Prologue - Intelligence Network (Elena)

The fire burned low behind its iron screen. Black stone veined with silver surrounded me, the war chamber’s corners engineered to catch sound and hold it. Frost feathered the high windows into patterns resembling ceremonial script. Beneath hearing, the palace’s ancient wards hummed their continuous note of warning. I sat alone. In my gloved hands, I held a single intelligence report, its seal broken, pages unbound.

I read it first as a ruler testing credibility. The language was cool and administrative. Dates verified. Sources named by code. Casualty confirmations cross-referenced with ward readings that registered the disturbance as a “seismic event.” The report reconstructed an ambush: midnight, the Cercle du Voile coven house, Grand Chancellor Theron’s vanguard moving with surgical precision. I had met Theron once; his pale amber eyes tracked my movements like a predator’s even as his voice maintained its professorial cadence.

My eyes returned to one phrase: elemental core removed.

I pressed my gloved thumb against the page. In the hierarchies I navigated, there were many ways to kill a witch. Fewer to unmake one. The victim: Isadora Levesque, called Izzy, twenty-six, possessed of an affinity for chronological thread-weaving that her own coven considered volatile. I knew the type. Every court had them.

I did not call for a copy. To copy it would acknowledge it existed in a form others might access. Instead I held it, the pages slightly warped from humidity, and read it a second time as a strategist.

The narrative shifted. Izzy had not died. She had fractured—soul-fracture, severity: catastrophic—and sent her consciousness six months backward into her own past. She awakened foreknowing every betrayal and rewrote the sequence from within. The report described this in operational terms almost offended by their subject: subject utilized predictive intelligence to preemptively neutralize threats.

Multiple sources confirmed the timeline: Lycan intelligence, Warlock Citadel review, coven defectors. They disagreed on nomenclature: “temporal recursion,” “soul bifurcation,” “chronological haunting.”

Then, Kaelen Thorne. I knew that name: the icy commander of Lys’s seventeen-layer ward system, who viewed emotional attachments as vulnerabilities. The report traced his transformation with administrative precision. Surveillance protocols modified, redefined as protective integration. The city’s defense reconfigured to shield one woman.

I set the page down. The fire had burned lower. I picked it up again. Important information required a third reading—the first for surface, the second for structure, the third for what lay between.

I read it a third time as a mother and sovereign.

The final paragraphs shifted to projection. Izzy had embedded an encrypted psychic beacon along the Lycan border. Kaelen Thorne pledged the full force of the Warlock Citadel to answer its signal. Coordinates were listed in surveyor’s notation.

My finger stopped on them.

The room contracted. I knew those coordinates from engineering assessments my people had abandoned, from maps marked unstable and do not approach. 

The beacon sat inside my mountains, in depths my line had claimed without possessing.

The fire had burned to embers. Wind pressed at the windows; the frost patterns seemed less like script and more like warning.

From the eastern wing, a sound reached me—the heir’s night nurse moving through the corridor, her footsteps a rhythm I had memorized. The sound faded. I did not move toward it. A sovereign at her child’s bedside invited interpretation, and interpretation became leverage.

I looked at the report’s final assessment: Theron vanguard, denied objective Lys, redirecting toward Carpathian approaches. Estimated arrival: seventy-two hours after the royal sled train departed.

Seventy-two hours. I had authorized the sled train because stillness felt like a different death.

I folded the report myself, tucking it inside my coat against my sternum. It warmed slowly against my skin, becoming secret.

I crossed to the door. My spymaster waited alone in the corridor beyond.

“Four orders,” I said. “The beacon inspection is classified. No record exists outside this chamber.”

He nodded.

“The escort list is approved by me personally.”

Another nod.

“The council receives an explanation: routine border-security review. No mention of beacon coordinates or temporal phenomena.”

“Understood, Majesty.”

I paused before the fourth. Somewhere beyond these walls, my son slept in the care of a woman whose loyalty I purchased.

“No signal regarding the beacon is transmitted without my direct authorization. This includes Concord channels, allied intelligence, Citadel infrastructure.”

His stillness changed. He recognized what I described: not caution but severance.

“The crown does not rest,” I said. “Neither do I.”

He bowed and left.

Chapter 1 - The Spring (Danika)

The spring lay glazed over with ice so thin it showed the water beneath. Three pups convulsed at its edge, their small bodies jerking against the frozen ground, dark foam gathering at the corners of their mouths. Their limbs moved without rhythm, without will, paws scraping furrows in the snow that filled with meltwater and blood. A mother knelt over the smallest—her hands slick with slush, pressing snow to her child’s throat while the lips above turned the color of bruised plums. The gathered pack had formed its uneven ring, shoulders tight, voices dropping to murmurs that cut off every time Héctor Cruz shifted his weight.

I stood among them but not with them, a half-step outside the ring, where the heat of bodies ended and the wind began. My amber eyes moved between the pups and the spring, reading what the water showed: glassy, silver-bright, and deceptively clean. No oil-sheen of common poison. No disturbance in the frozen margin where something might have been poured. They all avoided eye contact as I stepped closer, including Mateo, who’d shared my patrol route since autumn, and Inés, whose child I’d carried through fever three nights prior. Their shoulders angled away as if my presence carried contamination.

Tomás moved through the crowd at Héctor’s nod, searching bags, upending packs onto the snow with the methodical panic of a man who needed to find something specific. His hands shook when he reached my worn canvas bag. He pulled out the small glass vial—the dark liquid inside viscous against all that white—and held it up where the torchlight caught it.

The murmuring stopped.

Héctor turned. His eyes moved from the vial to me without surprise or reservation, as if he’d already measured the distance between those two points and found it sufficient. He didn’t raise his voice. “The spring,” he said, in the same clipped register he used to assign patrol routes. “You poisoned it.”

“That’s not mine.”

“Your pack. Your water source.” He named the facts like he was reading from a ledger. “Three days you’ve been refusing shift calls. Three days you’ve kept your distance from the den.”

“I didn’t poison the spring.”

I looked to Tomás. His eyes dropped to the vial in his own hands, then to the snow between his boots, and nowhere near my face. The pack had begun to close in—not all of them, but enough—wolves I had run beside, killed beside, and slept back-to-back with in the border snow. They came from three sides, leaving me the spring at my back and the dark at my front.

Héctor gave the order.

The first strike caught my scarred ribs, folding me forward around the pain like a door slamming shut. I tasted blood before I felt the knee driven into my spine, arching me backward, my face hitting snow that filled my mouth with cold and iron. I forced myself upright once, blood on my teeth, my eyes finding Héctor’s through the swelling that was already narrowing my vision. I didn’t beg. 

I do not beg.

The rank marker tore from my clothing in a single gesture, held up so the whole pack saw the Cruz line burned into the leather. Then it dropped in the snow. My outer layers followed—jacket, sweater, the thermal undershirt that had been my mother’s. The cold touched my skin like a waiting hand.

They dragged me to the tree line, two of them, their grips familiar from a hundred hunts where we’d pulled down elk together. They left me on the far side of the boundary stones, naked and bleeding, where the wind scoured the ground clean, and the amber torchlight of the spring was already swallowed by black pines and distance.

I stayed on my hands and knees. My breath came in shallow pulls, each one carrying the familiar pack scents that were already fading—wet fur, woodsmoke, and the biting scent of Cruz territory marked in urine and musk. Ahead, the dark forest waited with its weight of silence.

I reached inward for the heat and the change. For the wolf that should answer, that had always answered, even unawakened, even dormant. 

I found nothing. My bones wouldn’t respond, like they were locked behind a door inside my chest, from the other side. The cold moved in without resistance, settling against my skin, then beneath it, then deeper.

The wind changed.

A sound reached me—something large. I heard the crusted snow breaking as a single massive paw pressed into it, the powder beneath compressing. 

I raised my head. 

A figure separated itself from the tree line where shadows should have been absolute. A black wolf, larger than any I had ever seen before in my life, stepped out of the dark between the pines. It stood still and watched me as I began to lose consciousness.

Chapter 2 - Outside the Walls (Elena)

The fire had burned lower behind its iron screen, but I hadn't returned to my chambers. Instead, I walked the outer wall’s worn path, my gloved hands locked behind my back, my boots scraping the same black stone line I had traced through over a hundred sleepless nights. The frost patterns on the high windows had long since stopped resembling ceremonial script, and recently, they had begun to look like warnings I continued to ignore.

I passed my bedchamber door without entering. The ache between my brows was familiar enough that I rubbed at it once, then stopped. 

A sovereign does not acknowledge pain that has no remedy.

Two guards stood at the far end of the battlement. I did not acknowledge them. My silver-gray eyes moved across the tree line with the habitual sweep for threats. The palace rose behind me with its cliff-hewn towers, silver ward-lights pulsing faintly along the battlements, and iron braziers throwing orange heat against a wind that killed it almost immediately. Below, the ice road wound pale and treacherous through the dark pines, and the drop from the wall to the snow-covered base of the cliff was sheer enough to measure a life in seconds.

Then something below broke the pattern.

The translucent spirit of a massive black wolf stood motionless at the cliff's base. It was larger than any natural wolf, which marked it as either a lycan like myself or an apex shapeshifter. It did not pace or snarl; it simply stood over a collapsed human shape in the snow, a sentinel guarding rather than a predator claiming.

My gaze locked on the second shape. The woman was compact, naked and dark-skinned, with her left leg at a wrong angle, and her ribs barely moving. Her breath was almost nothing, a faint ghost of steam rising into frigid air that would kill it before dawn.

The moment my eyes confirmed the woman was dying, the black spirit wolf lifted its head. It looked directly up at the wall—directly at me—and then turned and walked into the tree line, vanishing without looking back. 

I rushed to the nearest guard post and issued a single command: “Open the gate.”

The guard’s half-formed objection died before it left his mouth. A second guard stepped forward, his hand raised in the gesture of a man trained to stop threats but not sovereigns. “Majesty, the woman is unknown. You should not go out alone. I can send a retrieval party—”

“No.”

I walked past him toward the massive, frost-rimed iron gate. It groaned on its hinges as it swung inward, the sound carrying across the silent courtyard like something waking. I stepped through the threshold—the first time in three years I had crossed the palace wall for anything other than a required state ceremony—and the wind hit me full in the face, unmediated by stone.

Snow bit through my boots immediately. The open air above me, the absence of cliff overhead, the sheer exposed distance between the gate and the dying woman below registered in my body as unfamiliar. My hand let go of the gate’s iron frame. One beat. Then I moved forward.

I shifted as I walked, my lycan wolf form rising through me with the controlled precision of long practice. Black-furred and massive, I crossed the deep snow without effort, reached the woman's body, and circled once, reading the damage. There was dark blood stiffening in her coarse curly short hair, and more blood along her ribs and one shoulder. One of her legs was clearly broken, her chest movement was shallow.

I pressed my wolf body against hers to begin transferring heat, then shifted back to human form. I stripped my coat and the upper layers of my clothing with cold efficiency, baring my torso to the killing air, and pulled the woman's body against my bare skin—arms under her back and legs, her dead weight held against my chest. I pressed my fingers to her throat and found her pulse; it was faint and irregular, but it was there.

I carried her myself. The guard who had followed to the gate’s edge reached for her; I said nothing, only looked at him, and he stepped back. When I had passed back through the threshold into the gatehouse’s sheltered interior, I lowered myself to the stone floor with the woman still pressed against my skin, called for blankets in a clipped voice, and counted her breaths while rubbing warmth into her limbs with both hands.

Her body was cold enough that my own heat seemed to vanish into her on contact. I held tighter when she shuddered. 

Then the woman's eyes opened, and they were the amber eyes of a shapeshifter.  They were sharp with raw instinct, with no recognition in them, only threat. She must not have realized in her delirium that she was no longer in her wolf form, because her teeth closed on my forearm, hard and sudden, breaking the skin. I felt it move through me before thought caught up: the bite, the blood, and the living shapeshifter in my arms who would rather wound than risk trusting a stranger.

Chapter 3 - Gilded (Danika)

The smell reached me first—boiled yarrow and copper, something resinous that caught in the back of my throat like smoke. My eyes opened to stone carved so dark it swallowed the silver light pressing against high windows. I lay on linen that smelled of lye and old blood, my ribs bound tight enough to make each breath a calculation, my leg in a cast, and my shoulder thick with padding I couldn’t see. The cold from the mountain still lived in my marrow, a deep ache that the heat from the iron fire bowl nearby couldn’t touch. 

I didn’t know where I was, but I knew I wasn’t alone. A healer in gray robes leaned toward my torso, her hands reaching for the bandage edge.

My body moved before thought caught up. I wrenched sideways off the cot, tearing the dressing loose from my ribs, and my shoulder struck a copper tray on the side table. Scalpels, forceps, and a ceramic jar scattered across the stone with a crash that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. I got one knee under me, lunged for the door, and my ribs and left leg betrayed me entirely. White-hot pain folded me in half, my vision narrowing to a tunnel, and my leg refusing the command to run. I caught myself on the cot frame, gasping through my nose, and swung an elbow into the second healer’s chest as she reached for me. She staggered back with a shocked cry of pain. 

I fixed my gaze on the door. It was iron-bound, but was ward-barred rather than locked, the faint shimmer of active magic across its surface. It was only twelve feet away, fifteen tops, but my body would not answer my command to run. 

A woman stepped in from the left, moving without hurry. She wore captain’s braids, silver at the temples, her body compact and balanced as she closed the distance. I tried to pivot and bring my hands up, but she dropped her weight across my back with the practiced precision of a hardened warrior. One of her arms locked my wrist up and behind, forcing my shoulder to its limit. Her other forearm pressed flat across my shoulders, pinning me against the cot’s edge with a grip that didn’t strain when I twisted, and didn’t shift when I tried to buck. I tested her twice, feeling the geometry of the hold, the placement of her knee against my spine, and the angle that would break my shoulder if I pushed wrong. 

She said nothing; she didn’t need to.

My breath came in short, controlled pulls. I cataloged what I could: the ward-bar on the door, the two healers frozen against the walls, and the instruments scattered across the floor like dropped teeth. My wrist cord—the braided leather from my first pack that was slaughtered when I was sixteen—still sat on my arm, slightly loose where my weight had shifted. That meant they hadn’t stripped me completely and may have missed something.

I stopped fighting, but my body stayed coiled. The captain didn’t release me, but her weight shifted fractionally, enough to let me straighten without standing. I kept my eyes on the door.

The room changed. The healers stepped back without being told. The captain’s grip didn’t loosen, but something in her posture adjusted, a subtle deference that made my skin prickle. I turned my head.

The woman at the foot of the cot wore black formal enough for a funeral, her braids heavy with silver rings that caught the ward-light. Her eyes were the color of winter dawn, moving over me the way I’d seen commanders read terrain before a hunt. Her left sleeve was stiff at the cuff, the fabric darkened where something had pressed through from beneath. I noted it. I also noted that she didn’t favor the arm.

“You are Danika Cruz,” she said in a semi-familiar Slavic accent. “Formerly of the Cruz border pack. You were found three kilometers beyond your territory’s marked boundary, unconscious, with injuries consistent with pack discipline.” She paused, and her voice maintained that same measured precision, each word carrying weight beyond its surface. “I need to know what happened at the spring. I need to know whether you are being pursued, and I need to know whether you present a threat to this palace or its heir. Now”

Something in the phrasing—pursued, not exiled—made my fingers curl once against the cot frame before I released them.

“I don’t bow.” My voice came out rougher than I wanted, the cold still in my throat. “I don’t break. And I don't answer questions posed by someone I do not know, or trust.”

The line landed in the infirmary’s silence. Neither healer moved. The captain’s grip stayed exactly where it was, neither punishing nor gentle. The woman in black looked at me for a long moment—not with anger, not with the warmth of rescue, but with the focused attention of someone recalculating variables she hadn’t anticipated.

Then she spoke, her voice dropping to something more dangerous than volume could achieve: exact, controlled, and devastatingly calm.

“Hmm. Your pack has reported you dead.” She held my gaze as the words sank in, as my breath caught despite my will. “Shall I correct them then?”

Chapter 4 - The Quiet Hours (Danika)

The soft, cool wool sat against my skin beneath linen that smelled of lye and privilege rather than sweat and honest work. I moved down the corridor because stillness had begun to feel like a trap closing. Each step pulled at the bindings wrapped tight around my ribs, and the borrowed nightdress hung loose where my own gear would have pulled taut across my shoulders. 

I didn’t move like a guest, but like what I was—a wolf in foreign territory. I mapped exits and cataloged the silver-threaded mortar between black stones. I noted how the ward-light pulsed in thin veins through the walls and how servants pressed flat against the stone when I passed, their eyes dropping to the floor as if I carried a contagion.

The scents in the palace included beeswax, old fur, woodsmoke from distant hearths, something medicinal underneath, and beneath that, fainter, the foul but familiar scent of a potential bathroom. I had to get a bathroom soon, so I followed the scent, my feet finding paths that angled away from guard posts, toward corners where the ward-light dimmed and the stone grew older, more worn.

Then the crying started.

It was thin and high, and cut through the controlled hush like a blade through water. I’d heard pups cry before from hunger, fear, fever, or the thousand or things that ailed the young. That cry was different. It was exhaustion, the kind that came from crying too long without answer. 

I stopped and listened for footsteps, but none came. No voices rose in response to the cry. A baby alone in a royal stronghold was not oversight. It was breach.

I moved faster, following the sound through corridors that narrowed and turned, my shoulder brushing stone when the passage demanded it despite the pain that flared through the wound beneath my bandages. The crying grew louder and more desperate, hiccupping between screams. I found the door. It was iron-bound like the infirmary door, carved with the same silver crest I’d seen there, standing a finger’s width open. 

No guard. 

No ward-bar.

I pushed through with my uninjured shoulder. The nursery breathed warmth and abandonment. A carved cot sat draped in silver-threaded blankets, and a banked fire threw amber light across walls hung with small ceremonial wolf figures, mouths open in frozen howls. An empty rocking chair sat beside a side table with a feeding bottle cooling on it, condensation beading its glass. A shawl lay on the floor, its wool still holding the shape of someone who’d left mid-task and had not returned.

The baby boy, whom I assumed must be the heir Mihai, lay in the cot, red-faced, fists clenched, his small body shaking with the force of screams that had outlasted his strength. I’d heard the name whispered by servants, attached to the weight that bent Elena’s shoulders when she thought no one watched.

I crossed the room in three strides. I checked him, quick from experience searching for damage in the dark. There was no fever burning his skin, no labored pull of breath, and no injury I could find. He was just a hungry and frightened baby who had been left alone too long. 

I lifted him and tucked his head against my collarbone, taking his weight against my chest despite the white-hot protest from my cracked rib and the deep ache from my wounded shoulder. Either he was lighter than he should have been, or I was stronger than I’d thought. I paced the narrow strip between cot and fire, one hand firm at his back, one supporting his head, feeling his heart flutter against my chest like a trapped bird.

The crying didn’t stop.

I dropped my voice low, rough from disuse. “Easy, pequeño.” The words came without thought, It was my mother’s voice in our Iberian wolf border tongue. Her voice surfaced in my memory after years of silence, the lullaby she’d sung through fevers and cold nights, the one about the wolf who carried the moon between her teeth: “Duerme, lobo pequeño, la luna te guarda...“

Mihai’s cries slowed. His fists unknotted. His damp cheek pressed into the hollow of my collarbone, and his fingers found the collar of my borrowed shirt and gripped it tight. His heartbeat steadied against mine, gradually, like dawn warming stone.

I stopped pacing. The fire popped once, loud in the sudden quiet. The wind pressed against the cliff-side window, carrying the pressure of snow.

Then the door slammed open. The cold flooded the room before the woman they had called "Magesty" crossed the threshold. She smelled like black stone and winter and something older, sharper, the scent of a wolf who’d run hard and fast. She entered without her measured control or ceremonial composure. Her silver-gray eyes altered to mercury-bright, her royal lycan wolf close to the surface, snapping to Mihai first, then to my face, then to my hands holding her son.

Her breath stopped.

Her right hand was suddenly closed around my throat, firm and shaking faintly, her sleeve was pulled low over the bandage beneath. Her hand had a pale binding-ritual scar on it, and her long fingers were cold enough that I felt it like a brand against my skin.

I did not drop Mihai or step back. I stood with the heir pressed against my chest and his queen mother’s hand at my throat.

I went completely still and stayed still while the queen took her heir from my arms while her fingers were clamped around my neck.

* * * End of Preview * * *

Thank you for reading the preview of BOOK 2: THE QUEEN OF WOLVES!

To read the remaining 156 chapters of this fully completed novel, you can follow the story on your choice of premium platforms:

• Read it on GoodNovel: [Link TBA]

• Read it on AlphaNovel: [Link TBA]

• Read it on MoboReader: [Link TBA]

• Read it on MegaNovel/HopWriter: [Link TBA]

• Read it on Webnovel/Inkstone: [Link TBA]

Your support through coins on these official apps directly helps me keep writing!

Thank you! ~ Roxy Nyx