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“Dad, it's not that kind of crystal,” Finn said. “Look at the colour, Dad. This comes from the White Wolf.”

We weren’t getting through to him. His lips pulled back to reveal broken fangs, a growl building in his chest. I closed my eyes, the sudden all-encompassing blackness uncomfortable in ways it hadn’t been before, especially when I felt a low rumble below us. Death , I thought, regrowth.

I was never good at meditation or visualisation.

My mind went in a million different directions as the instructor spoke in even, sleep-inducing tones.

The crystal piano and dolphin soundtrack playing in the yoga studio I’d gone to made me wonder why dolphins were seen to be so spiritual.

Like, there was no cow mooing or cats mating in meditation music.

But the never-ending blackness motivated me.

God knows how I was going to sleep tonight, but right now, I wanted that darkness gone.

Green tendrils in the dark, green shoots, green plants, green…

I tried to talk myself through it, tried to imagine the same explosion of plant life I’d seen in my dreams. Why?

I wasn’t sure, but I figured—as we seemed to be led around by the nose by the Great Wolves—I may as well use what abilities they’d gifted us for good.

Green spots appeared in the seamless black, then disappeared, smothered by the gloom. I sighed.

Like this? my Tirian said, and my internal landscape erupted. Green, formless, and growing rapidly, the spots spun and spiralled in my mind’s eye, chasing the black away and eating up each speck of darkness like some kind of verdant vacuum cleaner.

“Jules… Jules!”

My eyes snapped open to see both Rhydian and Grey were sitting up, blinking as they inspected each other, wide eyed.

“Rhy?” Grey said, reaching out to touch the other man and then jerking his hand away. Rhydian looked a million times better. He was still too thin, particularly for a man from Sanctuary, but his cheeks were no longer as sunken and there was a little more padding on his ribs and torso.

“Grey…” The other man’s voice was no more than a whisper, easing out of his chest as he wrapped his arms around his mate. They clawed at each other, fighting to get closer as if needing that skin to skin contact.

“Get the keys.”

Finn’s voice was the sound of hell’s doors creaking open. His fingers dug into the corroding bars, sending flakes of rust to the ground. His eyes glowed phosphorescent green as he watched his fathers embrace.

“Get the keys, now!”

I planted my feet, imagining them rooted there, no more able to move than blocks of stone.

The command smashed into me, shoving me over and over to do his will.

But I couldn’t. I knew if it was my parents in there, I’d be using whatever damn mystical bullshit I had in my arsenal to raze this place to the ground.

Which would only further feed Lonan.

We had to be smart about this. I glanced down the rows of cells and saw the guys ferrying the food around while conducting hushed conversations.

Aaron was scoping out the breadth of the building, creating a mental map in his head and conferring with his team, while Sylvan’s eyes were on the captain’s office door.

We had to stick to the plan, which is what I told Finn.

He just stared at me for a second, as if unable to believe I hadn’t moved, hadn’t rushed to do his bidding.

He kept a lid on using his alpha powers, using them as sparingly as possible, but I think a small part of him held on to the fact that he could force things if he wanted to.

I’m not sure how he felt about the fact he couldn’t do that with me.

“Finn?” Rhydian finally seemed to see that his son stood there, peeling his body from Grey’s and approaching the bars. “Son?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Finn replied, his voice breaking. The tears shone, then fell openly, and I touched his hand to feel why. I gulped air in as it all hit.

I’d buried both my parents—Mum dying of cancer, Dad of a heart attack some time later—so I lived in that weird space orphans did. You love someone who you’re never going to see again, the very bond you have with them ripping you open and wounding you at odd times.

I often wondered if my lack of concern about having kids came partly from that. That when I had a baby, I’d be where Mum was, taking the same steps she took, more or less, only to at some point leave my child like she had, just as unwillingly. It certainly affected my openness in a relationship.

It’d taken a while, but that had to be what held me back when the guys had been falling all over themselves to give me their dicks and their hearts.

Love is pain. It’s both the most intense joining you can have with another being, and as a result, the most painful.

You place so much of your self-worth, your identity, your wants and needs, your being into the other person, who then places that in you.

And then comes the magic—what they give you becomes more important, transcending the almighty ego and need to survive, and becoming something so much bigger.

So, I felt Finn’s burning need as if my own, partially through the lens that I’d give body parts to dark gods for another chance to hold my parents, while realising I needed to deny Finn just that.

Tears slid down my own cheeks as all he felt pulsed inside me, and I just held that, treasuring that for a moment before I pushed back with what I knew.

“Finn, we have to?—”

“I know.”

“At least for a day or two. We’ve just got to?—”

“I know.”

“This is your mate, son?” Rhydian said, his grey eyes creasing, as if he wanted to keep the love and pain that shone there from his child. “She’s beautiful.”

“This is Jules,” he said, choking the words out. His hands whipped out, and he wrapped his arms around me, holding me hard to his chest. I half closed my eyes, feeling that godawful longing in him rise and meet my own.

“Jules, who’s been touched by the White Wolf.” He nodded. “You love our boy?”

I looked sideways at Finn, almost shyly. Of course I loved him, the feeling more raw and immediate after what we’d been through since coming through the portal, but it hit me so intensely in that moment, it was a struggle to make eye contact.

“You do,” Rhydian said. “Good, he’s going to need your strength for what’s coming.”

And with that, they sat down to strategise.

I returned to the tables and distributed food, while Sylvan maintained lookout and the others sorted the latrine buckets.

A silence fell over the cells when we started putting the keys back on the correct hooks and packed the bowls away, scraped as clean as we could get them.

We, the bringers of hope, were going back to Sylvan’s mother’s house, where no one would touch us against our will, feed us scraps, or make us shit in a bucket.

But not for long, I thought. We would find a way to get everyone out of here.

“Finished?” the captain said when we knocked on his door to take his tray away.

Finn nodded. “Good, good. Well, you know you’ll need to come down, even during the…

festivities? Don’t try and find a little bolthole to hide in.

I’ll come for you myself if you don’t feed the inmates and clean the cells.

” His eyes roamed across the lot of us. “And you wouldn’t want that. ”

“Of course, m’lord. Wouldn’t think of it, m’lord,” Finn replied.

“Good, and don’t think none of us will check. You might have run of the place, such as it is, but any skiving and you’ll be down the Great Wolf’s throat in a second.”

Brandon and I shuddered at that, remembering the feel of just that from our dream. The captain noted us reaching for the other’s hand, and nodded as if satisfied.

“You get what you needed?” Adam asked in a low voice as we returned to the kitchen. It was late and things were slowing down, most of the staff having gone home, and only the boys prepping food for the next day were left.

We nodded.

“Lian,” Finn said. “They say he has my father, Max.”

“That one?” Adam shook his head. “You’ll not retrieve that one. He’s kept in much better conditions nowadays. Only sees to Lian’s daughters when his master wishes it, and no others. No, you’d have a better chance of riding out of here on Lonan’s back than freeing him.”

Finn went to protest, but Slade put a hand on his arm.

“Thank you for today,” Sylvan said, taking Adam’s hand and placing a small clinking bag in the palm. “For your family.”

“That’s not needed,” flustered Adam, but when Sylvan closed his fingers over the bag, he looked pleased. “Take some food for yours and Tsarra’s dinner, please.”

“So, we move during this Great Rite,” Aaron said as we sat around Sylvan’s mother’s table. She hadn’t returned from her work yet, but we’d left a plate of food for her on the kitchen bench.

“Every Volken attends?” Finn said.

Sylvan nodded, but said, “Doesn’t that seem awfully neat?

I didn’t intend to arrive back any time near Longest Night.

I was hoping to avoid it like the plague.

Yet, here we are. Right at the moment when the Volken will be both their most powerful and least attentive.

We time this wrong, we’ll get caught up in the slaughter after, like all the other inhabitants.

” His eyes narrowed as they scanned the room.

“We time this right, we waltz out of here, your people in tow, and put as much distance between us and Lonan as possible.”

“What are you complaining about? Easy is good,” Slade said. “I get you’ve got some whole other trip going on, but we want out of here as soon as we can. This place makes me fucking sick.”

“Complete agreement here. We can’t afford to tackle the Volken head on,” Jack said. “This is like a god given gift.”

“But which god?” Sylvan said, mostly to himself.