SERAPHINA’S POV

Lucian’s retreating figure did not fade from my mind.

Even after the forest swallowed him and the delay trap loosened its invisible grip, even after Brett’s furious snarls dissolved into raw silence, I still saw him.

The tension in his shoulders as he forced himself away.

The haunted look in his eyes.

The way he had hesitated.

That was the part that burned the deepest.

Not his betrayal. Not even the fact that he had helped Thomas escape.

But that hesitation...

That hesitation meant that somewhere beneath Catherine’s shackle, beneath Marcus’ influence, beneath whatever poison had been layered over his will, the man I had once known was there. He had heard me.

He had stopped.

For one impossible second, he had almost come back.

And then he had chosen—or had been forced—to leave.

By the time we returned to Nightfang, my wild emotions had condensed into something cold, sharp, and dangerous.

The convoy swept through the gates under the hard white glare of security lights, tires hissing across the stone drive as guards moved into position around us. No one spoke much.

Brett looked like he had aged ten years in one night.

His jaw was so tightly clenched I wondered how his teeth had not cracked. His eyes stayed fixed ahead as if some part of him was still in the forest, watching Thomas disappear again and again.

Kieran sat beside me in the back seat, his presence solid and silent, but I could feel the attention he kept trained on me.

His hand covered mine, a quiet anchor.

I turned my palm upward and intertwined our fingers, keeping my eyes focused ahead without meeting his gaze.

If I looked at him, if I let myself sink even briefly into the safety of him, I was afraid I would crack open and not be able to put myself back together again.

As soon as the cars stopped, I pushed the door open myself and stepped out before the guard could reach me.

The night air pressed against my face, dry and cool, carrying the faint scent of dust, stone, and the distant ocean beyond Los Angeles.

Nightfang’s main house rose ahead of us, all dark glass and sharp shadows, its windows glowing like watchful eyes against the black sky.

“Where is the puppet?” I asked.

Corin, who had just climbed out of the second vehicle, paused with his hand still on the door. His gaze flicked to Kieran first, then back to me.

“Sera,” he said carefully.

“Where. Is. It?”

Kieran moved to my side. “Do you think now is a good time?”

“Now is a fantastic time.”

Corin stared at me for a long moment, and I knew he saw it, the need to do something with the restlessness boiling under my skin before I exploded.

He exhaled through his nose.

“The dungeon,” he said at last.

I was already walking.

Nightfang’s lower levels had always been cold, but tonight the chill seemed to crawl beneath my skin with purpose.

The puppet had been secured in one of the reinforced interrogation rooms near the eastern wing of the lower level.

Corin and Brett had captured it during the shipment raid, along with crates of concentrated wolfsbane and medical equipment that still made my stomach turn when I thought about it.

He sat strapped to a steel chair bolted to the floor, wrists bound with cuffs and ankles locked into heavy restraints.

His head hung forward, dark hair falling across a face too still to look asleep and too alive to be dead. His skin carried a grayish undertone, and faint scars climbed the side of his neck in thin, deliberate lines.

Not battle scars.

Surgical ones.

My hands curled into fists.

Alois stood in the corner with two monitors beside him, his expression grim behind his glasses.

“His vitals have remained stable. No significant response to verbal commands since arrival.”

“Has he spoken?” I asked.

“Not a word.”

I moved closer to the puppet.

Kieran’s hand caught my wrist before I reached the chair.

I looked back at him.

His eyes searched mine, and for one quiet moment, the room around us vanished beneath the weight of all the things he did not say.

Do not let this hurt you.

Do not go somewhere I cannot follow.

“I’m here,” he said softly.

My throat tightened, but I nodded and turned back to face the puppet.

I placed my fingers against his temple and flinched.

His skin was frigid.

He lifted his head, and his eyes met mine. Empty, just like Aaron’s had first been.

A shiver moved up my arm, not from temperature, but from the wrongness beneath it.

Before I could second-guess the merit of this idea, I dived in.

His mind did not open like Celeste’s had earlier, raw and frightened and desperate for release.

It did not rise to meet me like Aaron’s, fragmented but still alive beneath layers of pain.

This mind was a locked room inside a locked room inside a sealed grave.

The first touch of it was darkness.

Then pain.

Then static.

I drew a breath through my nose and pushed deeper.

The world around me fell away, and I stood in a corridor made of fractured memory.

White walls stretched endlessly on either side, flickering in and out as if the mind could not decide whether to preserve them or erase them entirely.

Overhead lights buzzed with a sickly hum. The floor was slick, though when I looked down, there was nothing there.

“Hello?” I called.

My voice echoed strangely, warping at the edges.

A shape moved at the far end of the corridor.

I turned toward it.

The puppet stood there, but not as he appeared in the interrogation room. Here, he looked younger. Healthier.

His eyes were still empty, but his face had not yet taken on that gray, lifeless cast. A memory of the person he had been before Catherine reduced him to a tool.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

His mouth moved, but no sound came out.

I stepped closer, and the corridor flickered.

Suddenly, black lines shot across the walls like veins, spreading fast, crawling toward me with a sharp, insectile whisper.

A pressure slammed into my chest, and I staggered back, teeth gritting as the force tried to drive me out.

Another one of Catherine’s cleverly constructed blocks.

Fuck. That.

I pushed back.

The black veins pulsed, and the corridor shifted violently.

Images flashed around me in broken fragments.

A metal table.

Hands strapped down.

A woman’s voice, calm and pleased, murmuring, “Again.”

A scream cut off halfway through.

A needle sliding into the base of a neck.

A symbol burned into skin.

Then darkness.

The force hit again, harder this time, and I felt my body somewhere far away inhale sharply. Kieran’s voice reached me as if through water, saying my name.

I held on.

The puppet’s memory-self remained at the end of the corridor, motionless, his empty eyes fixed on me.

“What,” I gritted out, “is your name?”

The corridor buckled.

Pain lanced through my skull, bright and vicious. My vision blurred, but I forced myself onward.

The restraints recoiled and struck again, trying to bury the answers beneath static, trying to collapse the corridor before I could reach him.

I thought of the hesitation in Lucian’s eyes in the forest.

I thought of Celeste hiding in my closet like a frightened child.

I thought of Aaron’s empty eyes.

I thought of the long list of wolves the Alphas had submitted, wolves Catherine had taken, emptied, revived, and leashed.

Something inside me went very still.

Then it burned.

Power surged through me, no longer a careful thread, no longer a cautious hand reaching through a damaged mind.

It rose like silver fire, fierce and blinding, spilling from the center of me into the corridor until the white walls glowed with it.

The black veins writhed. And snapped.

A psychic recoil tore through the corridor, and the puppet’s memory-self jerked as if invisible chains had been ripped from his spine.

“You are not hers,” I said, my voice carrying through the corridor with a force that made the lights explode overhead one by one.

“You are not Marcus’. You are not a weapon. You are nobody’s puppet.”

The puppet’s memory-self trembled.

His empty eyes flickered. Brown.

That tiny human detail nearly broke something in me.

I closed the last of the distance between us and pressed my palm to his chest.

“Listen to me,” I said. “If there is anything left of you, anything at all, follow my voice.”

The darkness convulsed around us.

For a heartbeat, I felt Catherine’s restraint try to clamp down again, vicious and absolute, but my anger met it head-on.

This time, I did not slip around it like in Celeste’s mind. I did not search for a weak point.

I crushed it.

The corridor shattered, and the world became a storm of broken images.

A loading dock at night.

A black van.

Wolfsbane packed in sealed crates.

A distorted voice barking orders.

A room with concrete floors.

A man laughing as he counted cash.

Jack.

The name came with the image so sharply that I seized onto it.

Jack had handled movement. Supplies.

Temporary holding.

A hideout.

I followed the thread.

The storm pulled me sideways, and suddenly I was standing inside a memory that smelled of oil, stale beer, and damp concrete.

The impression came in fragments rather than detail.

Jack’s voice brushed past me, distant and indifferent. “Just keep them breathing until transport.”

Another voice—uneasy. “And if one wakes up?”

A snort. “Then you make sure they wish they hadn’t.”

The memory trembled under the surge of my anger, threatening to collapse entirely.

I tightened my hold.

“Where?” I demanded. “Show me.”

The answer came as direction—a point on the map that burned itself into my awareness.

The puppet’s mind began to collapse inward, exhausted by the force of what I had taken from it.

I came back to myself with a sharp inhale.

For a second, nothing made sense.

My hand was still pressed to the puppet’s temple, my fingers trembling against his cold skin, but everything else—

Kieran stood behind me, his hand halfway lifted as though he had meant to reach for me and never finished the motion.

Corin was frozen mid-step.

Alois’s gaze was fixed on the monitor, unreadable, unblinking.

Maya was gripping Ethan’s arm, her fingers curled into his sleeve as though anchoring herself to something solid.

Brett was locked in place, his expression caught somewhere between fury and something far more fragile.

Even the puppet sat motionless in the chair, head tilted slightly toward me, those newly human brown eyes staring blankly ahead.

"Guys?"

No one moved.

No one spoke.

My breath sounded too loud in the silence.

And slowly, with a creeping, ice-cold certainty that settled deep beneath my ribs, I realized...

They weren’t just still.

They were frozen.

What had I done?