'How quickly things shifted.'

'How quickly things shifted.'
The ceremonial hall was packed with bodies, the air so warm it pressed against my skin and stifled my breath. Wolves moved in slow, aimless currents—some picking at food they didn’t want, others pacing as though motion alone might keep the grief from swallowing them whole. No one knew what to do. No one knew what came next. We were all just… waiting.

The light strings overhead glittered with a cheerfulness that felt cruel, their brightness cutting through the heaviness in the room like an insult to all we’d lost. Dominic and the warriors he’d brought tried to help—passing out plates, offering quiet words, pretending there was still something normal left to hold on to. But even their efforts felt thin, like fabric stretched too far over a wound that refused to close.

“Come, Luna. Sit with us.” Juniper’s voice reached me through a fog, and I followed it without thought, lowering myself onto one of the benches that had been set up during my absence. The plates around the table sat half-full. It seemed I wasn't the only one unable to stomach much since the battle.

“You need to eat, Tyr.” Willow nudged a plate toward me, her eyes soft but insistent. The smell of food hit me like a blow. My stomach twisted sharply, bile rising in my throat, and I shook my head before she could push further.

“It’s been six days; your body cannot continue to function without food.”

She was right. I knew she was right. But knowing didn’t change the hollow ache inside me, the way every breath scraped against the raw place where hope used to live. My appetite—my will—had been torn away the moment the twins failed to wake.

A silence settled around us, heavy and trembling with unspoken sentiments. I stared at the untouched plate, the colors blurring as my vision burned with fresh tears.

Six days. Six days of waiting for a miracle that never came. Six days of pretending I could still feel them through the bond, when all I felt was an echo fading into nothing.

The hall buzzed with low conversation, but beneath it pulsed a deeper sound—fear, sorrow, the quiet unraveling of a pack that didn’t know how to mourn Alphas who weren’t dead—but weren’t alive either. Every face I saw carried the same question I couldn’t bear to voice.

What if they never open their eyes again?

My throat tightened. The world felt unsteady, as if one wrong breath might shatter it entirely. I pressed my palms to my knees, grounding myself in the faint tremor of my own hands.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I whispered, unsure if I meant the waiting, the breathing, or the unbearable not‑knowing.

Juniper’s hand found my back, warm and steady, but even that comfort felt distant.

Somewhere across the hall, a child laughed, and the sound cracked through me like a bolt of lightning. I couldn’t blame the child. Children are so often oblivious to the woes of adults. But still, it hurt. Life went on around us, indifferent to the pieces of my own life lying motionless in our healer’s beds.

And for the first time since this nightmare began, a thought surfaced that terrified me more than anything else.

What if I’m already grieving them? What if this is what it feels like to lose someone slowly?

I’d take the permanence of death over this—hanging by a thread of hope, clinging to ‘what-ifs’. The uncertainty was a blade, and it cut deeper than any truth ever could, leaving me raw and broken in its wake.

“Tyranni?”

My name drifted through the haze like a sound remembered from a dream--from another life. I turned before I understood why, pulled by instinct more than awareness.

Riley Haven stood a few paces away, his warm brown eyes carrying that soft, unbearable mixture of sympathy and worry. Everyone had been looking at me that way. He held a steaming mug between his hands, one that he extended to me. The offering was not the thing that pierced through the numbness that had wrapped itself around me for nearly a week.

It was the people standing behind him.

Beth. Kellen. Violet. Their faces were carved with the same grief that had hollowed me out. Matching somber expressions. Shadows under their eyes. Injuries that were nearly healed. My old pack—once almost friends, once almost family. Seeing them there felt like touching a bruise I’d forgotten was still tender, bittersweet and painful all at once.

My hands reached for the mug before my mind caught up, fingers closing around the heat as if it were the only solid thing left in the world.

“If there’s anything we can do…” Violet said, her voice gentler than I’d ever heard it, as though even sound itself might shatter me.

“Thank you,” I murmured. The words scraped out of a throat gone dry from crying and silence. My voice felt as empty as my chest. “How—how many did you lose?”

The question surprised even me; it was the first time my thoughts had stretched beyond the twins, beyond the echoing ache of my own loss.

Riley’s jaw tightened. “Almost two dozen.”

Two dozen. The number hit hard. Nearly half the pack’s trained warriors—gone. Snuffed out in a single night. Our pack had always been skilled, but small. Too small to stand against Levi. Too small to survive what he’d unleashed.

I lifted the mug and took a halfhearted sip. The broth burned my tongue, but the warmth slid down my throat and settled in my stomach like a fragile promise that my body still remembered how to live. How to function. Even if my mind didn’t.

“Thank you,” I whispered again, softer this time, relieved when the warmth stayed down instead of rising back up like everything else I’d attempted to eat in the last few days.

Around us, the silence thickened—shared, heavy, reverent. The kind of silence that forms only in the aftermath of losing too many people you never thought you’d have to live without. Beth shifted uncomfortably behind Riley, her hand clinging to Kellen's bicep. It was bizarre to think that she'd been my best friend only seven months before. How quickly things shifted. I was proof of that. So were the twins.

“You’re more than welcome to stay as long as you like,” I finally told them, forcing the corners of my mouth upward as I broke the tense silence. The smile was strained at best, but it was all I could muster. “If you need anything at all, just let Alpha Dominic or Luna Daphne know,” I added, gesturing to the couple across the hall.

Riley nodded, reaching out to squeeze my elbow, before they all moved on, leaving me alone in my misery once more.