MARGARET’S POV

For a moment, I thought my mind had finally broken.

It would have made sense. There was only so much the mind could endure before it conjured ghosts.

That’s what this had to be. Because the person kneeling before me did not look like Tobias Brighton.

At least, not at first glance.

His hair was longer and darker, pinned beneath a faded scarf in a style typical of the island’s older female staff.

A loose caretaker’s uniform softened the shape of his shoulders and hid the breadth of his frame. His skin had been subtly altered with cosmetics—his jaw shaded differently, his mouth held in a smaller, quieter line.

Even his scent was wrong, buried beneath antiseptic, salt, detergent, and the faint bitter trace of herbs used in the servants’ quarters.

But no disguise could change his eyes.

Storm-gray, steady, and old with knowing.

Nothing could hide the way he looked at me as though he had once seen me at the beginning of all this—before Catherine, before the seal, before the years had taken our choices and turned them into consequences.

His fingers tightened around my wrists, not painfully, but firmly enough to keep me anchored.

“Not so loud,” he whispered.

I stared at him, my breath trapped in my chest as my mind fought to pull itself together.

“You’re real,” I breathed.

A faint, humorless smile touched his mouth. “In a matter of speaking.”

My knees weakened, and I might have collapsed if he had not shifted closer, one hand moving from my wrist to my elbow to steady me.

“How?” I asked. “How are you here?”

His gaze flicked toward the open door, then back to me. “I can’t stay long enough to explain everything.”

“Then explain enough.”

Tobias studied my face, and for a second, something like regret crossed his eyes.

“I tried to find you as soon as I heard you were here,” he said, voice low and urgent. “It wasn’t until you agreed to cooperate that they relaxed certain protocols around your holding pattern because they believed they’d broken you enough to control you. That gave me the opening I needed. Unfortunately, reaching you took longer than it should have.”

My breath left me slowly.

My cooperation. The performance I hated myself for.

At least it had not been wasted.

"You’re here now," I whispered.

His jaw tightened, and, through the disguise and the altered scent and the impossible circumstances, I saw the man I knew years ago.

The man who had argued against Catherine when the rest of us had been too frightened and too desperate to think clearly.

The man who had looked at Sera not as a disaster waiting to happen, but as a child in need of guidance.

Oh, how different things might have been if we’d trusted him instead of the devil.

He must have seen the flash of pain and regret in my expression, because his grip tightened before I could pull away.

“Margaret—”

“You were right,” I choked out.

“About Sera. About the seal. About Catherine.” My voice trembled despite every effort to steady it. “You were right, and we didn’t listen.”

Tobias closed his eyes, as if the words hurt him more than they vindicated him.

“When people are afraid,” he said, opening them again, “they often choose the hand promising control over the one asking for trust."

A faint sound escaped me, not quite a laugh and not quite a sob. “That is a very generous way to describe our stupidity.”

“No,” he said softly. “It is an accurate way to describe Catherine’s manipulation.”

My eyes burned.

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. There were too many emotions pressing against my chest, too many questions crowding my tongue.

Where had he been? How had he entered Catherine’s facility? Who was helping him? Did he know about Edward?

“Listen to me, Margaret,” Tobias said. “You need to stay alive.”

The words were quiet, but they landed with the force of an order.

“I mean it,” he pressed. “Whatever Catherine shows you, whatever she threatens, whatever she uses against you, you stay alive.”

My mouth twisted bitterly. “She has Edward.”

“I know.”

My eyes widened.

“You know?”

His eyes darkened.

“I have seen enough to understand what she is attempting.” His voice lowered further. “And I know enough to tell you that dying now will not protect anyone from her.”

“She wants my wolf,” I said, the words scraping out of me.

“I know.”

“She already took my psychic power. She used it for years. She used it on Edward. She wants Sylvia now to finish whatever monstrosity she’s building.”

“Then do not give her Sylvia,” he said.

A broken laugh slipped from me. “You say that as though willingness has ever stopped Catherine.”

“No,” he replied, and there was a hardness beneath the calm now. “But resistance changes the shape of a ritual. Consent changes the channel through which power is drawn. Catherine knows that, or she would have already ripped whatever remains of your wolf out of you by force.”

I stared at him, my pulse beginning to pound.

“She needs me to agree.”

“She needs enough of you to yield,” he said. “That is not the same thing, but it is close enough that you must be careful.”

The room seemed to tilt from the sudden, terrible rearrangement of my understanding.

Catherine’s smiles. Her coaxing. Her promise of reunion. Her use of Edward as temptation instead of torture.

My hand curled into a fist.

“I almost let her win,” I hissed, a wave of shame washing over me.

“Almost.”

The sharpness in his tone brought me back to the present, to the open door, to the corridor beyond, to the impossible danger of him kneeling in front of me as if time belonged to us.

I swallowed and forced myself to straighten. My body still trembled, but the terrible clarity that had driven me toward death began to shift, reshaping itself into something colder and more useful.

“What do you need from me?”

Approval flickered through Tobias’ eyes.

“Survive,” he said. “Observe. Do not challenge Catherine openly again unless you have no choice. Let her believe you are shaken, grieving, unstable, if that keeps her careless. But do not agree to any ritual involving Sylvia. Not in words. Not in silence if silence is framed as consent.”

My blood chilled.

“Can she do that?”

“Catherine can twist almost anything if the subject is weak enough.”

I hated that answer. Hated the possibility of being considered weak.

Footsteps echoed somewhere beyond the corridor, distant but approaching.

Tobias stiffened for a moment before he slipped back into the slumped shape of the caretaker whose uniform he wore.

“I have to go,” he said.

I reached for him instinctively, my hand catching his sleeve. “Tobias.”

He looked back at me.

There were so many things I wanted to ask, so many pieces of the past clawing for space between us, but there was no room for any of them. Not here. Not now.

So I asked the only question that mattered.

“Can you get me—us—out?”

A faint smile touched his mouth, dry and fleeting.

“I have been getting out of places I should never have entered for longer than Catherine has been pretending to be a god.”

Despite everything, a breath resembling amusement escaped me.

Then his expression softened.

“I will find a way out,” he promised. “And when I do, you need to still be here.”

I looked at him, at the disguise, at the eyes that had survived years and secrets and whatever path had brought him into the heart of Catherine’s nightmare.

For the first time since seeing Edward behind the glass, the urge to die loosened its grip.

Not because the pain had lessened.

Not because hope had returned in full.

But because somewhere within these walls, someone was moving against Catherine.

And I was not entirely alone.

TOBIAS’ POV

The corridor outside Margaret’s cell smelled of damp stone, disinfectant, and fear.

I kept my head lowered as I stepped out, letting my shoulders fold into the smaller posture I had spent months perfecting.

A tired caretaker—a woman past youth, plain enough to be ignored, useful enough to be permitted in unpleasant places, invisible enough to survive in the seams of Catherine’s empire.

That was the disguise that had allowed me to walk past guards who would have torn out my throat if they knew who I was.

Behind me, the lock slid back into place, sealing Margaret inside.

Every instinct in me rebelled at the sound.

I wanted to turn around. I wanted to break the mechanism, drag her out, fight through every corridor with claws and teeth and whatever blood remained in my veins after all these years of running from ghosts that had finally found me again.

But wanting was not how men survived, and I had not lived this long by replacing strategy with emotion.

So I walked.

Slowly.

The woman I was pretending to be had no reason to hurry from the lower cells. She had performed a routine check, perhaps changed a basin, perhaps delivered sedatives, perhaps done any number of small tasks that made cruelty efficient.

A guard glanced at me as I passed.

I kept my eyes down and did nothing else. Overacting was how most disguises failed.

He looked away.

Only when I turned the corner did I allow myself to breathe.

Margaret had looked worse than I had prepared myself for.

I had expected anger. Grief. The sharp, composed Luna I remembered from Frostbane.

I had not expected to find her moments from ending her own life.

The image of her hand lifting toward the table’s edge followed me down the corridor, and for a few seconds, the disguise felt too tight, the scarf too hot, the borrowed skin too thin.

A service door waited at the end of the hall, marked with a faded maintenance symbol. I pushed through it into a narrower passage lined with pipes and humming cables.

The facility Catherine had built beneath the resort was more extensive than one would think, layered like a buried city beneath luxury, secrecy, and blood.

I moved through it by memory now.

Three turns. One camera blind spot. Twelve steps along the wall where the floor panel creaked if stepped on too heavily. Pause at the steam valve. Wait for the security sweep to shift. Continue.

The changing room sat two levels above, tucked behind the laundry service corridor. It was one of the few places in the facility where faces blurred by design.

Staff came and went in shifts, changing clothes, washing blood from their sleeves, complaining about wages, pretending not to know what was happening around them.

I entered quickly and shut the door behind me, sagging against it as the weight of pretense lifted.

The relief was brief.

“You’ve either lost your mind,” a woman’s voice said from within the room, “or you’ve decided death would be a refreshing change of pace.”