Nobody saw the pollen coming. That was the thing about airborne truth serum disguised as plant reproduction. It didn’t announce itself. It just drifted in, settled on the tongue, and ruined lives.

Gavriel blinked. Pupils blown wide.

“Somebody tell her I’m in love with her—” He stopped. Started again. “Actually don’t. Actually do. Actually, no, absolutely do not. Fuck. Gods.”

Six people looked at him. He looked at the canopy. The canopy offered zero assistance.

“Wait, what?” Aeron asked.

“Nobody. Nothing. I didn’t say anything. Moving on.”

He had very clearly said something. The something was going to be examined later. The later was going to be a problem.

Hyran suddenly started talking.

“I rehearse every cutting remark I deliver. In advance. In a mirror. With gestures. And every ceremony. Sometimes I adjust the pacing between insults for maximum dramatic impact.”

Hyran made a sound that was part outrage and part annoyance at his own mouth.

Then Aeron’s mouth betrayed him. Voice too loud, words too fast: “I once told Maelor his hair looked ’seductively windswept’ during a joint lecture. I panicked. The entire front row heard it. He looked at me. I pretended to faint.”

Maelor’s orange-covered face cycled through four expressions in two seconds. The fourth was a smirk that was going to cost Aeron years of leverage.

“I referred to Tiberon as ’emotionally constipated’ in a private note,” Hyran continued, unable to stop, “and the note was found by a servant, and I spent three weeks convinced I was going to be executed. The servant was transferred. I was never confronted. The uncertainty was worse than death.”

Then Fin opened his mouth and doomed himself.

“I check on Onyx before I go to sleep. Every night I count his breaths. If the count seems low, I stand there until it normalizes.” He paused. The pause was the pause of a man praying the pollen was finished with him. The pollen was not finished with him. “Also, I sleep with Serena’s shirt when she is not home with me because it smells like her and I can’t fall asleep without it.”

Dex stared at him. Blinked. His mouth opened. His pupils dilated.

“I have also been sleeping with one of her shirts,” he announced. “I had no idea Fin was doing the same thing.”

Both Alphas looked at each other. The looking was the looking of two men who had just discovered they had been independently stealing their shared mate’s laundry for comfort purposes and whose independence was producing an accidental solidarity that neither of them wanted and neither of them could deny.

Serena’s face was bright red.

“I told Elara that double-marking during sex would be the hottest thing imaginable and she should do it with Hale.”

Her hands flew to her mouth.

The grove erupted.

Gavriel wheezed. Genuine, chest-collapsing, no-air-remaining laughter that buckled his knees. Aeron bent over, hands on his thighs, shoulders shaking. Hyran stared at her with the wide-eyed horror of a man whose student had just confessed to giving sex advice.

Fin stared at her. Betrayed. Amused. Jealous because he wasn’t aware she had marked Dex or that she marked at all. That wasn’t a common thing with female wolves.

“YOU told Elara to do that?” Dex shoved her shoulder lightly. “I was wondering why Hale has been absent. I thought it was for something else.”

“Elara thanked me,” Serena blurted, unable to stop. “Oh gods.”

Gavriel collapsed against a tree. His body had given up on standing. The laughter had taken everything from him, every muscle, every ounce of composure, every structural element that kept a man vertical. He was on the ground, covered in orange pulp, laughing so hard no sound was coming out.

“Burn this entire jungle down,” Maelor snapped. “I find Aeron’s journal title genuinely brilliant and I am furious about it because I have been trying to write a paper on Serena’s impossible abilities and every title I produce sounds clinical and Aeron’s sounds like a bestseller and I HATE that.”

“You read my journal?” Aeron snapped.

“Oh yes. You left it open on a desk. Open journals are public domain.”

“Open journals are PRIVATE PROPERTY left in a MOMENTARY state of vulnerability and reading them is a VIOLATION of—”

“’Impossible Things A Princess Does While Three Master Mages Watch And Contribute Nothing Useful,’” Maelor recited from memory. “Page two hundred and twelve was particularly scathing and I have NOTES.”

“Nobody is giving notes on my private journal!”

“The notes are extensive and I have already begun drafting them.”

Seven people walked through the last wisps of golden pollen, covered in orange pulp, carrying confessions they could never take back and secrets they had barely kept.

The jungle quieted.

Too quiet.

Shadows flickered across the jungle path.

Too quick. Too silent. Circling them like hungry ghosts, the movement registering at the edge of peripheral vision and disappearing before direct sight could confirm it. The shadows were wrong. They moved against the light source instead of with it, cutting through sunbeams rather than hiding from them, and the cutting was deliberate and the deliberate was intelligent.

Every single person froze.

Seven spines went rigid in under a second.

Serena’s shield flared to life. A dome of gold hummed into existence around all seven of them, the construct solid, luminous, buzzing with a frequency that vibrated in their teeth. She had thrown it up on instinct, the magic moving faster than her decision to use it, the gold reacting to a threat her body had identified before her eyes could name it.

The jungle went still. The birds stopped. The insects stopped. The wind stopped. The stopping was comprehensive, total, the silence of an ecosystem that had been given permission to be afraid and was taking the permission at maximum volume.

Then something dropped from the canopy.

Silent as mist. Heavy as a falling star. The descent was controlled, unhurried, the landing of a creature who had been watching them from above for minutes or hours and whose watching was now over.

A tall figure stood on the jungle floor.

The figure was shaped like a man the way a knife is shaped like a letter opener. The proportions were close, the silhouette was familiar, but the details screamed wrong at a frequency that hit every wolf’s instincts before the visual fully registered.

Skin too pale, almost grey, the color of something that had stopped receiving sunlight centuries ago.

Eyes black. Completely black. Tar-dark, depthless, carrying zero reflection and the specific void of pupils that had consumed their own irises and found the consuming insufficient.

His scent hit next.

Rotted. Wrong.

Every wolf there stiffened.

Instinct. Pre-language. The specific wrongness that existed in the ancient part of a wolf’s brain where instinct stored the things that predated thought and whose storage was the storage of prey identifying a predator whose predation was absolute.

Dexmon’s blood ran cold. He had caught glimpses of these things when he watched his past life.

This was what killed Ronan and what forced Asher to leave his home. Whatever the hell this thing was. He had never gotten a clear answer about what they were.

The man smiled. Fangs glinted. The fangs were wrong too. Too long, too sharp, positioned in a mouth that was smiling with a warmth that belonged nowhere near the rest of him.

“Hello, Moon Princess.”