Page 87 of Commanding Blood And Bonds

He exhaled. “The world has fallen out of alignment. Adrastos seeks to restore it. He proposes a new social hierarchy—one where mortals know we exist. One where we rule openly, as protectors.”

The room erupted.

“Impossible—”

“Suicide—”

“Utter madness.”

“Blasphemy—”

“Enough!” Ma’s shadows snapped like whips, silencing the outbursts, wrapping around mouths and throats with deadly precision. “This chamber holds my confidence. One more interruption and it will empty.”

All eyes lowered.

She turned back to Lonan. “Continue.”

“He believes we’ve failed. That mortals suffer beneath our silence. That we owe them better. He proposes dominion with mercy.”

“And the cost?” Ma asked quietly.

He smiled behind the mask. “A reckoning.”

The war room had dissolved into chaos the moment Lonan uttered the word reckoning.

Even the Guard fractured into whispered dissent—some intrigued, others enraged, all too aware that the definition of “balance” was as mutable as the powers who enforced it. My parents, ever the anchor in the storm, sat like carved obsidian, unmoving as they tracked every argument volleyed across the table. My mother eventually raised a single hand, and with that, banished all but her king. No further discussion. No input from her commanders.

She trusted this ‘Lonan’.

At least, she trusted him enough to be alone with him and her mate in the same room. And I wasn’t sure what unsettled me more—his confidence that we would align with whatever vision he’d brought…or her willingness to entertain it without the counsel of her leaders.

So, instead of stewing in that simmering unease, I returned to where this hell of a night had started: my cave of an office. The disks. The hunt.

Which brought me back to her.

Valora E. Lamb.

According to the caption beneath a faded photo, that was her name—caught in a candid, all-too-friendly moment between my mother and father. She stood between them, a lanky woman with short dark hair, pale skin several shades fairer than mine, and a posture that screamed nonchalance. The timestamp on the file matched the tail end of the Solskari war—the last time Aren and my estranged aunt had supposedly reached out to my mother for aid that never came.

There was no record of Valora in any of the sanctioned logs. No death certificate. No burial.

Just a disappearance—like mist in morning sun. A vanishing act worthy of a Wraith.

Any tactician will tell you: enemies become predictable. You learn their rhythms, their angles, their fallback routes. Patterns reveal everything.

But it’s the ghosts you fear.

The ones who never follow the pattern. The ones who flicker in and out of view, dancing between bloodshed and silence, a trail of wreckage left behind with no footprint to follow.

And maybe that’s why I couldn’t stop staring at this image. At her. Valora didn’t look like a threat. Bootcut jeans, a basic button-down rolled to the elbows—she could’ve been any Southern girl from a backwater town. But the spark in her eyes, the crooked smirk tugging at one side of her mouth…

That was arrogance.

That was intention.

And the more I stared, the more certain I became: she wasn’t an extra in some forgotten war story. She was the story.

Which meant every soul my mother had just dismissed from that war room could now become an asset. If my instincts were right—if Valora Lamb was who I suspected—then I would need all of them.