No possession.
Only the certainty that a light had gone out at the heart of the clan.
And he had not been powerful enough to keep it burning.
* * *
By morning, the compound felt like a mausoleum wearing the shape of a home.
The corridors that usually breathed with movement and quiet conversation had fallen silent. Even the firelight looked wrong—too warm for what it could not repair.
The brothers moved through the stronghold like shadows with teeth.
All that power.
Nowhere to put it.
Cole became the clan’s spine because someone had to.
He stood in the main room with his jaw set and his hands locked behind his back, issuing provisional instructions in a voice held steady through force of will.
“We prepare for sundown tomorrow,” he said. “Nothing is announced and nothing begins until Sule approves it.”
Dax nodded, his eyes raw.
“The inner grounds?”
“Only,” Cole said. “Family and those she trusted. No crowd while the wards are compromised.”
Dax rubbed one thumb repeatedly over the ring on his finger as though trying to wear down a thought that kept cutting him.
“I’ll prepare the grounds. Nothing cheap. Nothing careless.”
Malakai remained near the window, staring into the gray morning with a stillness that was not calm.
He had barely signed since the blood.
Silence sat over him like armor—too tight and too heavy—but none of them forced words from him.
In the adjoining nursery, Mary and the birth medic tended the heir. His cries had faded into intermittent, exhausted sounds.
The child had lost his mother before he had been given a name.
No one in the room said it aloud.
* * *
Before dawn, Sule had finally allowed Mary and the birth medic to wash the blood from Leena’s body, dress her in white, and replace the ruined linens.
He had not left while they worked.
He had watched every movement, correcting the fall of her hair and the placement of her hands as though preparing her perfectly might make this something other than death.
Now he sat beside the bed, her hand held between both of his.
It had cooled fully.
The warmth he had chased through the long night was gone, replaced by a stillness too complete to feel real.
