Irina’s POV

The world had gone quiet.

Every sound, every sensation, every thought—all of it just *cut off,* like someone had reached in and pulled the plug.

And then.

White.

---

It was everywhere.

Not blinding. Soft, somehow. Like light filtered through fog, through something gauzy and thick that didn’t let you see too far in any direction. My feet were on something solid—grass, I thought, actual grass, cool and real under my shoes—but the sky was white and the air was white and everything at the edges of my vision blurred into white like the world had simply decided to stop having edges.

Flowers everywhere.

That was the next thing I noticed. They were all over the ground. Every kind, every color—pale pink and deep violet and gold and white. They grew in clusters between the grass like someone had scattered them by hand and then let them do what they wanted. The air smelled like all of them at once, and it should have been overwhelming, too much, a sensory assault.

It wasn’t.

It was—strange. Calm in a way that made my chest ache, because I didn’t trust calm, hadn’t trusted it in a long time.

I stood there.

*How did I get here.*

I turned around. Once, slowly. Looking for—something. A door. A corridor. The medical wing. Nadia’s face, the examination table, the way the room had tilted when I’d tried to stand.

Nothing.

Just fog. And flowers. And white in every direction.

*Maxim.*

The word hit me like a physical thing. Maxim breaking free. The sound of the shift happening—that wet, horrible crack. The moment where every calculation had happened too fast and my body had moved before I’d finished thinking.

Nicolas.

I’d been watching Nicolas.

Where—

"Nicolas?"

My voice came out smaller than I expected. It got swallowed up immediately, absorbed by the fog, by the thick white air. Like the sound couldn’t travel here the way it was supposed to.

I waited.

Nothing.

"*Nicolas.*"

Louder. More desperate. The specific desperation of someone who’d just found out they had something to lose and was currently not sure where it was.

The fog gave me back my own voice. An echo that felt wrong—too hollow, too empty. No one else’s footsteps. No movement in the mist. Just the flowers and the impossible white sky and the silence pressing down on all of it.

He wasn’t here.

That thought landed harder than I expected.

I started walking.

I didn’t know where. There wasn’t a where, exactly—no visible path, no landmark, nothing to navigate by. But standing still felt worse than moving, and I’d always been better at moving. Even in the pack house, when everything else had been stripped away, the ability to *move* had felt like the only thing left that was mine.

I walked.

Called his name twice more. Three times. My voice bouncing back at me every time like the air here was made of the wrong material.

I pushed through a cluster of flowers that came up past my knees. Found more fog on the other side. Kept going.

*You’re in a cell. In his building.*

My own voice in my head. What I’d said to Maxim. The moment in that cell when something had changed—some equation had finally resolved itself and I’d looked at him, at everything he was behind those bars, and I’d understood.

I’d understood something about what I was choosing.

But choosing something and trusting it were different things. I’d been standing in that great hall because I’d chosen it, stood on that platform and watched the proceedings because Nicolas had asked me to be there and I’d said yes. And Maxim had looked at me across the room and I’d watched his wrists and I’d thought *he’s been working at those cuffs—*

I stopped walking.

A sound.

Not my voice. Not an echo. Something else—from somewhere ahead, from inside the fog, from a direction that the fog made impossible to determine.

My name.

Not Nicolas’s voice.

Different. Lower. Quieter. Not a human voice—or not *only* a human voice. Something layered in it that I didn’t have words for. Something that resonated in the back of my skull like a frequency I’d forgotten I could hear.

I held still.

*Irina.*

Closer now.

Something moved in the fog.

A figure. Seated. I could just make it out—white clothing, pale and still against the pale ground, sitting in the center of a small open space where the flowers were densest and the fog had pulled back enough to let me see.

I crossed toward it.

---

She was sitting in the grass with her legs folded beneath her and her hands open in her lap and her face turned up toward nothing, toward the white sky, like she was waiting.

She looked—

She looked like someone who had been waiting for a very long time and was not surprised that the waiting was finally ending.

Her face was calm. Not blank—not the way I’d trained myself to be blank, not the managed stillness of someone keeping everything shut down. This was the other kind. The kind that came from somewhere deeper.

She looked at me when I got close, and her expression went through something complicated—grief and relief and something that might have been love, the non-specific kind, the kind that doesn’t belong to a single person.

I stopped a few feet away.

*Be polite,* I thought, which was such a stupid, automatic thought that I almost laughed. *Be polite. You’ve been dropped into a fog meadow with an unknown woman in white and your first instinct is manners.*

"Excuse me," I said. And then, because I genuinely didn’t know anything else to say: "Do you know where we are?"

She tilted her head. Smiled. Something sad in it.

"My child," she said. "We finally meet."

I looked at her.

"I think you have the wrong person," I said. "I’m sorry. My father never—" I stopped. *My father.* Mikhail in his cell. *You’re my blood.* "I mean—we haven’t met before. I don’t think."

She shook her head. Gently. The way you shake your head at a child who’s made an understandable mistake.

"Of course we have," she said. "Not like this. But I have known you since before you were born, Irina. I know every wolf I’ve made."