Chapter 1840:

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Astrid went very, very still. So still that I wondered whether she’d even heard me, whether my words had registered at all. But they had.

Her eyes glazed over, as if she’d retreated somewhere deep inside herself, watching a memory replay in her mind.

Her chest barely rose and fell with her breathing, and I knew better than to interrupt whatever she was working through.

After what felt like an eternity, her lips moved. The single word was barely more than a breath, but the room had gone so silent it practically echoed.

“Proof.”

I nearly smiled.

I might have been a fool and an arrogant one at that in my dealings with Catherine and Marcus, but I never aligned myself with unknown quantities. I had done my due diligence on both of them.

I knew how Catherine had left her pack, married a wealthy human, and, when he died under “mysterious circumstances,” used his inheritance to build her true empire. I knew the decision she’d made in her bitter heart when she left her pack: if she couldn’t be accepted as a she-wolf, she would become a witch to be feared instead.

I knew how she had sought out the kind-hearted couple, Esme and Rhysand. Esme taught witchcraft to the children of her coven and had opened both her arms and her home to Catherine.

𝖫𝖺𝗍𝖾𝗌𝗍 𝖼𝗁𝖺𝗉𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗌 𝗈𝗇 𝗀𝖺𝗅𝗇𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗅𝗌.𝖼𝗈𝗆

When it became clear that, as a half-blood witch, Catherine would never reach the heights she craved, and that the witch community welcomed her with the same warmth as the werewolf community had — meaning none at all — she decided to do the next best thing: raise another powerful witch in her own image.

And since she couldn’t bear a pure-blooded witch herself, she repaid Esme and Rhysand’s kindness by burning them alive in their own home and fleeing with their daughter.

I pulled a USB drive from my pocket and held it up. Sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind Astrid caught the silver edge, casting hard angles across her face.

She stared at the small device as if it held the secret to immortality.

“Proof,” I said. “And guidance.”

“Guidance,” Astrid repeated, not taking her eyes off the drive, like a predator tracking its prey.

“To know where she’s going, you have to know where she’s come from. Who she’s been. What kind of life she’s lived.”

“Her.” Astrid’s words came out as barely more than a puff of air. “Evelyn.”

Something struck me then — not quite sympathy, perhaps, but empathy.

Catherine had murdered Astrid’s half sister and brother-in-law, and stolen her niece from her. Evelyn was the last scrap of family Astrid had left.

I imagined Astrid’s loss had carved out a hollow inside her — different from the one Mireya had left in me, but an empty ache all the same.

We were just two broken souls, stumbling through the dark, desperate to fill the void we each carried.

“If this is a lie,” Astrid said, her voice light as a feather, “you’ll end up begging for the alliance to be the one to punish you, rather than face my wrath.”

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