Chapter 36. The Treason Pact

Lyssa was violently shoved into a small, stone square of a chamber, where the door shuddered closed, bolted with harsh, final certainty. The air in the cell was thin and tasted of stale fear. She didn’t fall, bracing herself against the impact of the heavy oak. She didn’t spare a moment to weep over the shackles that chafed her wrists or the raw grief that lined her face. Grief was a luxury she could not afford. She had just seen the one thing she feared and hoped for above all else: her daughter, Ismeria, alive but caged.

The image of the silver wolf, rigid and drugged, chained to the dungeon floor, was burned behind her eyelids. The Moonblooded child, destined to be revered, reduced to a monster in irons. The irony was a bitter burn in her throat.

For six years, she and Raymond had walked Magnus’s line, enduring every slight and every silence, clinging to the fading memory of their child, desperately hoping she had simply vanished to freedom. But no. She had merely bee