DARKHOWLER – ONE HOUR BEFORE EXECUTION

Agnes barely made it to the basin.

The bile came without warning, acidic and vicious, her body folding over the marble rim. Her knuckles went white against the stone. Her throat burned. Her eyes watered, and the tears were chemical, involuntary, carrying none of the emotion she was saving for later.

She waited until the spasms stopped. Counted to ten. Splashed water on her face with hands that were steady because Agnes Viremont’s hands were always steady, even when the rest of her was falling apart from the inside.

The timing of the message had been surgical. Twenty minutes. Enough to arrive, too little to plan. How her father knew Garrett was gone, how he knew she was alone, how the information reached her at all, she refused to examine. Reginald Viremont had intelligence networks the way other men had hobbies, and the methods were always deniable and the results were always precise.

She pulled a cloak from the hook behind the door. Dark. Nondescript. The kind of garment a future queen wore when she was doing things a queen should never be doing, which was a category Agnes had been living in since the day she took a mark she was using as a weapon and discovered it had become the only honest thing about her.

The corridor was empty. She moved through it the way she moved through every corridor in Darkhowler: with the memorized confidence of a woman who had mapped every guard rotation, every blind spot, every three-minute window where the eastern passage went unwatched because the shift change overlapped with the kitchen delivery.

Garrett would have been proud of the tradecraft. Garrett would also have been furious about the reason for it, which was why Garrett would never know.

The passage emptied into a clearing she recognized. The same clearing. The same trees. The same mineral smell of dark soil and old roots. The sun was barely visible in the afternoon sky, a pale sliver that offered neither light nor opinion.

Her father was already there.

He was never alone.

Two men flanked him, both wearing cloaks that matched the forest so precisely they could have been part of it. A third stood further back, hands at his sides. A mage holding a ward. The formation was escort. The formation was also containment.

Agnes stopped at the edge of the treeline. Every instinct she possessed told her to turn around. Every obligation she carried told her to keep walking.

She kept walking.

“Father.”

“Agnes.” Reginald Viremont looked at his daughter the way he always looked at his daughter: as an instrument he had built and was checking for damage. “You look unwell.”

“I am fine.”

His eyes moved over her, clinical and thorough, and whatever he was calculating behind them, he kept. His hands were clasped behind his back.

“Your time playing Darkhowler’s mate is finished.”

The words landed on her chest and stayed there.

“I need you elsewhere, Agnes. The window is closing. Garrett Darkhowler has served his purpose, and your presence inside his walls has served mine. What comes next requires you in a different position, and the repositioning begins tonight.”

Agnes felt her jaw lock. The muscles in her neck tightened in a sequence she recognized, the sequence that preceded the version of herself that said yes to her father and carried out the assignment and buried the cost somewhere she would never have to look at it.

The sequence completed. The word did not follow.

“I am staying with Garrett.”

Reginald’s expression held for one full second. The second was longer than it should have been, because Reginald Viremont processed defiance the way other men processed insults: immediately, completely, and with a plan for correction already forming before the sentence finished landing.

“That was an instruction, Agnes. It was never a choice.”

“It is now.”

“You are confused. The matebond is making you sentimental, and sentiment is a liability I trained out of you before you could walk. Whatever you think you feel for that boy is manufactured by biology. It will pass.”

Agnes looked at her father. She looked at the two men flanking him. She looked at the mage in the back, whose hands had moved from his sides to a position that was fractionally more active than it had been thirty seconds ago.

“I already made my choice, Father. I made it a long time ago.”

His nostril twitched. The single tell he had never been able to eliminate, the one flaw in an otherwise impenetrable performance. She had catalogued it at age twelve and had been reading it since.

“What did you do, Father?”

The question came out carrying a frequency she had never aimed at him before. Protective. Territorial. A woman whose wolf was pressing against the surface because the man standing in front of her had just threatened the perimeter of a life she was building, and the wolf understood threat in a language that predated every manipulation Reginald Viremont had ever deployed.

He did not answer.

Agnes’s nostrils flared. The scent hit her a second later, faint, threaded beneath the pine and the soil, carrying a chemical signature she had learned to identify during her weeks as a spy inside Darkhowler’s walls. The signature belonged to a substance that should not have been in this clearing, in these trees, anywhere near the man she loved or the castle she was protecting.

“What did you do?”

Silence.

The mage behind her father raised both hands. A portal tore open at the edge of the clearing, its surface dark, rippling, carrying none of the gold warmth of mage portals and all of the cold that came with connections made through channels that decent people avoided.

“I need you elsewhere, daughter. That is all.”

Agnes made her decision in the space between one heartbeat and the next. The decision was fast because it was old. She had been making it every morning when she woke up beside Garrett and chose to stay, every evening when she crawled back into his bed and chose to lie beside him instead of lying to him, every time she returned to this clearing and lied to her father. She chose her mate over the mission.

The choice had been made months ago. She was just saying it out loud for the first time.

She ran.

Agnes Viremont turned and sprinted toward the treeline with every ounce of speed her body possessed, her cloak tearing on a branch, her boots digging into the soft earth, her wolf surging with a fury that said mine, mine, mine, and the mine was a man who would tear this forest apart if he found her missing.

Behind her, two sets of boots hit the ground.

“Retrieve her,” Reginald’s voice ordered, carrying zero urgency, zero anger, and absolute certainty.

The mage’s hands lit.

Agnes cleared the first line of trees. The second was forty yards ahead. The castle wall was beyond that, and if she could reach the patrol line, if she could get within mindlink range of a single guard, if her wolf could carry her faster than the men behind her could follow, she would make it.

Twenty yards.

The portal expanded behind her. She heard it grow, the sound of dark edges widening, the specific hum of a passage being stretched to accommodate a body that was running from it.

Ten yards.

Her hand went to the place below her ribs, instinctive, protective, pressing against the thing she had told nobody about, the thing that was the size of a heartbeat and carried half of Garrett’s blood and all of her terror.

Five yards.

The treeline was right there.