted.
Now she knew the truth.
She wasn't simply unlucky. She wasn't just another orphan of war.
She was the daughter of the Alpha King.
