"Yes, Alpha." She began collecting dishes efficiently.
Nicholas’s hand wrapped around Lilith’s arm, and he pulled her up.
You can go to your room now Lilith. "We’ll call for you when we want you again."
Lilith didn’t need to be told twice before she turned and walked out of the room.
***
Nicholas’s office at midnight looked different from the rest of the estate.
No warm lighting. No careful arrangent of furniture designed to impress. Just a working space....maps on the walls, files stacked on the desk, three glasses of untouched whiskey on the table between them.
The brothers had gathered here without discussion.
No summons. No scheduled eting.
Just the unspoken understanding that sothing needed to be said out loud before it consud them all from the inside.
Sebastian stood at the window, his back to his brothers, looking out over darkened grounds. Nicholas sat behind his desk, his fingers pressed together, his expression the careful blank he wore when sothing was threatening to crack through his control.
Lucian sprawled in the chair across from him, golden eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Nobody spoke for a long ti.
Sebastian broke first.
"Rhen has been quiet for four days."
The words landed in the room like stones dropped in still water.
Nicholas’s eyes moved to him slowly. "Since she arrived?"
"Since she arrived," Sebastian confird. He turned from the window. "Before she ca....you rember what it was like. The restlessness. The aggression. The feeling of losing ground to sothing I couldn’t fight."
Lucian lowered his eyes from the ceiling. "I bit through a training dummy last week. An entire training dummy. Zev just....took over for thirty seconds and when I ca back there was rubber and foam everywhere and three warriors refusing to make eye contact with ."
"You didn’t tell that," Nicholas said.
"You had enough to worry about."
Nicholas was quiet. His jaw worked. Then: "Two days before she arrived, I lost four hours."
Silence.
Sebastian turned fully from the window. "What do you an you lost four hours?"
"I an I was in this office at nine in the morning reviewing border reports and then I was standing in the training grounds covered in blood at one in the afternoon with no mory of how I got there." Nicholas’s voice was perfectly controlled.
"Whose was it?"
"Nobody’s. Thank god. The warriors said I’d been fighting training posts. Just.... destroying them. For four hours." He t Sebastian’s eyes. "Kael, took over completely. In broad daylight."
The weight of that settled over the room.
The curse.
They’d known about it their whole lives, whispered about it, researched it, tried to pretend it wasn’t getting worse. The Blackwood wolves, going slowly feral. Generation by generation, the curse tightening its grip.
Their grandfather had lost three years to it before he died.
Their father had managed it with iron discipline and herbal suppressants and sheer force of will.
The triplets had watched it creep up on them for the past year. Growing teeth. Finding cracks.
And then in the last three months, since the treaty eting, since their father’s death....it had accelerated.
Like grief had ripped open every defense they’d built.
"She’s affecting it," Lucian said. Not a question.
"Obviously," Sebastian said.
"Explain obviously," Nicholas said sharply. "Because I want to understand the chanism, not just acknowledge the coincidence."
"It’s not coincidence." Lucian stood up, moving to pour himself a proper asure of whiskey. "When she’s in the room, Zev doesn’t disappear. But he....settles. Like sothing is holding him down. Calming him." He turned to face his brothers. "When was the last ti you felt your wolf just... rest? Without fighting it?"
Nicholas didn’t answer.
Because the answer was four days ago.
When Lilith had arrived.
"There’s sothing about her," Sebastian said. "I’ve been trying to figure out what. Wolfless oga....she shouldn’t affect any of us this way. She has no power. No wolf. No status. She should be completely invisible to our instincts."
"But she’s not," Lucian said.
"She’s the opposite of invisible."
Nicholas stood abruptly, moving to one of the bookshelves. Pulled a file from the stack....thick, well-worn, clearly referenced many tis before.
He set it on the desk.
"I’ve been researching the curse for three years," he said. "Everything I could find about its origin. What it does. Whether there’s a way to stop it." He opened the file. "Most of the records are incomplete. Our family wasn’t exactly forthcoming about their failures."
"What have you found?" Sebastian asked.
"Fragnts. ntions of a counter-force. Sothing that can hold the feral nature at bay." He looked up. "Witch magic."
"Specifically," Nicholas continued, "witch magic. There’s a reference in a docunt from 1923. a Blackwood Alpha who managed to hold the curse at bay for eleven years longer than any of his predecessors." He paused. "The record says he was under the protection of a witch. A powerful one."
Lucian’s eyes narrowed. "Which coven?"
"The record doesn’t say. It was deliberately removed." Nicholas closed the file. "Either he was protecting them or protecting himself."
Lucian was quiet for a mont. "Witches hate our family. They have for generations. Whatever happened at that treaty eting only made it worse." He looked at his brothers. "So why would our ancestor seek one out? And more importantly....why would she agree to help him?"
Nobody had an answer.
The question sat in the room like smoke.
"There’s sothing we’re missing," Sebastian said. "So connection between our bloodline and theirs that we don’t have the full picture of yet."
"That’s what worries ," Nicholas said quietly.
Sebastian crossed his arms. "Which brings us back to the full moon."
"It is in seven days," Nicholas confird.
"And we have a wolfless oga sleeping two corridors away who has sohow been quieting three cursed wolves without even knowing she’s doing it." Sebastian looked directly at his brothers. "What happens when the moon rises and whatever fragile control we’re holding onto disappears completely?"
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