Chapter 9
"Break."
A beam of blinding, cerulean-white light erupted from her fingertip.
The moment the frost touched the ancient bronze-banded oak, the massive gates did not splinter—they froze instantly into translucent, brittle blue glass. A second later, the sheer atmospheric pressure of the wind shattered the glass into a million singing diamonds of harmless rime.
The ancestral threshold of Jericho Pack, unbreached for two centuries, collapsed into dust before her feet.
"Forward," Petra said.
The host marched through the shattered gate.
No blood was shed in the streets. The townspeople fell back against the walls of their stone cottages, dropping to their knees in awe as the silent, disciplined legion moved toward the high citadel. The scent of ozone, frozen iron, and juniper washed through the cramped alleys, scouring away the putrid stench of the blight.
They entered the Grand Citadel without meeting a single drawn blade. The guards threw down their spears at the entrance of the courtyard, bowing their heads before the sovereign who commanded the living winter.
Petra strode through the double bronze doors of the Ancestral Council Chamber.
The cavernous hall was bathed in the eerie, flickering light of seventy tallow sconces. Gathered around the curved stone dais were the remaining five elders of the council, their rich velvet mantles clutched tightly around their shivering frames, cowering behind the central altar.
At the center of the dais stood the pedestal of the Prophetic Mirror.
The ancient relic was an oval of tarnished silver and black obsidian, six feet tall, carved with the faces of screaming wolves. But the center of the glass was missing—a jagged, gaping void that had supposedly cracked on the equinox when Petra’s curse had manifested.
Elder Corin stood before the altar, clutching the silver ceremonial blade—the very knife that had severed Petra’s bond on the bluffs—his knuckles white with desperate, maddened terror.
"Stay back!" Corin gasped, his voice hitching in his throat as Petra crossed the threshold. "You cannot be here! The mirror... the mirror spoke the truth! You have brought ruin upon us! You brought an army of rogues to our very hearth!"
With a single flick of her wrist, Petra shoved Alpha Wyatt forward.
The heir tumbled across the wet flagstones, his iron chains ringing like church bells as he landed heavily at the base of the council dais, bruised, broken, and shivering before the men who had commanded his hand.
Petra did not look at the fallen Alpha.
She reached beneath her Khar-Ursa mantle. When her hand emerged, she held a jagged, palm-sized shard of pure, unblemished black obsidian—the stolen central shard of the ancestral mirror, recovered from the secret cache Corin had hidden in the northern border shrine.
A collective gasp sucked the air from the council chamber.
Petra raised the obsidian shard high above her head, its polished surface catching the amber glow of the sconces.
"The mirror never broke on its own, Corin," Petra’s voice rang across the vaulted ceiling like a judgment from the gods. "You smashed it. You took the heart from the frame and hid it in the snow, because you knew what was carved beneath the glass."
She stepped onto the first tier of the stone dais, her silver-rimmed eyes locking onto the trembling elder with lethal certainty.
"Read it, old man," Petra commanded, her voice dropping into a register that shook the stone foundations of the hall. "Read the blood-carved verse hidden beneath the tarnished silver frame! Tell your pack what the mirror truly said!"
Corin’s face contorted into a mask of frenzied, cornered savagery.
"Quiet, abomination!" he shrieked, raising the ceremonial silver blade high above his head, the jagged tooth gleaming in the firelight as he lunged forward to plunge it into her throat before she could speak the words.
Petra did not flinch.
She did not draw her blade. She did not summon a wall of rime, nor did she raise a shield to block the strike.
Instead, Petra took a deliberate, measured step forward—straight into the lethal arc of the falling silver knife.
